FEATURE: Spotlight: Special Interest

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Special Interest

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NOT that I am late to the party…

because I have known about the music of Special Interest for a while now. I have not got around to putting them into my Spotlight feature. That changes now. I would recommend them to anyone who has not heard them. This is a group hat have been around for a while, but they may not be as known here in the U.K. as they are in their native U.S. They have a string of great albums under their belt – 2018’s Spiralling, 2020’s The Passion Of, 2021’s Trust No Wave -, and they released their finest work, Endure, back in November. I will get to a review of Endure at the end of this feature. I will come to some interviews soon. Before that, here is some background regarding an incredible band:

“Special Interest was born out of New Orleans’ evasive DIY scene. After a demo tape (Trust No Wave) and a debut 12” (Spiraling), the group released their second LP The Passion Of in 2020. The Passion Of finds the band with a fuller realization of their sound. While Spiraling documented a band discovering their purpose, The Passion Of is both more chaotic and melodic, daring to finally live up to their notorious wall-of-sound live performances. Massive, juddering beats from an old Electribe sampler and distorted bass provide much of the rhythmic backbone. The effect is purely physical, circumnavigating the brain and heading straight to the body’s core. Crass, decolonized guitar work and haunting synth lines cut through the low end noise to serve the album’s layers of drama. It’s a cloying, intense dynamic that builds to almost unbearable fever pitch at points, threatening to overwhelm and overpower. The Passion Of is a true document of Special Interest as the intense and radical unit they are”.

Even though most of the group are not based out of New Orleans now, I think that the city is still very important to them and their music. Many of the interviews with the group are from last year. There is one from 2020 that I want to highlight. Around the release of The Passion Of, The Quietus caught up with Special Interest and asked how New Orleans has impacted them and their music:

“Members Alli Logout (vocals), Ruth Mascelli (synth and drum machine), Maria Elena (guitar), and Nathan Cassiani (bass), together manage to make their instruments and vocals sound like a fight for our existence. Logout's vocals leap from raspy gasps to full throated screams echoing socio-political angst, backed up by Cassiani's pummelling bass, Elena's cutting distorted riffs, and Mascelli's driving beat.

Both the band's first album, 2018's Spiraling, and their latest release, The Passion Of, contain an element of chaos, creativity and surprise that is hard to predict, changing genres and making swift left turns with little warning. 'Disco II' opens with a throbbing, gabber-esque beat and siren like cutting riff, while 'All Tomorrow's Carry' slows down the pace slightly and centres its energy around a pulsating beat.

The band all see New Orleans as the inspiration for their no rules approach to music making. Mascelli explains: "When I first came to New Orleans, the scene was really DIY and supportive in a way I'd never experienced anywhere else. It kind of really encouraged me to try things I wouldn't have tried otherwise."

I spoke to Special Interest about why they want to create space for punks of colour, writing punk anthems, and how they want to be defined as a band.

Since you're all from different places, what is your relationship with New Orleans? Is it somewhere you would stay forever?

Alli Logout: Once you live in New Orleans, you're really fucked because there's no place in the whole world like this city. I spend all my time here and I only travel for art stuff. I like creating art here and I have a family here.

Do you mean in terms of kind of like a community?

AL: Yeah, the community. I got drawn here by Black punks, specifically Osa Atoe who does Shotgun Seamstress.

You cover issues of gentrification and displacement in your music. Has this been influenced by New Orleans and the punk scene there?

AL: I just wanted to start having that conversation. I can barely afford to live in some of the places I do live. I'm currently staying in a place where I don't even feel safe. Housing is consistently always going to be an issue all throughout America. Just thinking about the Black diaspora migrating from different places and still being Black doesn't make you not a gentrifier, you know. I want to talk about that because I'm thinking about it a lot.

I'm thinking about the people that I'm affecting. I'm also thinking about myself and my safety. I'm trying to hold all the nuances that come with having those conversations because being an active gentrifier in a place where you didn't grow up. You do have to come to terms with your existence being violent.

Your music is incredibly energising. How do you want your music to affect people? Is that something you consider?

AL: I want people to be affected. I want to make an album like the ones that carried me through really hard times. I feel that on this album there's so many different emotions, it can really meet people where they're at and hopefully carry them through. The whole reason I've done music is so that Black kids can see me doing what I'm doing”.

