Pianos Become The Teeth (PBTT) have finally become the creature they debuted with 2014’s magnum opus, Keep You. The pensive post-hardcore band of yore is something completely different from their inception in 2006, but they’re also the same. Drift, out August 26 via Epitaph Records, is their most intimate and powerful record since breakout record The Lack Long After, and that’s not an accident at all. Paired with the same producer as that record, Kevin Bernsten, PBTT are as emotionally charged and loud as you’d hope, but there’s something extra to this record that is beautiful in a way that few records ever reach.
So much of that has to do with the performances and engineering of Drift. I discover more with each listen, but I also discover more with each type of listening equipment. Good headphones, earbuds, speakers. There’s just so much to appreciate. And I love the fact that it’s almost like an entirely different experience depending on what you listen to. It’s like when you rewatch or reread a favorite story, you pick up on different things. This is a fucking heavy album, but subsequent listens reveal just how throbbing and electronic and noisy this record is. Guitarist Mike York appreciates my sentiments and adds:
“You know what, that is very intentional. I mean, maybe less so of wanting it to translate differently, but more so just like the constantly coming back to it, kind of record when we started putting it together. We really wanted something to felt super immersive like that. I think throughout all of our records, we’ve always tried to build something like that or just something that the songs would flow into each other or create an environment of listening. We’re not much of a single band usually; it’s like you have to take the whole thing as the whole piece together, but there’s something special about this record.”
“This is my favorite thing we’ve ever done just first and foremost,” York adds, a notion that most artists would echo, but one that is absolutely true in this case. “And I feel like one of the cool things about it is that just from that first opening of ‘Out of Sight’ it’s almost just like this moment where you’re just floating. Like it’s just a very light moment. and it has this beautiful lightness to us until the bass comes in and brings this darkness. And I feel like the whole record ebbs and flows like one long night. It starts at twilight and then thrusts you into the deepest part of the darkest part of the night. And then slowly as the record ends, you start get a peak of the light again.”
Part of that sense of time and place only happens when you can get away to record, and Drift is no exception.
“There’s a lot of soundscape of just things that were recording from,” says York. “We wrote a lot of this up at a house that my uncle owns in (the) woods (in) Virginia. And a lot of it was just the sounds of when it would rain there, and we’d be talking outside and walking around and just, like, the ambience of the spaces. And I feel like we wanted to create something that when you put your headphones on, it’s like you’re in a space now. You’re not listening to a record. You’re in a space that takes you through these little chapters of this night. We spent a really, really long time trying to pull things apart, put them together. I think as the record grew and as we put it together, because it took about a year to get it recorded and mixed. I think it really started taking on a life of its own at the tail end of that.”
Drift is very visual and plays off of the idea of light and dark. There’s a cinematic, psychological horror vibe to much of the record, yet it’s oddly hopeful.
“I think one of the things that I think I really wanted to convey,” York adds, “is this sense of either disorienting or stuff falling apart. Or moments where you’d feel like, ‘Why is this happening within this song there?’ I work at a guitar amp builder, and there was this old, ’60‘s Echoplex (that I was able to bring home and mess around with).
“I loved the volatility of the echoes, and just how it was just warping itself because the tape on that was from the original tape. We started putting all the songs basically through this thing. There’s a lot of places in the record that we specifically wanted to make it feel as though something was falling apart or degrading. But what I think was really cool was we were able to put them together is if there were different, almost characters, where it’s like, you’d have the main part and these weird echoes that you aren’t sure are there.”
“I’ve always wanted to create something where you couldn’t grasp it on the first listen,” he continues. “Drift feels like you’re listening to somebody’s inner monologue versus a record. Honestly, I’m proud of us as a band to be able to have gotten here with that because I think that is something that I strived to do forever, and us five together. I feel like as well as Kevin, our engineer—I feel like (we) just dove in as hard as we could and truly just tried to consistently make something that was a bit weird or a bit more different each time that you would listen to it. So I think we tried to really just exemplify, if a song felt like it should be disorienting and feeling like it should be falling apart or feel fucked up, I think audibly, we could take the lyrics and make it happen.”
I’m reminded more of Thrice and less of their fellow emotional hardcore brethren in how PBTT are uniquely able to take these weird ideas and make them sound incredibly comforting. And then, of course, you turn right into “Hate Chase,” which is one of the heavy songs on the record.
“Yeah. That was actually one that we were like, ‘How does this fit?’ And in my brain, it was like, watch this because it’s less than two minutes long. We’ve never done that. The point of this was to be like the whole album feels voyeuristic a lot of time. It’s almost like watching, reading, listening to something you shouldn’t be. And it really has that diary sense to it where it feels like what you’re listening to is extremely personal, and maybe you shouldn’t be looking in on it, but that’s what I really dig about it.”
“We actually had almost an entire other record written,” he confesses, “and we totally scrapped all of it. Back in 2019, we basically had probably 10 songs that were pretty well fleshed out in it. We just scrapped all of it and went back to the drawing board and rewrote with a different mentality of just trying to make something that felt a bit more where we wanted to go.
“It took us a year. I mean, we were recording basically in and out from January of last year up through, I think we finally sent it to mastering in October. So, I mean, almost a full year of just coming in and out and building everything and slowly chipping away. But it’s almost like getting a piece of stone that you know it’s going to be something because you have the material, but you got slowly chip away at it until it actually becomes something. So having that opportunity, I think, was the thing that allowed us to do a lot of that.”
That creative do-over helped lead to the best version of and most closely connected PBTT yet:
“I don’t think we would’ve really been able to realize a vision like this or what we were going for at any other point in your career. Honestly, I think this is because we’re all so open and excited to be writing around each other and just, life is different for everybody now obviously, than it was 10 years ago. And we’re growing as adults together and learning how to, again, work in different ways together. And I think that it’s a bond that you own, luckily. I’m unbelievably lucky to have been able to have it. It has been able to have a bond like this with a group of people that you’ve worked with for so long to be able to revisit it and be able to impress each other with stuff that’s like, ‘Damn, I never would’ve thought that you would’ve come up.’ And I think just putting trust in each other’s taste and just being excited to write a record together, I think really made this just such a great experience in that way.”
Pre-save the album here, and watch the video for “Buckley” below:
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Photos courtesy of Micah E. Wood
