FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Andrew Mishko
that should be on your radar this year are Witch Post. Consisting of Dylan Fraser and Alaska Reid, I am quite new to them. I will come to a couple of interviews from them. This year is going to be one where we will see future greats come through. I think Witch Post have the potential to endure for years to come. Even though they have two singles to their name, what they have put out shows real promise. I am going to get to two recent interviews with them. First, DORK highlighted their debut single, Chill Out, last year:
“The track sees the duo – formed of Scottish musician Dylan Fraser and American musician Alaska Reid, and named after 17th century carvings intended to ward off witches – delivering a hard-hitting nod to the 90s and early 00s.
“Chill out is a crooked teeth, sweaty bar conversation of a song,” the band explain. “We wanted to draw elements from bands such as the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Hole to create this rough round the edges track.
“It’s blood pumping through the veins and outbursts of emotional confusion that flow throughout this song. Diving into the venomous tongue that comes with a relationship breaking down”.
I am interested to see where the duo head this year. With a couple of distinct and brilliant singles under their belt, things are looking very bright. Their fanbase is slowly building and there will be that demand to see them live across the country. Their latest single, Rust, has been compared to something The Replacements might produce (“‘Rust’ is about taking a chance on someone. Dylan and I met under strange circumstances. Both of us have solo careers and plenty of baggage. Neither of us intended on being in a band again. However, the timing was undeniable and we couldn’t help but write together. ‘Rust’ is inspired by the album ‘All Shook Down’ by The Replacements. It’s a combination of heart-aching melancholy cut with the glimmer of change”).
PHOTO CREDIT: Andrew Mishko
Before closing up, there are two interviews that I want to highlight. Last month, PAPER spoke with a connected and spectacular duo who want to create some magic. If you have not followed the duo yet then make sure you connect with them on social media. They have the sound and potential to go a very long way:
“Dylan Fraser and Alaska Reid were never meant to be in a band. For the two singer-songwriters, their solo endeavors have been the main focus for the past few years. But sometimes between artists, there’s a certain spark — a ‘twin telepathy,’ if you will — that becomes undeniable.
“We want to bring back band music, make it less boring and one-dimensional dude-centric,” Reid tells PAPER. “I miss that real energy and rock star lore that people talk about when they talk about Blur or Fleetwood Mac.” In comes Witch Post, the new project between Reid and Fraser, who hail from Montana and Scotland, respectively. The two met online and came up with the idea for the band a year ago, initially bonding over the shared name of their hometowns Livingston from different sides of the globe.
Both Reid and Fraser bring their own musical baggage to the band, and it’s working in their favor. Reid, a Montana kid with big dreams, cut her teeth on Americana-tinged indie rock (go stream Big Bunny and thank us later), while Fraser’s breakout EP, The Storm, cemented him as Scotland’s brooding alt-pop prince. Together, they’re like a sonic match made in witchy heaven, blending their strengths to create something both nostalgic and now.
For them, it’s all about building lore, the kind of teenage imaginative interest that we all experienced when discovering a new band back in the day. “I think it’d be fun to get people excited about the music in a way that it becomes word of mouth,” Reid says. “‘Oh apparently for that ‘Chill Out’ vocal take, Dylan had just projectile vomited all over the street’ or, ‘Alaska thought up the name Witch Post because she kissed an actual 17th century witch post and got followed around by a black cat.’”
With two songs under their belt, Reid and Fraser are focused on summoning more at the moment. Sometimes witchy undertones make for music magic and given their output so far, Witch Post are sure to become alt-rock wizards in their own right.
We sat down with the two to discuss their inception as a band, how they want to be perceived and what the future holds.
How did you two come together?
Dylan Fraser: It’s September 13th, 2021. I’m on a train from London back to Scotland, a journey I wasn’t unfamiliar with during this time in my life. I’d just finished a tour around the UK and was heading back to my childhood home. My life had rapidly changed in the space of a year. I’d gone from a small town in Scotland to being in London making music and partying. I was having the time of my life but also feeling the pressure of the music industry slowly creeping in. This train ride was the only free time I had with absolutely zero distractions and it was the time where I could discover new music and artists and listen to an album in full. I don’t remember quite how I stumbled upon Alaska Reid but it felt like she just appeared one day on my Spotify. I was intrigued by her album title “Big Bunny,” so I clicked on it. I listened to the album in full and I remember being completely taken by her voice. I had never heard anyone sound the way she did. I decided to reach out and tell her how much I loved the album. She responded to me, gave me thanks and told me she was coming to London in mid-October and that we should write some music together, and we’ve kept doing that ever since.
