This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Photo by Joey Tobin
Since the release of the first glass beach album back in 2019, glass beach’s quirky sound has been making waves in the DIY community, so it only makes sense that fans would want more. Enter alchemist rats beg bashful (remixes), an album filled with glass beach covers and remixes by a variety of artists. Ahead of the album’s release, I zoomed with glass beach to get to know them a little more. As their pets strolled in and out of frame, we discussed everything from video game soundtracks and college radio to post-COVID touring plans and, of course, alchemist rats beg bashful (remixes).
I know you just recently moved in together, how has that gone so far?
JONAS: It’s great, honestly, it has made being a band together so much easier. We had our first band practice working on new music the other day and we haven’t been able to play together for almost a year, so that’s definitely been very cool.
WILLIAM: When making the first album, the three of us that were in the band at that point lived together anyway. We used to live together, and then we didn’t for two years, and now we do again.
J: I think it really helped our process then and I think being apart kind of slowed down our songwriting process, and just the process of doing everything. But now that we live together again, if there’s something we need to take care of, we can just walk over to somebody else’s room and be like, “Hey!”
WILLIAM: This interview, for example, is a lot easier to schedule if I can knock on someone’s door and be like, “Hey, are you free on blank?”
I know you all have also been doing Patreon covers — I love the “beach life in death cover” a lot. Whose idea was that?
WILLIAM: I think it was kind of collective.
LAYNE: We brainstormed a bunch of crap and that was one of the first things.
WILLIAM: When we set up our Patreon, I was kind of spearheading it because I was the one who knew the most about Patreon, and then my perspective on it is that I don’t fault anyone for doing Patreon exclusive content, but it’s just not something I want to do, and it was something we all agreed we weren’t necessarily looking to do for the band. The Patreon is more of a sponsorship and the money that we get we use to do stuff that everybody has access to. That’s just the way we wanted to do it, so when we were coming up with it, we had a meeting where we just laid out a bunch of ideas that we had for goals — not necessarily tiers or content for patrons.
JONAS: Things we’d like to do eventually.
WILLIAM: Things we were going to do anyway and just having patrons be involved in it, like the patron suggested covers was a thing, but we weren’t necessarily going to devote a lot of time to covers and we still aren’t. I mean, we’ve done one, although it was 14 minutes long.
JONAS: We did a song that is three songs.
WILLIAM: Maybe four songs. So we’re not looking to devote a whole lot of time to it because we want to focus on our own original music and everything and work on LP2, and so when we were thinking about what patrons might like, it’s like, well, they might like to suggest songs that we cover, or, for example, I think our 400 patron goal is suggesting an article of merch. So they can say, “Oh I want rat sweatpants,” or something, basically stuff that we want to do generally and then having the patrons be involved in helping us make that a reality.
LAYNE: I will say that I was a little nervous about it at first because they tossed out my customized balloon dog idea as the patron rewards, but it’s pretty good!
JONAS: I think we used our collective veto on that one. I actually love the idea of – what’s the band that has the big beach balls at all their concerts?
LAYNE: Weezer?
WILLIAM: Who are the people that do the song that’s like “Do you realize?”
EVERYBODY: The Flaming Lips!
JONAS: I wanna do what The Flaming Lips did but with a big balloon dog.
WILLIAM: I saw a Flaming Lips concert where they were covering the entirety of The Wall and they had a bunch of huge balloons and Primus opened for them.
JONAS: Did they throw a wall into the audience? Who likes cinder blocks?
J: Cinder blocks for everybody! Woo! That would be fucked up. I’m glad they didn’t do that.
WILLIAM: Yeah, they didn’t.
Just for fun, since you’ve been letting your patrons choose your covers for you recently, if you all were to choose songs to cover, which ones would you pick?
JONAS: I think “Polar Bear or Africa” by Jeff Rosenstock would be really fun. [everybody laughs] We just did “Polar Bear or Africa” of mostly our own volition.
WILLIAM: It’s for a compilation.
JONAS: The No Earbuds compilation of No Earbuds artists covering other No Earbuds artists. I really want us to do “stupid horse.” It keeps being on the Patreon polls but not making it all the way. I think we could have a lot of fun with “stupid horse.” I have a couple friends who think theres not as much meat in “stupid horse” for us to play with and I disagree and I want to prove them wrong.
