It may seem fitting that Portland-based post punk band Soft Kill released their highly anticipated new full-length Canary Yellow on October 31, but in reality, vocalist and founder Tobias Grave expects the album might turn off some of their more spooky-leaning listeners, as its influences lean more toward Tom Petty than The Cure.
“It’s absolutely going to chase away a ton of people that are Draculas for sure,” Grave says. “Which is unfortunate. I hate to see them go.”
Full disclosure, I went into this interview with the idea of writing a full-on preview complete with references to the sound of the album, my thoughts on the evolution of their discography, etc., but Tobias and company are playing things close to the chest and aren’t sending it to the press. As of writing, the only thing I have to go off of is the fantastic first single “Magic Garden.”
Instead, I present a raw discussion with Tobias covering everything from his battles with drug addiction to his insistence on being 100% independent.
You’ve mentioned there are two distinct eras of Soft Kill. Tell me a little bit about the first era. And then what brought it to the second era?
The project was initially called something else. It was another band that had gotten offered a record deal by a close friend of mine, Nathan, who was deciding to use money that he had made from the popularity of the band that he was in and to start off a buddy record label where he just wanted to put all of his friends’ bands. And he offered my other band, which is essentially another solo thing, a record deal. And I happened to be living in Los Angeles at the time and happened to be around.
I was changing a lot in my life. I just left San Diego, and I just ended a relationship. I had started basically rebuilding what this live version of the project was going to be and had started to create songs that really felt kind of detached from what the initial kind of vibe of my last project was. It kind of got birthed organically in a cool way, but also had this opportunity to have a record funded and released already on the table prior to that really existing. It was kind of a unique circumstance. The first record was recorded in October and November of 2010. It came out March of 2011.
I was struggling heavily during this time with opiates. I had been struggling with opiates on and off pretty significantly since 2003. By the end of 2011, a bunch of us were just basically living that life of being on drugs and living off of crime. I had a bunch of active warrants that had caught up to me. I started getting locked up, bailing myself out, running, getting caught by U.S. Marshals, and getting sentenced to longer periods. Basically, from 2011 to 2014, anything that you really heard about from this band was these little blips of, I don’t even want to call them stability, but I had the ability to write some songs and demo them and put them out into the world in one way or another.
The official second era of it being a substantial thing that can play shows and have some sort of social media presence and all that sort of bullshit doesn’t come until late 2015. What changed then was that a record that had come out and a cassette of demos that followed had gained a cult following from the internet. There seemed to be enough interest that friends of mine that believed in those songs came together to start a new lineup of the band.
We went out on a 12-day run with Chameleons. It was those shows where we were like, “holy shit.” It’s not that this had blown up by any degree, but there were people out there that care about this. “Yeah, maybe you should try some more, you know.” And then I wrote another record. And when that record came out, it just got us kind of flowing.
From your perspective, what got you out of that kind of cycle of addiction and crime?
I have been pretty blunt about going on record and saying this. I’m not really shying away from the forthcoming nature of saying this… I didn’t get clean until 2018. So even though there was stability, in terms of getting shows, and Profound Lore put out a couple of our records, it still wasn’t enough really to break that cycle of abuse, my disease and the obsession with the escape through use. It’s just still so fucking prevalent; it was almost impossible to shake it.
What happened for me was, first of all, a nonprofit called MusiCares that’s funded by the Grammys. By the fucking grace of whatever, the fourth record we did charted on Billboard’s heat seekers. Because of that, they funded me going to rehab. Now when I got offered that, I was still terrified of it. It was another year before I actually made the commitment to go. I had one of those spiritual coming to God moments, regardless of how you want to take that, where I recognized that my brain and my own thought process was not enough to steer me in any direction but down.
You were scared about going into rehab?
I was terrified to go into rehab. I had relapsed, and not that this is like really the place to define those types of things, but with relapse being a process, it was a mental thing. My brain was constantly relapsing, if you want to call it that. I was constantly making a decision to do drugs at some point, even if it was weeks down the line. I was living in that tunnel. I finally got to that point where I ended up with crystal meth, which was my drug of choice towards the end of my use. And I relapsed.
And I had this thing where I just broke down totally in tears and cried out for help. It was late at night, and I was in my car, which was going to be where I was going to be living. It wasn’t because I wanted my family back. It’s not because I wanted a bed. It’s not because I wanted the comforts of the house. I just had hit that ceiling. The obsession had become so crippling that it was definitive of my entire existence. And that really fucking freaked me the fuck out.
I asked for help. I called MusiCares back and was like, “Hey, remember me?” They were a little hesitant, like, “What the fuck is different now than a year ago when we approved this?” I just said, “If you don’t help me, I’m gonna fucking die.” They immediately jumped into action. I was in rehab within 48 hours, I think.
That’s kind of a blessing that that happened.
It was. It was the best experience of my life. You’re getting kind of just plucked out of your world and placed into an environment where all you have is the concept of recovery and learning. It turns out I needed it. I didn’t need to juggle five things I needed to be. I needed my entire day to day to revolve around what was wrong with me to somehow get some distance from what was plaguing me and start to build a different life. Clearly you go through and do a ton of work after that. Shout out to MusiCares who absolutely saved my life. One of the coolest parts of being in any sort of musical career that’s even remotely successful, you know?
