We checked in with Soft Kill’s Nicole Colbath and Mensa Deathsquad’s Brandon Phillips on how they spent 2020, what they learned, and their thoughts and hopes for what 2021 will hold, as part of our New Year’s Evolutions Series!
Nicole Colbath – Soft Kill
Nicole Colbath of Soft Kill saw the writing on the wall quickly, and with touring off the table got creative. With people stuck at home, making an album that doubles as a board game is a stroke of brilliance. And since they can’t go out to the world, they let people come to them in the form of a brick and mortar store called R.I.P. City.
The day the lock downs started we had 42 shows announced.
We luckily have an amazing booking agent, Natasha at Ground Control, who I would like to send so much love to as she and so many people in the music industry saw their careers go abruptly on hold. She just immediately knew we were done for the year. She emailed sometime in early April and said, “this year is done,” which I felt so fortunate that we at least knew early on not to expect any income from tours and weren’t waiting around, so it just became a question of what next.
I think the word of the year in music should really be “ownership.”
I think we’ve all heard (and assumed it was true) for years that the only money in music is in merch and touring, but that’s not really true. The money is where it has always been, where the value is— and that is in the music itself.
Most artists just don’t own much of their own music, so when touring was no longer an option it didn’t leave people with many options. Even Bandcamp days benefited labels often more than it directly benefited artists.
We immediately began releasing music, pressing our own records locally and making merch. This eventually led us to self- release our new studio full- length album, Dead Kids, R.I.P. City, which debuted as the number one new alternative record on the Billboard. We were blown away by the response— how people, when they knew they were directly supporting an artist, it meant so much more to them.
We released a tip-on gatefold double LP with 16 color variants and a playable board game version in the middle of a pandemic by ourselves and we sold thousands and thousands of copies and every dollar of it went directly to the team. It really gives you a lot of hope in the community of people who are invested in what we do. The hard work of this year was certainly worth it in the end.
Everyone has continued to get paid something despite there being no shows. That was my biggest goal. We are really proud of that.
We have been able to send money to artists, hired people who were struggling, made donations to important causes and keep everyone on the team taken care of.
We have used the momentum from the record to open up a retail location. Since we can’t play shows, people can come to us. We created a whole world in the store where you can buy records, boutique guitar effects, clothing, books, and more. Rest in Peace City is like the inside of our brains. We’ve been open for a week and it’s been really incredible to talk to people and interact with people again.
I have no expectations for this year. Our hopes are for playing a local show here in Portland later in the year under some kind of capacity restrictions, doing another live stream, and perhaps touring Europe late in the year. In the meantime, we are busy with the store, new music, new merch, and people can come see us here in Portland at 5916 N Greeley Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm.
We plan on filming a YouTube show in the shop that will feature artists, musicians and local businesspeople who are doing interesting stuff here in Portland as well as pedal demos and record reviews plus maybe some of our stupid store banter so keep an eye out for that.
We aren’t ready to announce shows or sell tickets or be in a hurry. When it’s time and it’s right I think we will intuitively know. But now is not the time, we are still in the time of great pain for people and that is always in the forefront of our minds.
Brandon Phillips – Mensa Deathsquad
Emerging from some serious medical drama, Mensa Deathsquad‘s Brandon Phillips kept busy and productive with at least three different musical projects and helped with production on masturbatory material, and is coming out on the other side a new person that will not be lulled into the chill life of convenience of the pre-COVID world.
I started 2020 in the hospital, and for the first three months of the year I was caught in a Groundhog Day loop of recurring complications that led from my bedroom, to the ER, to a hospital room, back home again, and then back to the ER. While I was slowly getting well, the world was coming not-at-all-slowly unspooled, so just about the time that I could look at a screen again, all the screens in the world were filled with the slowly unfolding disaster that was 2020.
I did not, however, spend the rest of the year hiding under a blanket, chewing my nails and chanting mantras of imminent catastrophe.
Not entirely.
In the foreground I was producing new albums for Other Americans and Mensa Deathsquad. I was releasing new Brandon Phillips and The Condition singles, and I was working on the writing end of a couple of film projects.
The existential dread, the anxiety, the nauseous acrobat swaying on the tightrope over a vat of ice- cold panic— that was all in the background, slightly out of focus in every scene.
How did you make ends meet to simply survive?
Emergency artist grants and unemployment mostly. Sold some gear I wasn’t using. I did the VO and production work on an Amazon audiobook called The Lowdown On Going Down. It’s about giving head, obviously, and if you think you can stomach listening to me read to you about that, I encourage you to buy it because the hourly pay was shit and I could use the royalty income right about now. I cannot stress enough that I DID NOT WRITE THIS BOOK.
What new things did you learn?
The lesson of this year and this era is that the beliefs you are raised with are far less important than the beliefs you discover.
How do you feel about the coming year in terms of ‘getting back to normal’? Is there going to be a normal?
It sort of depends on who you were before the pandemic/protests/elections. Some of us are simply never going back to who we were in 2019 or before.
If you’re a normie of the PetsMart | BedBath&Beyond | HomeDepot variety, you’re probably not going to have to wait very long before being seduced by something that seems like normal. You don’t really feel like you’re asking for a whole lot anyway— you just want to eat ribs in a big, busy restaurant, get hammered in a giant-ass nightclub and to not feel like every little thing you do could get you shamed and cancelled by your hip liberal friends. You want to go back to being carefree and chill, and I do not fucking blame you at all because 2020 has been a year of exhausting carefulness and raking, brittle tension.
I can’t go with you though. That normal is a kind of carefree chill that I want no part of. Not that I was especially naive before the-year-that-shall-not-be-named, but now that I have watched people take up literal arms against basic human decency, basic human liberty and basic human knowledge; and seen a third of my country call for the murder of another third in the name of protecting privilege and convenience, I don’t think I have it in me to “just get along” ever again. For me, a new normal is going to mean a new underground.
Any sort of predictions for how this year is going to be?
At the moment, my sense is that American society is not done unspooling yet. I truly hope to be wrong about that. I predict that it’s going to take much longer than anyone thinks for these ripples to leave the pond.
Follow Soft Kill on Twitter here and Mensa Deathsquad here.
