The band’s music seems to both zero in on celebrating the best type of nostalgic vision of America’s rock’n’roll musical heritage while still casting a light on the darkness that permeates it - what’s your version of Americana and what influences came from growing up on the West Coast?  

I’m not sure if we have a fleshed-out concept of what Americana means to us – when it comes to music I’m more of a hopeless Anglophile to be honest, haha. We operate in a pretty decentralized and scattered way, for better or worse. When it comes to playing shows or planning releases and artwork and all of that, we tend to conceptualize things in a pretty non-linear, imagery heavy sorta way – which is all just a jumbled way of saying we’ve never taken the time to sit down and have a serious conversation about what our philosophy on American rock is, haha. We definitely have a certain debt to American bands like Television and the New York Dolls and all of that; when it comes to American politics and history, we’re a strongly left-leaning group of people. That said, we intentionally try to avoid being too on the nose about our political views or reverence older styles of rock. It’s unavoidable to a certain extent, of course – every band is referential, and I don’t think a bunch of dudes with guitars is exactly reinventing the wheel in a radical way or anything, haha. But, in general, I think we’re much more interested in feelings of contradiction and implication – not so much “America is evil and we’re here to tell you about it,” or “America has made incredible contributions to music and we’re here to celebrate those,” so much as like, digging into thornier questions like, why do we love certain things, like the CBGB-scene, for instance, that have a lot of retrograde or ugly cultural connotations, what does that say about our attachment to music or the desire to make art, and so on. 

We all come from very stereotypical West Coast backgrounds – I grew up in LA and Carl is from the Bay Area, originally, but we all met in Seattle during highschool. Coming from that sorta context, I think we’re generally more interested in digging into how we’re complicit in, or inevitably shaped by, American culture, as opposed to making some sort of moral judgement about it one way or another, as if we could ever occupy some sort of outsider, contemplative distance. There’s plenty of other people who do that, some of whom are way more qualified to be doing so than us, haha. As far as the West Coast influence goes, the Pacific Northwest is a pretty unnerving place in a lot of ways, especially once you outside of Seattle. During the winter the sun goes down at like 3pm and doesn’t rise until 9am, so most of the day is spent in total darkness – you’re kinda inevitably surrounded by these thick patches of woods and forests, and once you get more than 30 miles out of a major city things get pretty intense, culturally speaking, like people still doing cross burnings and lots of meth and all of that. To that extent, I think growing up there imparted a general interest in a type of unhinged humor. Not like, an edge lord sort of humor, to be clear, but just a general interest in being able to pick up on and amplify little details underlying a situation that make the whole thing seem kinda ridiculous or insane – like teenagers drinking Bacardi in the dark in a haunted-ass forest that feels like the middle of nowhere but that, in reality, backs up on like, Bill Gates’ house or something like that, which was the sort of thing we grew up doing. We definitely try to let that sensibility come out in our music

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There’s also a degree of “fun” that flows throughout your records - is this an important aspect of the process, creating something that’s both self-aware and danceable?  

Definitely! I think we’re always trying to entertain ourselves when we write together. A lot of ideas that make it into the final version of a song come about from someone dicking around or playing a bad part on purpose to try to make everyone else laugh. We try not to be too on the nose with it, of course. I think, in general, too much music right now ends up getting lumped into to this binary view, where things are either deadly serious or like, slacker comedy – we try to avoid both as much as possible. Trying to be a band in any sort of like, semi-professional manner in 2021 is inherently pretty funny – especially if you’re a rock band, which is so retrograde in a lot of ways. I think it’s necessary to have a sense of humor about it. Like, going to a family gathering and trying to explain why you have a bad tattoo or why you think like, Bryan Ferry is still cool to your aunt who actually lived through that era and heard “Love Is The Drug” on the radio is fucking funny and stupid as hell. At the risk of sounding too self-serious or whatever, there’s this great quote by Rainier Fassbinder that goes something to the effect of, “the more honestly you insert yourself into the work you make, the more it will connect with other people,” which I think connects well with our approach to trying to be fun in a self-reflective sort of way.

Advertisement came together after stints in various more hardcore-adjacent projects.  What brought everyone together into the band in its current form?  

