TPL: Post Animal Tour Diary

Featuring coverage from:

May 19th: Dallas, TX @ Dada - Haidyn McKenzie

May 20th: Austin, TX @ Empire Control Room - Jacqueline Fierro

May 21st: Houston, TX @ House of Blues, Bronze Peacock - Violeta Alvarez

May 27th: DC @ DC9 - Miya Miyabi

May 28th: Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda's - Carolyn Lederach

June 8th: Des Moines, IA @ xBK - Alyssa Leicht

June 10th: Chicago, IL @ Metro - Colette Custin

You were labeled early on as a psychedelic rock band and have said that with the release of your debut full-length album When I Think Of You In A Castle in 2018 you started trying to break away from that label and grow your sound as a band. What has that journey been like for you guys?

Jake: We definitely love making psychedelic rock and still do make a lot of psychedelic rock, but I think that we do that and other stuff. We definitely consider ourselves a progressive rock band...maybe progressive psychedelic. We all just wanted to experiment with our record and include many different genres and try on different hats. We like to make metal music and pop music, and I think there's something kind of psychedelic about doing all of that on a single album. In that way, I think we're still very psychedelic. We love to just genre hop. It's almost the genre that we are at this point, a band that tries to do as many genres as possible at once and see what happens.

Before you released When I Think Of You In A Castle, you all said that you weren't sure what the future of the band was going to look like. With everything that you guys have been through as a band over the years, what does the future of Post Animal look like for you guys currently? What is your creative vision going forward?

Jake: I think that we want to keep making music. I think we are making the best music we've ever made, at the moment. I do think the pandemic has given us renewed uncertainty in a way, as it probably has for everybody. It's hard to, maybe, rely on certain experiences. You can't even be sure a tour is going to off these days. Anything can happen, so we are sort of taking it one day and experiencing one at a time. I would say that, at this point, we don't have any intention of not continuing to make music. I think that these shows coming up are going to be some of the best ones. Our live shows are getting more intricate and there's more going on. There are more layers and more keyboards and samples and riffs. I think it's going to keep getting crazier and crazier.

You guys came up in the Chicago music scene playing DIY house shows. Having talked about how much you love the Chicago music scene, what can you tell me about those early days of the band and being a part of that scene? How do you feel like the Chicago music scene has changed over the years?

Jake: I think that the music scene here is always evolving, but there's a super, super strong DIY ethos and always so much going on. When we were kind of cutting our teeth as a band and starting out playing, there was just so much going on in the DIY scene and there were so many opportunities for us to play. I think we basically owe our growth to that sheer amount of activity. We were just able to jump onto shows and make a lot of friends and were able to play a lot as we were coming up in Chicago. And they were great shows too. It wasn't like we were playing to nobody. They were just always, like, exciting, warm, and fun shows with a lot of people in attendance with good vibes. That was very lucky for us and I don't think we would have been able to hone our performance without that.

2020 was a hard year for a lot of musicians as Covid hit and shutdowns occurred industry-wide, and your tour came to a halt before playing Boston. What was 2020 like for you guys, as you have said you all are happiest playing in a room full of music lovers. And what has it been like to come back to touring after so much time away from it?

Jake: Playing live is what it's all about for us. We are definitely a live band, first and foremost. We're writing music so we can get in front of people and play it, so it was hard for us, as I'm sure it was for most other musicians. The first part was definitely hard, in terms of music. Maybe for the first 6 months to a year, we weren't playing at all in person. I think we had a little break away from music, which was kind of sad but enlightened us a bit maybe to how important the craft was for us and how much we wanted to do it. We did a little recording from our homes and made the EP Worried About You. That was sort of our project for maybe the first year of the pandemic, sending files back and forth. We managed to come up with 3 songs that we're pretty proud of, without really gathering as a full band at all. That was a cool challenge. It's been the best feeling ever to get back to live shows. It just shows how hard the pandemic was for everyone, with how good it feels now. We're back and forgot how amazing it was. We just played in Mexico last weekend and it just made us so excited for our tour coming up. We're just so happy to be back.