As they prepared to launch Endure last year, Special Interest were doing a fair bit of press. It was an album that so many people were excited about witnessing. In a chat with The Quietus once more, Emma Garland chatted with them about radicalism, resilience and transcendence. Led by their amazing frontperson Alli Logout, their amazing voice and power is a big reason why the songs from Special Interest hit so hard and resonate. They are a group to watch very closely and sure that you add to your playlists. Endure is a truly remarkable album:

“Work on Endure began in mid-2020, when the band – composed of Logout, guitarist Maria Elena, bassist Nathan Cassiani and Ruth Mascelli on synth/drum machine – found themselves in the depths of a brutally hot New Orleans summer, during a time of exceptional anger and isolation, with very little to do besides get together and play music. They responded to their constraints by doubling down on their influences, with Funkadelic-inspired vocals and dancefloor rhythms pushing some songs into house territory while their 70s glam and post-punk side took a more brutal and theatrical turn. “We were writing much moodier, darker music as well as a lot more… I hesitate to say poppy," Cassiani reflects, "But it was working out a different response to the feelings that we were having at the time."

The result sees Special Interest operating in a more dancefloor-ready register. Mykki Blanco-featuring single ‘Midnight Legend’ is all thumping bass and synths whirling like loose hair, functioning as a "love song to all the girls leaving the club at 6AM". It’s also a sombre nod to the darkness behind the glamour, namely the void-chasing behaviour we engage in when we feel lonely or isolated, and the opioid crisis that's been ripping through at-risk communities in the States for decades. "The song is about being enabled by other people, but also by the institutions that we're able to be ourselves in a lot," Logout explains. "I feel like everybody is quite literally silently screaming all the time, and that we don't really know what to do or how to take care of each other. But I do think we're learning that every day."

Elsewhere lead single ‘(Herman’s) House’ is a raucous disco ode to Herman Wallace, one of the Angola Three Black revolutionaries who were held in solitary confinement for 41 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary. During his imprisonment, Wallace worked with the artist Jackie Sumell via hundreds of letters to create his dream house down to the last detail – from the hobby shop to a skillet placed under a fire making shrimp and oyster gravy. Logout and Elena describe it as "a battle cry for dreamers who persist in spite of and because", and in practice the song bursts at the seams before it even starts, demanding to be played so loud it risks blowing the speakers and cracking the ceiling. Rave whistles and a “ooh! ooh!” go off like a Pride float full of leather daddies behind impassioned lyrics like “we’ll all be Basquiats for five minutes or Hermans for life, so when I say build I mean dream”. In October 2013 Wallace was released from prison. He died of cancer three days later.

“The link between Basquiat and Wallace is a very American link,” Logout says. “I think that just being Black in America means being exploited. Essentially Basquiat died because of the white people in his life and the pressure to be this particular kind of person. It's two different sides of what being Black in America is. You're either fully idolised and destroyed, or you're thrown in a cage.”

Throughout the first half of Endure there is a dissonance between sound and subject. While most of Logout's lyrics are heavily weighted rallying cries (though often bitterly funny), there's an appeal to resilience through movement that sends the whole thing reeling towards transcendence. As Mascelli puts it, the music is "joyful, but still about real shit."

"[We wanted] to make people respond in a way other than just catharsis or dismay or something," they elaborate. "The last album really focused on that type of release, but joy is an important tool for gathering for the collective and for people coming together. So it felt right to make music that could facilitate that.”

The second half of the album takes a much darker turn, feeling more obviously attuned to the imminent threat of collapse that's been a theme of Special Interest's music since their 2018 debut Spiraling. In one interview around the time of Spiraling's release, Logout claims to want the “complete, total destruction of everything”. This of course was two years before the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprisings, the Capitol Hill riots that took place after the Presidential Election – and, more recently, Russia's war with Ukraine and the fact that leaders across Europe are advising people to prepare for a harsh winter of financial hardship and energy blackouts. Relaying that quote back to them now, they find it quite funny.

“Maybe that’s why everyone thinks that we’re nihilistic,” they suggest, before adding that we're definitely "on the same timeline" as we were when that interview took place. "I think that things are going to get intense, and resources are going to get intense in a way that we haven't seen yet."

More to the point, though, Logout – who was raised in Texas by "Christian rednecks" – has a perspective on America that's deeply informed by their experiences of extreme ideology, and of whiteness. "One of the very first things I was taught was if they ever come for our guns, or if they ever come for God and Christ and Christianity, we're going to go blazing," they say. "I know what white America is really thinking and feeling, and it's intense and it's extreme. We had this LOL insurrection, the storming of the Capitol Building by all the Trumpers, and, you know, that couldn't happen if anybody of colour was doing that. There's so much protection for those people and those things”.