We all played in punk and hardcore bands in high school, which is how we met for the most part. TJ and I went to high school in a suburb east of Seattle, Waylon grew up a little north of Seattle, and the rest of the guys come from Bainbridge Island, which is about a 25 minute ferry ride west of the city – there aren’t that many show spaces for punk bands in the suburbs, so we inevitably ended up crossing paths at DIY gigs in the city. At a certain point we all realized that we liked other kinds of music more than we liked hardcore, and that we had been playing that type of music mostly because it was what was easy and available, socially speaking – Advertisement mostly came about from a shared realization that we could simply like, play a different type of music, as uninteresting of an answer as that might be, haha.

A lot of the tracks in ‘American Advertisement’ seem to stretch far beyond their 3-4 minute run time and feel pretty borderless without losing any of the tautness that ties them together.  How does this apply when you play live?  

We try to stick to a pretty consistent song structure when we play live. In the past, people have tended to associate us with a bit of a jam-band mentality, which is pretty far from the case, to be honest. Improvising with 6 people can get pretty dicey, and we’re collectively probably a little too neurotic for the kind of relaxed attitude jamming requires, so we’ve learned the hard way to avoid that approach to live performances. We used to try to do this live transition from one of our old songs into an instrumental cover of War’s “Low Rider” that was a total train wreck every time, haha. We do try to switch things up live, but that mostly takes place through like, different approaches to arrangement or layering – with 6 people, there are a lot of opportunities to add and subtract different ideas on top of each song without necessarily messing too much with its actual structure. 

The new EP features two new tracks each paired with a remix.  It feels like a natural fit for the fairly adventurous/experimental ethos behind the band’s music - what are your thoughts on the different ways a song can be interpreted?

Our favorite music tends to be songs that have a lasting quality, songs that you can continually revisit and take something new from. To throw it back to the last question in a way, we like to think of each song as having a determined skeleton or identity, which then can have different arrangements or ornamentations thrown on top. We’re interested in how elastic or mutable a song can be while still retaining its core idea – we’re not too caught up in the specifics of like, “this song is this riff plus this melody plus this drumbeat,” or whatever. To that end, we looked at the idea of remixing as taking a different approach to the ornamentation tossed on top of the already existing song skeleton, in a way where the remixes are as much “definitive” versions of the song as the original. The remixes on the Freedom EP were made from stems taken from the recording sessions for the song “Here It Comes,” which itself was just a rewritten version of the song Freedom from the EP, so there’s a sort of repeating self-referentiality baked into the whole thing. I forget who published it, but there was a review of the EP that said something to the effect of like, “How many times can you put out the same song? Apparently, Advertisement seems to think the answer is 4!!” which I thought was funny and captured our general outlook pretty well, although I’m not totally sure if they meant that as a complement haha.

Tell us more about the recording process/inspiration behind this new track!  

Lyrically, “The Matador” is about paranoia. Kurt Vile was in the studio next door to us when we were recording – he was filming some sort of like, slice of life rockumentary about his recording process or something to that effect. The studios shared a backdoor space, so every time we’d go outside to decompress or smoke or whatever there would be all of these camera crews running back and forth setting up mics and hidden cameras and all of that. All of the sudden at like, 7pm, this whole crew of people showed up for what seemed to be a semi-scripted, “candid” studio hangout – they were all drinking and laughing and casually talking shit about Lou Reed’s later records, but with like, a massive camera three-feet away pointed directly at them. At one point we kinda collectively recognized one of the louder voices in the crowd and realized that it belonged to John C. Reilly, which was a trip. He was wearing this crazy Canadian tuxedo outfit and definitely wanted nothing to do with any of us, which was totally fine. The whole squad out there seemed kinda annoyed that we kept on coming in and out, in fact, which was a little funny given that like, we were there to actually record and they weren’t. I don’t know if it dramatically changed how the song came together in any tangible way, but the whole experience definitely matched the tone of the song, insofar as it kinda felt like multiple layers of intrusive thoughts or sets of eyes surveilling people stacked on top of each other.

Any under the radar musical peers we need to know?  

The Berries rule – they have a new record on the way that is one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. Daisies, Gen Pop, Puzzlehead, and Smirk are all great people making great music, too.

What’s special about the mix you’ve made?

We have a lot of overlap in terms of older music that we’re into, but once you get past like 1980 or so our tastes start to diverge pretty wildly. We decided to have each person from the band pick 2 songs for the mix, to try to capture a bit of each person’s individual tastes when it comes to new music – there’s definitely overlapping interest in some of the songs chosen, but there’s also probably at least one song on there that each of us individually is not like, wild about. To come full circle to the first question about our relationship to America, though, as a band we believe in a little thing called democracy ;-)

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