In 2020, you guys released your sophomore album Forward Motion Godyssey, which was described as being as poppy and grandiose as you guys had ever been. What was it like recording in Big Sky, Montana, having recorded your first album at a lake house, and the influence the different locations had on the sound of the album?

Jake: We definitely didn't really know what it was going to sound like until we got there. We had the opportunity to stay at a friend of the band's house in Big Sky, which was a ski-in, ski-out kind of place. I'd never been to a place like it before. It was really beautiful and we saw pictures and stuff, but we were going to set up a DIY recording studio in that state. We had no...like, if you are recording at a regular studio, like a traditional studio, you might be able to listen to records that are recorded there and get an idea of the sound that's going to come. But we definitely had to wing it, to a certain extent. We ended up getting in this space and spending a good amount of time experimenting before we tracked stuff and moved stuff around the house. It was a two-story house with a lofted area up top. We did certain things like having guitars spread between the two floors of the house. We recorded the song "Post Animal" with all three guitars...me, Matt, and Javi...all playing at once. But Matt and Javi were on the top floor and I was on the bottom floor and we tracked all of those guitars at once and got all of the different room tones. I think doing things like that gave the whole record a sort of big sound. It has a ton of space to it and almost reflects the mountainous surroundings in a way, and I think that's kind of cool. Being there made a completely different sonic record from the lake house and had a huge influence.

You guys will be releasing your third album Love Gibberish on May 13th. What can you tell me about the writing, recording, and producing of the album, as you did everything yourselves and will be releasing it independently? Having released your first two records on Polyvinyl Records, what has it been like to do this album independently? What can you tell me also about the album's artwork?

Jake: Yeah. I will say that the actual writing, recording, mixing, and all of the music stuff was not actually that much different from what we've done in the past. We've always done it all on our own, even when we were working with Polyvinyl. We would do all of that stuff in house. It's just how we've always done it. This one, in a way, was oddly more traditional. We actually went into the studio for this one, for about half of the recording time. We did some of it on our own, but you would think maybe we would be doing it more DIY because we are now working more independently, but we actually visited a studio and did a lot of the tracking in a studio called Palisade in Chicago. I think there are some sounds that are very hi-fi, polished, and modern, which is what we were going for. Dalton did the mixing and the engineering, as well, along with our new friend Jack Henry Lickerman at Palisade. And then we recorded a lot of the stuff in our own studio, at Treehouse Records in Chicago, which is sort of a practice and recording hub. We were really looking forward to creating a new pile of music coming out of lockdown, with a new record that we were super happy with. I think we had enough time throughout the pandemic to really hone in on these songs and to really chisel them into these songs. They are maybe a bit shorter than what we usually do. I feel like we have a reputation for longer tracks, that kind of move in space and are explorative songs. This album is a little more honed and polished and there's some good pop material on there and some different progressive stuff and crazy riffs and turn arounds. You know like when you take a pop song and add a crazy turn around at the end of the riff and make it sound like Rush song or a Yes song or something. So we still have some experimental stuff.

 What can you tell me about the album artwork and the meaning behind it?

Jake: We worked with an artist, Courtney Sofiah Yates, and kind of used different images of different elements we wanted to be included in the art. We knew we wanted a photo and a lot of the album is about the duality of the self and the passage of time and looking back on a younger self and your past and what you choose to carry forward with you into the future. These are kind of the essential themes of the album, and also, like, the singularity of experience throughout your life. Like, how this one kind of person travels through time and this one experience sort of travels through time and how it transforms. That was stuff we were discussing, and so we landed on the idea of having this, not necessarily the same person, but a young person and an older person together in this image and share some features. We started talking with this artist named Ethan Skates who does animation and they transformed the eyes so that the two people in this photo have some sort of shared detail. We just wanted this image that sort of evokes some of the colors of the album, as well. We wanted something bright and vibrant and with the warped eyes and colorful blue sky in the background, it almost has this almost cartoonish and abstract look to it that really reflects the gibberish element of the title. It's kind of hard to put it all into one sentence, but basically, we'd have these conversations about these beings and land on what we thought was this unique image that represented a lot of those themes, which was two people standing and looking at the camera and sharing eyes.