WILLIAM: I mean, the less meat there is, I think the more we could do with it.
J: I think horses have a lot of meat.
JONAS: Horses are so meaty and bones!
WILLIAM: Horses are so meaty and bones.
LAYNE: Just because I want to go as weird as possible with the rest of the band, there’s a song called “Ants of the Sky” by Between the Buried and Me. It’s 13 minutes and 10 seconds long.
J: Is that the one you showed us in the tour van?
LAYNE: Yes! And it’s a progressive death metal band, but I feel like we are weird enough where we could make something super amazing out of that because it already goes so many fucking places. We can do that, but we can go completely different places, and that sounds fucking cool to me.
J: I’m not going to cover another 13-minute song. I might write a song that long, but I’m not gonna learn somebody else’s song.
WILLIAM: I’ve been really into the song “New Music” by Another Michael — I love that song so much, and there’s a thing in me that would love to cover it, but I also just have a high voice that is not as pretty as the lead singer, so I feel like what I would do would be too similar and not quite as good. Oh yeah! I would cover anything by The Wonder Years.
JONAS: Yeah, we would love that! We were talking about wanting to do that at one point.
WILLIAM: The Wonder Years and Slaughter Beach, Dog.
JONAS: “Acolyte” is just one of my favorite songs, period. So J, you’d probably wanna cover “Revolution 9.”
J: I’d like to cover The Microphones or something or Brave Little Abacus. I already covered them, though.
A lot of your songs remind me of video games. Would you say there are any specific games that have inspired your style?
LAYNE: There are a lot of them!
J: It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently because as a kid, I was obsessed with Super Mario and I realized recently that that impressed on me at a young age being into jazz.
LAYNE: Something I was talking about with Jonas and I’s friend group the other day on Discord is I was talking about how recently I’ve been drawing upon video game influence for a while now, but now I’ve started to hit this point where I’m digging out recesses of my mind where I’m like “Wait, which game is this?” Like very specific games, like that Bomberman game where I haven’t met anybody else who’s played through it, but these very obscure games that the soundtrack seems so specific and almost forgettable, but I’ve been trying to draw them out of my memory because I feel like it’s a well that I like to bring up ideas from.
WILLIAM: Weren’t you showing me that ninja one?
LAYNE: Oh yeah, Revenge of Shinobi! That thing has the fucking most banger ass soundtrack for an action game! It’s ridiculous and it’s on the SEGA! It’s not even real instruments!
J: So far as specific game soundtracks, I really like the Earthbound soundtrack, like the whole Mother series.
JONAS: Earthbound is my favorite soundtrack for a game I haven’t played yet.
J: Oh, you should! They specifically set aside way more memory on the cartridge for music than any other game on the SNES did, so there are like 100 songs on it, which is wild for how old it is.
LAYNE: The way Mother 3 not only has a really good soundtrack but forces you to, if you want to play better, you have to interact with the rhythm of the soundtrack during battle sequences. It’s so fucking good!
J: That’s the really cool thing about Mother 3 is the way battles work, if you attack enemies in sync with the music, you get combos and do more damage, and so the way they escalate the difficulty with that is, as the game goes on, the songs get faster tempos or weirder time signatures. The final boss music is in 23/16 or something, and it’s just straight up math rock time signatures.
JONAS: From my understanding, I feel like Earthbound is the most direct video game to our music line. I hear Mario a lot, I also think a lot of my instinct for how I like to harmonize stuff with bass comes from Grant Kirkhope’s writing for Banjo Kazooie. He does so many weird things over what otherwise wouldn’t be weird and I feel like J and I can speak on that level a lot.
J: I definitely think that his music impressed the idea of taking very, very simple melodies and putting the weirdest chords possible behind them, cause that’s the backbone of his style.
LAYNE: I think there’s a whole world of depth that isn’t sometimes talked about in very popular games like that. Even the Legend of Zelda series, like Koji Kondo has this weird thing where, for example you have the main theme that people know for the overworld theme, but then there are games like Majora’s Mask where you are in a slightly different world and the theme is almost the same but you’re like, “This is definitely different!” But then there’s the game where you go into the fucking mirror world and the theme is flipped upside down! And then there’s a version that feels like it’s in a dream in Link’s Awakening! They think so much about the concept of how they want the music to sound that it’s a really interesting way to approach music and I think that’s why I draw upon it so much is because they think about how the music’s gonna come off.