There are a couple of other interviews I want to get to before the review of Endure. Loud and Quiet caught up with the band in Los Angeles over the course of a couple of days about their amazing and career-best Endure. One of the most challenging, important, and exciting groups in independent music, we get to know more about the spectacular Special Interest:

“They’re all a little like this in conversation: invariably friendly and charismatic, but honest and unsentimental at the same time. There’s little in the way of convenient myth or simple categorisation with this band.

“I moved from Pennsylvania to New Orleans in 2009,” says Ruth. “And I never really played music at all; I was in my mid 20s and I really wanted to be in a band. So I started doing a little solo project to try and attract some people, and I was a really big fan of Maria’s band at that time – like, obsessed – and I did a T-shirt design for them. And that’s how I met them, going to the same shows. Maria and Alli were the ones who really started Special Interest.”

Before New Orleans, Maria had been in Minneapolis, part of an arts collective who brought a series of underground artists to the city.

“I was part of the post-punk revival thing,” she recalls. “They were the things that I was booking in Minneapolis. There were bands coming out of Texas that were really exciting, and also in the Midwest. And there were all the British bands I booked too – like Rachel Aggs and her pre-Shopping stuff.” She already knew Alli, and they’d spoken about forming a band together before; the plan eventually came to fruition once they were both in New Orleans. Nathan was already there – “You were so established [on the scene],” Maria tells him when this comes up, “I didn’t realise you’d only been there a year” – and Ruth was recruited soon enough, his clattering drum machine and windy synth production favoured over a live drummer.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mathew Scott

“We didn’t want a real drummer,” says Alli. “One, because they’re unreliable; two, because of how much space they take up. They have so much stuff to carry around.” Although relying on a drum machine presented its own challenges. “It was like, ‘How do you play these DIY shows and get to hear it?’ We had to carry an extra PA around with us.”

The practical choice of drum machine over drummer immediately informed the aesthetic direction of the nascent group – after all, machines are “uncompromising, so we just adapted our composition to that, creating angles. Nathan would find the groove [on bass], and it’d take a while to figure out. But we knew something was interesting.” The early shows also featured Alli ‘playing’ the power drill, the band taking ‘industrial music’ quite literally, Einstürzende Neubauten-style. The drill actually makes a welcome return on Endure track ‘LA Blues’.

“Yeah, I didn’t know how to play anything, but liked playing music and loved performing,” says Alli. “In my first band, I just sang and loved it. Then I started wanting to jam with other people but I didn’t know how really, and I wasn’t interested in, like, learning a chord. So I just took a more noisy approach. This was happening when I was in Denton, Texas, and there were a lot of really great OG noise people there. Being friends with them really encouraged me to be like, ‘Fuck it, make noise, with anything.’

PHOTO CREDIT: Mathew Scott

“That’s actually the whole reason my first band went to New Orleans – to play this festival, but our drummer got arrested and our guitarist hated the bassist, so we couldn’t go and I was hanging out with these noise girls at a bar, crying like, ‘I’ve never done anything outside of Texas!’. I hadn’t like travelled at that point in my life – I was like, 19. And they were like, ‘Fuck it, get a toy drum machine and just write a whole new set.’ And that’s what we did. And we went and played in New Orleans.”

Those early shows, in different bands across the South, clearly mean a lot to Alli. But it’s also obvious that like so many queer people of colour in contemporary America, their experiences were far from uniformly positive; they wince a little when recalling them now.

“In my first band I was really adamant about being like ‘We’re a queer band’, but it completely destroyed me. I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t understand how my blackness was being fetishised, and it killed my soul. One day, the memoir…” Alli lets out a hollow laugh.

It’s a recurring trauma that continues to this day. At one point in our conversation, I briefly reference an interview with Special Interest from another publication, and their groans come out immediately, in perfect unison.

“The headline [which caricatured the band’s identities and politics with tabloid crudeness] was so embarrassing, it was one tiny thing Maria said at the end…” Alli is still lamenting as I try to steer the interview in another direction. But it’s clear what the issue is: quite correctly, they’re sick of being pigeonholed and caricatured by the mainly white, heterosexual gaze of the music press, and even in supposedly ‘progressive’ publications (or DIY scenes for that matter), they can’t seem to escape its othering tendencies.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mathew Scott

“Nathan hit it the other day: queerness isn’t a sound,” says Alli. “We’re just so clearly part of a queer legacy, and that is something that’s really important, but it doesn’t describe what we sound like at all, so being put under that umbrella doesn’t make sense. But we definitely see ourselves as part of that lineage, and a lot of our art is about being queer and the politics of that; but we don’t need to be lumped in with a lot of [corporate queer culture] stuff, we don’t really have anything to do with that. It goes back to branding. It’s just such bullshit.”