You recorded part of the new record at your family's farm and grounded yourselves at the same place where you first named the band, which I imagine felt like a full circle moment! What was the experience like for you guys of being there and making some of the records at that location?

Jake: Yeah. It was awesome. That place is super important to us. I've been visiting the farm since for as long as I can remember and it was really cool to have everyone out there. Everyone in the band has spent time out there, as well, and yeah, that's where we originally came up with the name for the band way back before we were really doing anything. It was really cool and we had a beautiful time. We mostly just wrote out there, actually, and weren't really recording. We finished all of the material for the songs out there together, because we tend to kind of start songs on our own and then come together with the demos and then finish them as a band, but they all feel like they are coming from the group. This was probably our most extensive collaboration period, ever. We really got together and completed these songs as a unit, so that was really special. We basically entered with a bunch of ideas and sketches and walked out of there with a record that we were like "Wow. We really have something special here." It was a really beautiful experience and it definitely influenced the music, as well. The song that just came out, "Cancer Moon", is metaphorically set at the farm, in a way, so I think being out there was an inspiration for the music.

Your tour starts on May 7th in support of Love Gibberish. Are there any songs from the album you are especially excited to play and what can fans expect from the tour?

Jake: Oh Yeah! There are so many. I mean, we are pretty pumped to play this crazy progressive song we have on the record called "Infinite Zone". We debuted it in Mexico last weekend and it's probably one of the most adventurous tracks we've ever written and it's a big, fun challenge to play it live. It was so cool to play it in front of people. Fans of the more progressive and/or psychedelic side of the band are going to maybe like that one. There is some very sweeping kind of pop tracks that I think are going to be really sweet to hear live. The first track on the record is called "Bolt From Above" and is really just ear candy to me and we've been preparing to play it in our upcoming set. And there's this really awesome dark synth-pop track sung by Matt that is a band favorite, as well as a favorite of a lot of the people that we've shown it to that we're preparing to play, as well, that I think people are going to really like.

Are there any certain cities you are especially excited to play? Any favorite cities you always like to hit on tour?

Jake: Yeah! We definitely do. I'm really, really excited about the east coast. We haven't been to any major cities on the east coast since over a year before the Covid lockdown. We were approaching the city of Boston on our tour when we were sent home for Covid. I think it was March 12th or whatever that date was. I can't remember exactly. We were about to start our east coast run of our Forward Motion Godyssey Tour and we just barely didn't make it. We were right there and didn't get to play in any of those cities...DC, New York, Boston, Philly. So, that for me...I can't wait to get back to the east coast. But it's always sweet to play out in LA and Austin, TX. But yeah, it's the greatest hits of the American cities coming up. I think it's going to be pretty fun.

Aside from the upcoming album and tour, do you guys have anything else coming up this year that you are excited about?

Jake: We have some stuff cooking, but nothing quite ready to announce yet. We hopefully have some exciting stuff we've been talking about for the fall. We'd like to get out of the country a little bit. We're working on it!

Going back to being at your family's farm, and how it felt in the beginning before you ever thought you'd be an actual touring band with no expectations for yourself, what kind of reflections surfaced for you guys in thinking back on starting out and how far you've come? Is there anything that surprised you about where you are now or that you are especially proud of?

Jake: Yeah! The thing that comes up for me when you ask that question is the feeling that we have that we were sort of getting back to the root of what we love about playing and writing music. The reflective element of the experience was really us trying to capture some of that naiveté that we had at the beginning. I think we really did it. We had just this fun writing experience and fun adventurous recording experience and we were really focused on the craft as opposed to being focused on the reception or where it was going to go. And we were really focused on the live performance and were playing everything as a band and were having fun playing it before we recorded it. We put on a mini-concert for my parents who came out and brought us some food one day at the farm and we were performing new music. It was a fun thing that felt like what it was all about from the beginning...playing music that we think sounds amazing, learning how to play it, enjoy playing it, and just playing for fun and not because we have a tour. At that point, we didn't have a tour coming up or anything. We were just playing this music and really having a fun time doing it. So yeah, I think we kind of came full circle in a way and realized that some of that stuff that we were doing at the beginning was really the right stuff to do for us and we were really on the right track. We were just doing it just because we wanted to.