JONAS: What headspace is it gonna put you into? How is it gonna make you hear it?
J: Video game music really works on an unconscious level, I feel like. It’s not what you’re paying attention to when you’re playing, most of the time, and the tune gets stuck in your head, like “Oh, I got this tune in my head, where’d it come from?” and you play the game again and it’s like, “Oh, there it is.”
I know another influence one of you brought up was jazz. Were any of you classically trained? Did you start listening to jazz when you were young?
WILLIAM: I came to it in college and it was very casual. I’m not trained or anything and I wouldn’t even say I know that much about jazz or that I’m really good at any type of jazz music, but I listened to a lot in college.
JONAS: We appreciate jazz.
WILLIAM: We appreciate jazz, at least Jonas and myself.
JONAS: And we have played some jazz, but never super seriously or formally.
WILLIAM: Neither of us are trained in anything musically.
J: Neither of you two. I took piano lessons for a while as a kid, as a really little kid, playing like “Hot Cross Buns” or whatever, and then I took piano lessons again in high school, but I never really got that into it and it wasn’t really until I started trying to self-teach myself and study music on my own that I really got into it. I guess at some point 5 years ago or something, I just felt like I’d hit a wall with what I could do with major chord, minor chord, just simple harmonies, and I was like, “I guess the only way forward is to learn jazz,” so I started learning jazz then. So I started listening to more jazz and trying to understand it, learning standards and stuff like that. And I feel like that was a big breakthrough that formed the writing on the first glass beach album a lot.
LAYNE: I was part of a jazz ensemble in college, I had messed around with it beforehand but college was the first time I really got into it, but I joined a jazz ensemble and they did this thing where, as part of their thing every Tuesday night, they would go to this one restaurant that had this backroom area and they would get up and they would play standards and they would just go at it. And they would be like, “Hey, anybody in the room who goes to this college who knows the standard, come on up and play!” And so sometimes you’d have 12 people on there and sometimes it would only be two people cause you’re like, “No one’s playing ‘Giant Steps.’”
J: Well you’re just an asshole if you play “Giant Steps.”
LAYNE: What’s funny is that the only things I’m classically trained in at all are voice for choir and when I was a piano major in college, and then that’s it. I’ve sort of tried to learn from people as far as guitar goes, but I never got actual training from people. The lessons I did get were little tidbits — I couldn’t call it classical training.
J: It’s really funny cause I’m the pianist and the singer in the band!
JONAS: I think about how Patrick Stump auditioned to be the drummer of Fall Out Boy.
WILLIAM: He’s a good drummer, though. When I saw them live, they had a drum battle. It was sick.
You flipped roles!
WILLIAM: Oh yeah! I’m having my first actual, for real, “I’m taking it seriously” drum lesson on Saturday. The drummer for The Sonder Bombs, I reached out because they’re really good, and I was like, “You’re so good, do you do lessons at all?” And they were like, “Actually, I’ve been playing since I was five, I taught at the School of Rock for five years,” and they’re gonna give me a drum lesson, we’ll see how it goes, and I might continue with that!
J: I’m about to start vocal lessons, so we’re all just trying to level up our skills here.
WILLIAM: Part of it is getting better and the other part of it is, I think there’s a tendency with DIY or indie bands to not be trained, and with that comes a lack of technical skill that ends up hurting you. And I mean actual injury.
J: Especially with voice. But you can really fuck up your wrist playing guitar wrong.
WILLIAM: We went on our first and only tour last January, a year ago. It was the first time I had ever toured, especially as a drummer, because I was more of a guitarist growing up, and when we were on tour, we got halfway through and I had never played that many shows in a row before. I had never done it on that little sleep, with that little nutrition, and it really showed the technical skill that I was lacking to play the songs properly in a way that wouldn’t end up injuring myself, because we got halfway through that tour and my wrists were aching and my hands were tight and my forearms were just blasted. There’s a way of drumming that I would see other drummers who would open for us — they were a lot more natural and very smooth and relaxed and clearly could play five hour sets and be fine. And I’m sitting here getting fucked up over a 30-minute set. So as soon as we were done with tour, I was like, “I have to increase my technical ability.” Not just to get better at the drums, but to save myself in the long run.