What references or inspirations do you two most agree on and how have they influenced your vision for Witch Post?
Alaska Reid: Big guitars, emotional vocals, stories. We love rock music, and we love scrappy, romantic-sounding songs. With this band we’ve been making an effort to reference different influences or different elements than we do with our solo projects. I’m always obsessed with The Replacements and being in Witch Post has been a good opportunity to not just think about, “What would Paul [Westerberg] do?” from a songwriting perspective, but also from a production perspective. Dylan loves Sonic Youth and I do too and I think it’s been really fun for us both to use each other's voices when writing, playing with contrast of male/female vocals. We’re both really into The Waterboys and Fleetwood Mac at the moment.
Tell me about “Chill Out” and how that song came to life.
Dylan: It happened really naturally. We were fucking around with guitars and Alaska started playing these chords and I just started singing the verses over the top. The words just sort of came out and have mostly stayed the same since that day. We wanted “Chill Out” to feel like a crooked teeth, sweaty bar conversation of a song. A rough around the edges track. Diving into the venomous tongue that comes with a relationship breaking down. In our heads it’s a couple having a fight in a bar. I almost wanted it to feel like a Fairytale of New York. I love the back and forth in that song. Conversational lyrics are exciting to me.
What space do you envision Witch Post filling in the music landscape, especially given both of your backgrounds as musicians/producers?
Alaska: I want to make music that I’d enjoy listening to. We want to bring back band music, make it less boring and one dimensional dude centric. Sometimes I feel that currently it’s as if all the cool songwriter personality and emotion have just been sucked out of the rock scene and we’re only left with a hipster bro in a “rock n’ roller” outfit. I miss that real energy and rock star lore that people talk about when they talk about Blur or Fleetwood Mac. I think it’d be fun to get people excited about the music in a way that it becomes word of mouth, “Oh apparently for that ‘Chill Out’ vocal take, Dylan had just projectile vomited all over the street” or, “Alaska thought up the name Witch Post because she kissed an actual 17th century witch post and got followed around by a black cat.” When I was a teenager, this was all I cared about, music lore and fantasy books. I guess we’re finally combining the two”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andrew Mishko
I am going to end with an interview from The Line of Best Fit. They spoke to a dup that were channelling the “blood, sweat and tears of 90s alt-rock into a sound all of their own”; stating that “Kissing a 500-year-old piece of wood in a house in England a few years ago might have been the catalyst that changed Alaska Reid's life”. The more I read about Witch Post, the more they stand out. Definitely an act you will want to follow:
“The witch post.... was meant to deter witches, and people would carve them on the mantels...and this is so weird, but I kissed it," Reid tells me. At this time she was exploring the idea of collaborating with Scottish songwriter Dylan Fraser, and, aside from a black cat following her shortly after, this moment gave her the concept of the band name, and a new chapter for both of their lives.
Fraser and Reid are, for all intents and purposes, two sides of the same coin. Both solo artists and in their mid-twenties, Montana-native Reid initially began in an indie-outfit (Alyeska) before embarking on a solo career driven by narrative-laden indie-rock that delved into country-tinges and electronic elements. Her debut album Big Bunny came in late 2020, and its follow-up Disenchanter three years later. Fraser's start was via a more modern entry into the business – a meme-based website that earned him enough money to start focusing on his real passion for music. After uploading tracks to YouTube, his debut EP The Storm also came out in 2020, its electronic beat under-towing honest reflections of life. While their backgrounds and journeys may differ, there's an inherent similarity that means their partnering up for a project was, in the grandest sense, meant to be.
“I think we're secretly related somehow,” Fraser laughs. “Alaska's second name is Reid, it's very Scottish. She has Scottish descent, somewhere in a past life maybe we lived in a bothy in the highlands, and were eating boiled meat and veg.”