“As homosexuals, we love it when we find out people are gay,” says Maria. “That’s cool and it’s nice to interact with them. It is exciting when there’s a band you like and you see that they’re queer – I get it, I would be pumped on that too.”

Alli nods sympathetically. “Even the bands we played with last night, they’re queer, and we had a great time with them, but we’re not marketing our show as a queer show. I know how important that is to people, and I know how important that was to me – if I saw something labelled as queer, I knew that I could go there. It’s just really frustrating when people do that all the time, just talk about literally who we’re fucking – there’s more to everything than who we’re fucking.”

All four of the band are queer, and they’re visibly tired of their identities being commodified and fetishised in this way. Ruth even fake-protests, “We’re all straight!” as a jokey way of evading the question; yet through their own internal bond, as well as the solidarity they share with other marginalised artists and communities, it seems like they’re finding new ways of at least keeping that shit at arm’s length”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Alexis Goss for NME

In an interview from February, NME helped bring the music of Special Interest to British audiences. They already have a big fanbase here, but I think the more press they do, then the more people they add to their army. I hope that they do more gigs over here. At the moment, I think the only U.K. date is Green Man Festival in August. There will be a lot of demand to see more of them, as their music is really starting to turn heads. They are a force that will continue to grow stronger and stronger. Make sure that you investigate the wonder of Special Interest and their stunning music:

“It’s fair to say that into the present, Special Interest continue to reject all things po-faced or solemn, embracing weirdness in all its forms. Instead, they’re heavily influenced by the most raucous, playful strains of punk-rock: alongside the glam-infused T-Rex, the surrealist leanings of art-punks The B-52s, and genre-blurring The Slits, Mascelli pinpoints the anarchic, kazoo-enlisting Swiss trio LiLiPUT (formerly called Kleenex, until lawyers from the tissue company came knocking) as another huge early influence.

The heavy pulse of dance music also courses through their records like a cavernous heartbeat – many of Logout’s lyrics unfold in hidden basements after dark. “Disco, disco, disco, we want disco!” they demand, early on the band’s 2018 debut record ‘Spiralling’. On its successor – 2020’s ‘The Passion Of’ – Special Interest focus even more keenly on their flaming cocktail of desolation and ecstasy, pulling from industrial techno, glam rock, art pop and pulsing four-to-the-floor dance beats. Hitting somewhere between a techno banger and a strange, distorted ripper from an early Kitsuné Music compilation, ‘A Depravity Such As This’ is one such moment that finds its home firmly on the dancefloor.

On ‘Endure’ meanwhile, these increasingly well-honed influences collide with the claustrophobia of the times in which the record was written. “[The pandemic shuttering live music] meant we couldn’t test songs for an audience,” Maria Elena says, “which is what we usually do. It was directly influenced by our emotional state at that moment.”

Despite the backdrop behind creation of ‘Endure’ – the isolation of the pandemic, coupled with Black Lives Matter protests, and the dystopian horrors of the Capitol riots – Logout reckons it’s a record that would’ve resonated whenever it was released. “I feel like this album could have come out at any time,” they say, although “it feels a little different than when we released ‘The Passion Of’, offers Mascelli. “In June 2020, during all the uprisings happening across the US… that album was born out of so many things before, but it really hit at a moment that struck a chord, in a way that feels different. Like Alli was saying, [‘Endure’] could have come out at any time, and resonated”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Allen for Flood Magazine

Get a copy of Endure if you can. I want to end up with one of the many positive reviews for the album. Pitchfork were impressed with what they heard when they sat down to tackle this work of brilliance. I do feel that Special Interest are one of these groups that you simply need in your life, regardless of your musical tastes and preferences. They are going to go a very long way, that is for sure:

“In a big enough mosh pit, the world jostles loose. You enter the pit as one person, and you leave as someone else. The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz described this transformation as a portal in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia. “I remember the sexually ambiguous punk clubs of my youth where horny drunk punk boys rehearsed their identities, aggressively dancing with one another and later lurching out, intoxicated, to the parking lot together,” he wrote. “For many of them, the mosh pit was not simply a closet; it was a utopian subcultural rehearsal space.” In the squall of the music, reality starts to split and curl. Through communal, friendly violence, punks build muscle memory of what it’s like to feel unhinged and cared for at the same time. The thrash of bodies clears a channel, however fleeting, into a more survivable life.