In 2018 you go through this, and you now have this newfound sobriety. Did that affect or reflect in your music at all moving forward?
Well, I was really scared that it was going to completely ruin my creativity.
The idea of the sober record being the shitty record is a scary thing, right?
One thing that heroin and drug use of that nature did for me is that it created a total black cloud of suffering. Which for this type of music, apparently, is like an incredible asset.
When I switched to crystal (meth), the two main differences were that I thought I was thriving, and I was staying up for a great deal of time. I was just pumping out a great deal of music that was never over analytical, never really scrutinized, it was just purely…. purely what it was. The prime example of that would be this record of demos called “Premium Drifter.” That’s the most direct line into my thought process and how far gone I was. I was definitely channeling things and approaching instruments in a way that was really outside my normal limitations. I was just creating from a different place. I really thought that that was an asset I did not have. I had a very romantic view of it.
So yeah, I was terrified. I was like, “Fuck, dude. How am I going to write music sober? It’s gonna be so stupid.”
I had gotten used to the fact that my music scene, and that a certain contingent of our fan base, lacked a lot of empathy for people like me—me in particular—but also just people with the disease. That was a selling point to them. You know what I mean? It felt like part of what people were drawn to was like, “Oh, this dude is a sociopathic drug addict.”
And it’s all fucking dark and twisted in a real way. It took me a while to get into a place where I realized how much that disappointed and hurt me, you know. Then I ended up being able to create what I thought was very pure and realized music in the form of the last record that we put out Dead Kids R.I.P City and destroyed all my perceptions of what that might be.
It’s two years later, and obviously a lot has happened in the world. You dropped a new single, but there’s not much info on the record. Is that under wraps?
Well, the first thing, and I think this is the most important and interesting aspect of our story at this point, is that we are an independent band. We have an incredible booking agent, Natasha Parish at Ground Control. But besides that, we do all of this ourselves. We press our own records locally at Cascade; we try our best to keep up with mail order. Even though it’s gotten to a point where the success comes with a much larger workload, we’ve still diligently stayed focused on not handing that over to somebody else. We don’t pay for publicists. We don’t do interviews that aren’t organic. We’re not seeking out artificial press. We don’t pay for play listing. All of this is stuff that I think is important, because the core of it is ownership. Through ownership I think there’s this way to educate younger bands that are coming up right now and doing stuff.
The business model of how money is made within the music industry has obviously changed immensely with the streaming age, but there is the contractual side of what labels are offering bands has not. So they’re spending less money, of course, but they’re still spending way more than you have on your own. And they’re expecting you to recoup that money through means that are almost impossible to do so. These recoup periods are taking longer, resulting in bands burning themselves out before they’ve ever gotten a paycheck. But it also further pushes and reinforces the idea that bands need to be touring nine months of the year to make $1. Which does what? It promotes the record that they no longer own because they gave it away to whatever label.
With the last record, we tried to make a statement. And with this record, we’re trying to do that even further in that we funded it completely ourselves. We made a departure record sonically, and we’re releasing it in a way that you’re going to be able to hear the first glimpse of it next month. There will be a preorder for limited variants and whatever bullshit, but we were able to work directly with our pressing plant and get a good chunk of copies and advance that will only be available at the shows that we’re going to do. We’re going to do five record release shows where we fly to different places across America, and we’re going to have that be the tour that supports the record.
It might seem suicidal or totally crazy, but I’m just reaching a point where my son is turning 5 years old. I want to do less, and I want what we do to feel more impactful. We just did seven months straight of touring. We have gotten to a point where the shows in bigger cities have gotten to be 500 to 750 to maybe even 1000. We can make a decent living art-wise off of doing less instead of doing five or six weeks, which is just not sustainable when you have a kid that wants to know where the fuck you are.
You said it’s a departure record. What do you mean by that?
A big part of it was it was the first time we ever worked with a producer. The first time I went in and took songs that I had written and trusted somebody that clearly knew way fucking more than I did to tell me when this should probably be half as long. “This chord probably needs to go somewhere else.” “This is a little empty here.” “What can we put here to build it up?”
I think the real main thing would be that Rob (Schnapf), having worked with Heatmiser and then Elliott Smith, we always kind of romanticized the idea of what he might be able to do. But after meeting him and interacting with him a couple of times on the two records leading up to going in with him, we were just really intrigued. We were like, “What could this person do?” This person’s studio is full of all of this really interesting stuff, and they clearly have this confidence and taste in music that is really parallel to ours, but then also in other territories that I know nothing about.
He pushed to shape the songs in a way that a few of them changed quite a bit dramatically, which is great. But also there’s next to no reverb on the vocals. They’re really clear and up-front. You can understand the words… quite a concept. The drums are not gated reverb ’80’s cannons; they’re really tight and sound great. They’re the best-sounding drums that we’ve ever had. But in a way, that’s more in line with my favorite Tom Petty records. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar for rhythm tracks. I still think it’s like a rock record. It’s still nice, has its intensity, and it has a lot of really great tones. It’s really well-produced. But it feels human to me.
Get ready for soft kills Black Album.
You know what it is? It sounds so American in this genre that is constantly only compared to European and U.K. bands. I really just wanted to get away from that and wanted to grow. It’s absolutely, absolutely going to chase away a ton of people that are Draculas for sure. Which is unfortunate. I hate to see them go.
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