J: That’s exactly what happened with me with my voice on tour, cause the last few shows we did, it was really clear that I was losing my voice, and the last show we did in Reno, I was not able to talk that morning, and I drank tea with five packets of honey in it, and I was able to just barely do that last set, but I had to drop a lot of stuff an octave and back off a whole lot, and after that, I was like, “Okay, I need to do some coaching.”
JONAS: Layne and I picked up some of the yelling parts of the later sets. You were like, “Could you scream instead of me here?” “Of course I can, J!”
J: Yeah! Cause you’ve done that in metal bands before, huh?
LAYNE: Funny enough, before I moved to LA, I was a vocalist in a few different bands and I had a period of doing hardcore stuff. Thing is, I would love to get guitar lessons at some point.
J: You could give guitar lessons, Layne.
LAYNE: I do want to do that too, but here’s the thing. There are lots of really great players, I’ve seen lots of great guitar players, like Aria from Hoity Toity is really fucking good. But nobody that I’ve met in the indie scene yet is specializing in the area that I really want to get lessons in, and that’s the problem is I’m very hyper-specific about that stuff now because I have to be.
J: Well then, don’t learn from the indie scene! I think if there’s anything to take away from this it’s that it is actually pretty important to have some kind of training on your instrument, at least for the sake of not hurting yourself.
WILLIAM: You don’t have to be good, you can just hammer out power chords, but learn how to do it without hurting yourself. That’s the truth for drums, guitar, voice.
JONAS: Plus it’s easy to practice efficiently then, and then get better faster.
WILLIAM: It’s the same thing with people needing earplugs. There’s nothing rock n’ roll about losing your hearing at 40 years old.
LAYNE: And straight up, I’ve learned that it is way harder to undo wrong techniques of playing that will hurt you than it is to just learn it the right way and get that good with learning it right.
Something that just came up was touring, and I feel like a lot of your fans hopped on board right before or during the pandemic. Do you have any plans for after the pandemic?
LAYNE: Take over the fuckin’ world.
JONAS: We’ll inherit it next.
WILLIAM: We’re focusing on LP2 right now. We were just talking to our label about doing one all-encompassing tour to get the first glass beach album out of our systems, give people an opportunity to hear those songs live.
JONAS: Probably just North American if not even just a United States tour.
WILLIAM: I would love to hit up Canada.
JONAS: We want to go everywhere that people tell us to.
WILLIAM: I don’t have a passport.
JONAS: Am I the only one with a passport?
LAYNE: I have a passport.
JONAS: I can marry one of you.
WILLIAM: Whether that means that we’re gonna be a support on some other bigger act’s tour or we are going to try a US headline tour, that is to be determined, but we’ll probably do one thing.
JONAS: One big hurrah!
WILLIAM: We had a US tour planned, an east coast and midwest tour, that got canned because of coronavirus, but afterwards doing that would be good. If coronavirus hadn’t happened, it would have been cool to maybe go to the UK.
JONAS: And we still want to do that, just maybe not as soon.
LAYNE: Brazil!
J: We just ended up in a situation where this album came out two years ago and we haven’t got to play it in most places.
WILLIAM: Run for Cover released it a year ago.
LAYNE: Brazil, we hear you.
JONAS: We’re coming, Brazil! Just please stay patient. We will be there.
WILLIAM: So probably something US based, maybe support with a bigger act. Maybe headline, only one though, and then we really want to continue focusing on the second record.
JONAS: There’s no telling how soon that will be done, but there’s a chance that we’ll have the second record at least written by the time we get to tour again. We really don’t have a solid timeline of when that is going to be done, but we’ve started on it. We have a good handful of songs that are pretty well-developed, but a long way to go. Very long way to go.
LAYNE: I remember looking up whatever band I heard play a new song live and I would look up video from that tour just to hear the new live song, and it would be from a fuckin’ iPhone, so you couldn’t hear anything, and I was like, “It’s so good!”
J: I figure if we’re touring again before the next album comes out, we’ll inevitably be playing new songs, cause we’ve already written new songs, we’ve already put out new songs.