Special Interest drill down into that same molten core. Across three ferocious albums, the New Orleans band traces the line where the thirst for a new world meets the rage that torches the old one. Lit up and led by searingly charismatic singer Alli Logout, they call out the stakes of the era as they see them, excoriating gentrifiers, cops, warmongers, and trust-fund art-school kids with keenly tuned sneers. Songs about bracing for revolution brush up against songs about great sex on great drugs. Running on the tireless engine of Ruth Mascelli’s clattering drum machine, they follow in a legacy of queer perturbations from the ’80s and ’90s that include Coil, Frankie Knuckles, and the B-52’s—all of whom, in their own way, worked with the same mix of political dissatisfaction, biting humor, and erotic fantasy. On their third album, Endure, Special Interest push their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their reliably raucous glam punk, and questions of communal caretaking press against a grief-riddled apocalyptic outlook. This time around, their thorns drip with honey.

Across Endure, Special Interest embellish the cornerstones they established on 2018’s Spiralling and 2020’s The Passion Of with gestures that wouldn’t sound out of place on ’90s radio. The after-dark sounds of house and techno started spilling onto commercial daytime airwaves toward the end of the last millennium, many of them drifting onto the Top 40 from overseas in the pan-flash genre called Eurodance. Logout stretches into certain vocal timbres and minor-key intervals that echo the perfect, ephemeral dance pop of a group like La Bouche, while behind their voice, delicate piano lines fringe the band’s hard-driving foundation. These shifts clear more air around Special Interest’s sound. While certain moments still feel immediate and unignorable, others seem to waft out from a club’s open back door, beckoning passersby to come take a closer look.

The album’s most compelling songs use both strategies in tandem. They invite you to wander in of your own accord, then enclose you inside a fever pitch. On the rollicking dance track “(Herman’s) House,” Special Interest forge an incandescent call to anger out of a surging hook. The song shares its name with a 2012 documentary about the imaginative collaboration between artist Jackie Sumell and activist Herman Wallace, a member of the Black Panther Party who spent 41 years in solitary confinement after serving a life sentence for a murder he denied committing. From his tiny cell, Wallace described his dream house to Sumell, who rendered it via computer graphics and as a tabletop model. In 2013, Wallace finally stepped out of prison, then died of cancer three days later. Sumell made plans to build the house he described to her as a youth community center in New Orleans, but property developers bought the proposed land out from under her.

Special Interest began writing Endure in the middle of 2020, in the wake of uprisings against police killings that stirred cities around the world. Across the insistent drumbeat spikes of “Concerning Peace,” the band bemoans the whittling down of those revolutionary impulses into a neoliberal mold of nonviolent personal enrichment: “Liberal erasure of militant uprising is a tool of corporate interest and a failure of imagination,” goes a call-out line reminiscent of the interjections on System of a Down’s “Prison Song.” Over Maria Elena’s frothing, sidelong guitar chords, the band’s voices come together for the chant-along chorus, where they collectively quote the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael: “We are not concerned with peace/Peace is not of our concern.” Power disguises its own violence as the natural order of things; to call for violence in retaliation clarifies the terms of a smiling oppressor. “No one will ever rest in peace/When their value is less than property,” Logout seethes, pillorying commentators who expressed more concern over broken store windows than the lives of Black people killed by police.

Amid calls to destroy every kind of cage, Special Interest stay attuned to what might sprout from the ashes. The music video for “Midnight Legend,” a sweetly melodic dance track whose single version features a verse from Mykki Blanco, follows a group of clubgoers through a messy night out. They flip off a handsy bouncer, ingest a few too many drugs, argue with exasperated bartenders, and get kicked out of the bathroom in the middle of a gay threesome. This club houses little of the utopia the dancefloor can sometimes tease; all night, it plays host to low-grade, aggravating conflict. Then the dancers spill out into the morning light. As passersby hustle their way to work, three of the clubgoers sync up for an impromptu dance routine. The people who have just woken up scowl at those who have been up all night. But the dancers look at each other and beam. Their movements reassure each other that they have each other’s backs even if no one else does. Under the new sun, they practice another world inside the cracks of this one”.

Go and follow Special Interest and keep an eye on them. I discovered them last year, but I have been hooked on them ever since. I suspect that there will be more U.K. dates soon, but they are very busy and taking their music around the world. This American quartet are…