The pair met a few years ago after Fraser heard one of Reid’s songs during one of his five-hour journeys from Scotland to London. After messaging her on Instagram, the pair became fast friends. A planned to meet up in London was pre-empted after they accidentally bumped into each other the night before the rendezvous at a gig at Lafayette in London. “I just remember you had a very distinctive haircut, and I saw it from behind, and I was like, I think that's this person I'm talking to,” Reid laughs.
Reid and Fraser headed to the studio the next day, more for a casual session than real intention, and wound up delivering "Vampire", from Fraser’s 2022 EP, 2030 Revolution. They kept in touch, and after Fraser stopped working with Atlantic Records, he and Reid headed to her home state of Montana to record the sessions that would become Witch Post's first songs (as well as an unnamed second project yet to come).
Reid’s prior experiences had turned her off band work entirely. “I was doing the indie-rock chick thing for the longest time before it became cool," she sighs. "I'm lucky that there's a lot of girls that came in and made it fun and socially acceptable, people like boygenius, that brought about a renaissance of being an indie chick. But, it's been lonely for a long time, and it still is.”
It was a lot of back and forth before Witch Post would see the light of day. Even today the pair are still unsure of what exactly this period of their lives is leading to, but they do know that it came at the right time. "We really had a situationship that lasted many months," she continues. "Of us both at one point being like, Let's do the band and another one be like, No. Finally, I remember we had this moment where, I think Dylan, you offered the ultimatum. You were like, we just need to commit to only this if we're gonna do it," Reid explains.
This was the biggest hurdle for her to ascend: “We're writing these great songs together, and people are kind of being like, Oh, you guys have a vibe together. And in my head, I'm like, Oh, what's the next Alaska Reid solo record? Clearly I'm writing these songs to push this band forward, and I'm not really writing as many Alaska Reid solo songs. And then I'm sitting there being like, Oh, I don't want to do the band.”
As for the band's name? “I almost feel like we're the witches in a way," Reid explains. "In so much of my life – especially in rock music – everyone's been like, Fuck off. You're a girl. So in a way it already feels a bit witchy... It all feels punk in a way, but in our own way."
PHOTO CREDIT: Parker Love Bowling
“It's also scary," Fraser laughs, "I didn't know what the fuck a witch post was, and Alaska was like, let's call the band Witch Post! She explained it to me, and then I Googled 'witch post', and it literally has the St Andrew's Saltire carved into it…it's probably a fuck you to Scots. It's probably not a good thing, but we're reclaiming it!” Fraser beams.
Eventually, the first song they penned together made it out into the world. “Chill Out” leads with ramshackle guitar chords, before a howling Fraser comes in, later joined by the soothing sounds of Reid as the driving track careens with the freedom of the band unleashing their intentions. Fraser’s vocal sounds lived, a rawness that only life can tune in: “I’d projectile vomited on the street before I got into the studio. I was hanging out of my arse. It was awful!”
The pair recognised a space in the musical landscape for the kind of rock band that died out at the turn of the millennium: all dirty-fingernails, grit and restless energy. And while it may be a grand statement to attribute to Witch Post, their appreciation for 90s alt-rock is deep in the duo's DNA; Fraser has an affinity for Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails et al, while Reid loved Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements. They pay tribute to these influences on the cranked-to-eleven single "Rust", released today.
"In my heart, The Replacements the biggest band ever," Reid enthuses. "In a way, I feel like Dylan and I are writing songs in that alternate universe where The Replacements are playing massive arenas and stadiums. We're writing songs for all of the artists that we feel like that about.
"We're bringing back good, cool, rock music. Sometimes I feel like there's not a lot of that out there. There's definitely people doing stuff, but then there's a lot of boring shit, and we're not going to be boring." And if that wasn't enough, she follows this promise up with an even larger one: "We're ambitious, and we're going to make you listen”.
This year is going to be a big one for Witch Post. After releasing two brilliant singles last year, they have the momentum and press acclaim to build on that. For two people who never wanted to be in a band, their distinct spark and chemistry means they will be bonded together for years. It will be exciting to see…
WHAT comes next.
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