With the internet making everything and everyone instantly accessible, up-and-coming bands can be a dime a dozen these days. Most will either be a flash in the pan, rise to prominence to where they’re being marketed on every type of media imaginable, or they break up before they realize their full potential (seasoned local music fans in Providence and Boston know the latter all too well). Time can dictate someone’s success to whether they blow up instantly or they have to spend most of their time paying their dues for a spot in the limelight. Riding on the success of their impressive independently released debut, rambunctious punk act Microwave will be coming through the Sinclair in Cambridge this Sunday, the latest stop on the Atlanta punk band’s current tour with Baltimore alt-rockers Have Mercy and local emo dudes Transit and Somos.
Led by the angst of frontman and guitarist Nathan Hardy, there’s a certain heart-on-sleeve quality that makes this quartet enticing to see live. Ahead of this weekend’s show, Vanyaland caught up with Hardy to chat about self-releasing their debut and now being signed to an independent label, taking influences from a wide array of musicians, one certain type of dance that’s apparently the rage in Atlanta, not blowing his vocal cords out, and when we can expect the band’s next release.
Rob Duguay: In August of last year Microwave self-released debut album Stovall before getting signed to the Los Angeles based label SideOneDummy Records. Did you feel you guys had any advantage at first by releasing Stovall by yourselves?
Nathan Hardy: At the time while we were recording the album we didn’t have any interest from labels. We still had the songs and we wanted to record them and put them out so we didn’t see any reason to wait and shop it around. We were more focused on getting on the road, playing music and wanting to have fun. I don’t think there was any advantage by releasing it ourselves but I don’t think there was a disadvantage per say.
Usually when bands choose to self-release an album or an EP most of the time it means that they want to have more control over their material.
We had an EP before that but this was our first full-length release, I guess we could have recorded it and send it to a bunch of people but that whole process has always been kind of unappealing to us. We figured since we already had the songs that we could go out and play them.
Seems logical to me. It has been said that you draw a significant amount of inspiration for unlikely sources, like ’60s singer-songwriter Melanie, for example. What makes you want to step outside the box as a musician so much?
We all have sort of ADD and ADHD personalities and short attention spans so I’ll be into something for a while and then I’ll get bored for about a month or so. We’ll just search around the Internet and other places for new music and stuff. There are cool things to draw from a lot of different stuff. With old blues music all those guys were so punk rock and they’re so fucking cool, they were all smoking a shit ton of weed and were in and out of prison. There’s these cool backstories that are sort of relatable now to say trap music or something, the same sort of mentality or whatnot. It’s cool that the same spirit has been around for 100 years, there’s just cool music from a lot of different periods that their mentalities or sort of applicable but to different circumstances going on right now.
It’s interesting to look at it beyond styles or genres and just stick to a mindset behind the music to get inspired by it regardless of where it came from or what it sounds like. I’ve heard this before from other musicians from Atlanta, namely Mastodon, is that twerking at shows has become the rage. Or at least to some extent.
What is this? [laughs]
Twerking at shows.
Twerk? Like with a T at the beginning?
Yeah.
Hahahahaha!!!
Has anyone ever done it during a Microwave show? Is it really that big of a thing to do in Atlanta?
I hope so [laughs]. I haven’t noticed it but I hope that people would twerk at our shows because that would rule [laughs].
Have you ever seen it happen yourself when you got out to shows in Atlanta or is this news to you as well?
Probably for a few seconds in the ironic sense but I’ve never seen a girl just go all out [laughs].
I’ve heard that it happens from a few Atlanta musicians I’ve had the chance to talk to over the years so I usually feel compelled to ask anyone in a band from there about that. If it happens at all the shows down there then it must be pretty weird.
Yeah.
One thing I’ve noticed from listening to Microwave’s music is that you like to scream at points during songs. Is there anything you do before you get on stage to prevent yourself from blowing your voice out while performing?
Not really, I mean I used to warm up with an acoustic guitar in the van for a little bit. Not specifically though. I’ve never really thought that was a big risk or a thing that I needed to prevent from happening. When I’m singing, it doesn’t really seem for me personally that I’m on the verge of blowing a vocal cord or anything. If you push a lot of air out with your diaphragm it’s not a very big risk I don’t think.
It all depends on how you deliver it I guess.
Sort of, yeah. More having to do with technique or something.
After this run of shows with Have Mercy, Transit, and Somos, when can we expect Microwave’s follow up to Stovall?
We actually started writing a new album a few months back and we’re planning on recording it in January as of right now. We’ve been spending a lot of time with it so I’m not sure, I know we’re planning on going into the studio in January but I also know that SideOneDummy wants to hold off the release until early summer or late spring of 2016. Probably sometime in May or June.
MICROWAVE + HAVE MERCY + SOMOS + TRANSIT :: Sunday, October 16 at the Sinclair, 52 Church St. in Cambridge, MA :: 6 p.m., all ages, $14 in advance, $16 day of show :: Advance tickets :: Bowery Boston event page :: Facebook event page
