CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 149: DEAD MALL ON HARDCORE REACHING YOUNGER GENERATIONS
Interview by Brooke Gibbs.
FMM: Your single, Gasoline, is out. How are you feeling? What’s the reaction been like?
Adam: It’s been pretty crazy, I would say. We haven't released anything in a couple years. I guess when we started the band, we were all in different bands that we were kind of taking more seriously. Then this band was the fun, hardcore band that we always wanted to do, but our songs were pretty jokey back in the day. We kind of went away and recorded a huge amount of music and put a lot more effort into it, and we didn't really know how it was going to be received, but people seem to really like it. It's definitely the best we've ever felt about a song, I'd say.
FMM: What made you decide to go from that frame of mind where you're like, oh, it's a bit of a joke band, to wanting to put more effort into it?
Adam: It's probably just the demos. Joe, our guitarist, he writes majority of the music, if not all of it, and we all kind of write the lyrics and stuff. He started sending through these demos that were just all pretty crazy, so we decided may as well really go hard at this and book some time away and put a heap of effort into it. All of our other bands were not as busy, so it just kind of took the forefront.
FMM: Thinking of your time together, I love your band name, so I’m curious how that came about.
Adam: The whole Dead Mall, that was a Rory thing. Rory's our singer, and he found it. Dead Malls are a thing. If you go on YouTube and look up Dead Mall, you won't really find us. You'll find heaps of these weird videos where people sneak into these malls in America that are now deserted. There was a heap of them in the US after Covid, and people just kind of sneak into them and take these weird POV videos. He showed us one, and it just came up on the screen and just said Dead Mall in a cool font and that was it. I feel like that's often the case with a lot of band names. It's when you see it in writing; that’s what seal it.
FMM: Any plans to film a music video in a dead mall?
Adam: He was so close to doing this. There was one in Newcastle and it got a heap of coverage, but we couldn't get into it. It was all locked up, but it was disgusting and really dilapidated. Then it got knocked out, so we were seconds away from doing that, but just missed it.
FMM: So if someone searches your name, they either get some really cool music or they get that loophole of dead malls.
Adam: Especially if you write gasoline next to it if you have the song as well. It's like a lot of people burning down malls. Yeah, it doesn't really work. SEO is terrible, but that's all right. A lot of band names are that. It just becomes more of a challenge, you know. We've got to get to the top of that Google results one day.
FMM: For any new Dead Mall fans, could we get a rundown of who’s in the band and what your roles are? And how long have you been together as a band?
Adam: I'm Adam. I play bass in the band. Then Rory, he's our singer. He's also the singer of Jacob, which a lot of people who are in the emo scene in New South Wales especially will probably have come across at some point. Then we have Darcy Long on guitar, Joe Willis on guitar, and Brad McLean on the drums. And how long have you guys been together for?
We spent a lot of time kind of being together and doing nothing, so I'd say the initial ideas probably came like, 2019, but there's been very long stints of everyone doing other things with their band. I'd say we've been properly pushing it the last two years, really. It started ages ago, but it was very stagnant for a long time.
FMM: And as you said, you took a bit of a break from releasing, so how did you know when you were ready again?
Adam: Well, once we got everything done… Darcy, who's our guitarist, he works at a studio here at Sawtooth Studios, and he has his own room, which is amazing because we get to kind of go there whenever we want. But it's also terrible because we have no time constraints, so we've just added layers and layers and layers and change things and completely change sections, essentially. Just dicked around with this new batch of songs a lot. So once we were happy with it, we were pretty keen to get it out as quick as possible, but there was a lot of dicking around with the tracks. I think it's so easy to do because you're always finding new inspiration, new things you can add to it. But then it gets to the point where you're like, no, I actually want to put it out. If you pay for it, and you pay a lot of money for it, you want to make sure that you get your money's worth, so you kind of put more thought into it. Whereas we were doing a lot of improvising and just testing out, spending whole days testing out tones. So, there was a lot that went into it, but I feel like maybe a monetary aspect where we were stressed about it might have helped at some point, I think.
FMM: Well, it’s great to see you guys back! Gasoline, your returning release, is a great track and I like that it's taken influences from an old comedy skit. How did you translate the skit into music?
Adam: That was all Rory. He loves to reference stuff, and he's done that a lot through his other band, Jacob. He's kind of become known for it. When he was at Jacob, he wrote a song called Hospital, and in that song he was writing from the perspective of an old writer from the Simpsons. There's a heap of lore behind this guy; some crazy character. Rory just really loved doing that, kind of trying to pretending to be a different writer and writing in their style.
And it was essentially these little short quotes or stories that kind of seem really wise, but they're just really stupid. It ran for ages and Rory just kind of took that and that's what he used for the lyrics. So the lyrics in it, if you listen to it, there's a bit of talk about revenge and a few other things, but mostly it's just sentences that cancel themselves out and just really stupid, which is classic for him.
FMM: I love that because you mentioned you want to take the band more seriously, but you’re sticking to your roots at the same time.
Adam: Yeah, I feel like there are some songs in this new batch we've got that are a little more serious, so maybe like more politically aimed, but generally even those ones get pretty silly. It’s hard not to, because we write a lot of the lyrics on the spot and because of that, it just becomes pretty absurd. It's kind of easier to work on something that's absurd with a group of people when you don't have as much of a connection to it.
It sounds like a bit of a cop out, but it kind of gives you more room for creativity when you can kind of put on a character or kind of talk from a perspective that's not too hard for you. You can really just use your imagination and it kind of comes easier, I'd say.
FMM: Does it translate the same playing live? Obviously this is your music and you know what’s coming, but do you ever burst out in laughter?
Adam: Yeah, I'd say we're trying to do that less now. Because our old stuff is definitely more like more traditional hardcore stuff, I'd say we play on a lot of bills where there's a lot of like beat down hardcore bands, so we are the least scary band on a bill usually. Sometimes we'll spend a lot of time between tracks where Rory will essentially do a stand up set between the songs and sometimes it just doesn't go down as well as we think it's going to. So we've kind of been working on a new set and trying to create a bit more atmosphere around it just to kind of to fit us in a little bit more, but there's always some jokes in there for sure.
FMM: You guys seem like the most fun to be around. Do you have any favourite memories from filming the Gasoline music video?
Adam: I’d say like 20 percent of it was fun to film because the video is people standing in a line, so essentially the day of filming that we had was quite long and it was just heaps of standing in lines and that's the last thing anyone wants to do, but Nicholas is pretty amazing and we all trust him. He's the director and he's done everyone's videos up here in Newcastle recently and does an amazing job, so we kind of just did whatever he said and are very glad that it came out the way that it did.
The idea is that it's kind of like a dream state that Rory's in. It's kind of like just his worst, absolute worst nightmare. It's being summoned to Centrelink or to court or jury duty or something and all the bureaucracy that comes with it is absolutely opposite of what he would ever want.
FMM: This release is from your upcoming project, so what can you tell us about the project?
Adam: There’s a bit more like Gasoline that is more on that punky, hardcore side, but we also delved into some much heavier stuff and metal sounds, which is new for us. I don’t really know how to explain it until it comes out.
FMM: What’s the hardcore scene like in Newcastle? Are there any local bands you’d like to give a shoutout to?
Adam: There's heaps. The new hardcore scene in Newcastle at the moment's the healthiest it's been in decades. I think it's amazing. There's really good bands. Feel The Pain and Scorn and Splinter, all those guys. They kind of have a crew called the Steel City Terror Set. They're sick and they're putting on a lot of shows. A lot of young people are going to them, which is also kind of new. There wasn't a huge amount of younger people going to hardcore shows a few years ago, so it feels very exciting.
Who else? Oh, and then I should shout out Darcy, our guitarist. His other band, Lamphead, which is more like an emo math rock band, but they're also really awesome.
FMM: I'm curious what the change has been. You mentioned that younger people are coming along. What do you think has inspired the reach to a younger generation?
Adam: Speed. Yeah, it's pretty simple. Speed are the biggest band in alternative music at the moment and they play their shows everywhere, kind of like Parkway did. Speed will still come and play like that. They played a 300 cap room not that long ago in Newcastle. It's like a charity thing and like they're out and about and people know them, which is kind of similar to what like happened with Parkway back in the day. They used to just tour endlessly in Australia and built up an unbelievable base in Australia. I think that's what Speed have done. They've just got this huge strength of fans and that's kind of helping out the rest of the scene. I think punk music and hardcore has become more popular because of them. I think it's just maybe because of Speed, it's cool to like hardcore again, which maybe it wasn't for a while. There just seems to be a fresh new energy in hardcore and punk at the moment. It’s a very exciting time to be doing things.