WILLIAM: We’ll do “1015” live. That would be cool. I can’t even imagine how to play that live!
I know before COVID, you were playing smaller DIY shows. Would you prefer playing basement shows or big venues?
J: We are looking to play medium venues. Here’s the thing: our live setup, with all the equipment that we need to use and everything that needs to go through the PA, typically does not work that well in really tiny venues unless they just happen to have a really good PA system. But also, I don’t think we’re the kind of band that’s really looking to be in fuckin’ stadiums.
JONAS: The Echo was great.
J: The Echo! That was one of the best venues we played at.
LAYNE: Here’s the thing. I love playing small shows that are crowded — those are fun. I like playing big shows, and I would love to be able to play a festival, like a giant stage.
J: Oh yeah, I’m not ruling that out.
WILLIAM: I’ll play a fuckin’ stadium!
J: I wouldn’t say no.
LAYNE: But! As someone who not only enjoys being able to be within proximity to the crowd and see someone and point at them like, “You!”
J: Pull them up on stage and beat the shit out of them.
LAYNE: Number two, I’m an audio engineer. I like for my shows to sound good. And I’m gonna be honest, I don’t care how nice your basement is, it’s not gonna sound that great. And as much as outdoor festivals can be fun, live sound outside can be handled but is also kind of a fuckin’ nightmare, so I love venues like The Echo where it’s a room and it’s more or less designed to work for the size of shows that they have, and it sounds fantastic. I really don’t like when having good sound quality is associated with not being DIY or not being punk. You can have a good sounding punk show, a good sounding DIY show. You don’t have to have everything sounding muddy and bad. So that’s where I stand, I want a place where it’s a good sized-show where I can still interact with the crowd, but the sound is very good.
JONAS: I need to stress that I really, really love the feeling of being in a really cramped, dank basement show, and I kind of have a lot of longing feeling for the time in my life when those were the only shows that I could go to or play at. I love doing the shows where we have more control over the sound, and it is better for our setup and everything, but there is a very special way that the shows we don’t have to play anymore feel.
LAYNE: I definitely still like them.
WILLIAM: I never want to play a house again. Personally, it’s so stressful. I kind of helped run a DIY venue in Minnesota and did setup and sound for it a lot, and it was really a nightmare. Some of the shows were pretty cool; it was always a good experience.
JONAS: It was a living reminder of how, if we didn’t have this, we wouldn’t have live music, and that’s a really cool, communal feeling.
WILLIAM: Exactly! I love house shows, I love basement shows, I love people who put them on. I love attending them for the most part, but I don’t like being sweaty or cramped, personally, and then also, as a performer, I enjoy a tiny element of being taken care of because if I’m having to push through a crowd to set up a drum kit, that just adds more stress. Like, you have a 15 minute turnover and you have to push everything through the crowd.
J: Most of the places we played on tour had green rooms, and that was something I had never had before. Life of luxury!
LAYNE: Not that this is the norm for DIY shows, but I’ve never played a show at a place like The Echo and had something that disappeared from my stuff and never got returned. I have had that happen at house shows. It doesn’t happen at every show, there’s lots of people who put on great house shows, but eventually when you save money and get expensive gear, you do at least want to make sure that it’s not going to get touched.
J: I’ve played lots of shows where somebody would break a string during soundcheck and be like, “Hey, can I borrow somebody else’s guitar?” And granted, most of the time, it was me.
LAYNE: And that’s why I learned how to change guitar strings really fast.
JONAS: Alex from Dogleg is a master string-breaker. It’s incredible.
LAYNE: San Francisco, he broke not just two strings but also tore out one of the strap holders, just full-out ripped it out of the guitar, so he borrowed my guitar and I went backstage.
JONAS: That’s the price you pay for breaking the audience’s fuckin’ necks with rock n’ roll! I miss Dogleg.
WILLIAM: All the records that got released back in 2020, like Bartees’s record and Melee and all those other fuckin’ awesome records that don’t get to tour, I know we released ours, we got to do one tiny west coast thing, but at least Melee by Dogleg, I think about that pretty regularly. They had like four tours set up for 2020 and they had to cancel all of them. They were going to play with Joyce Manor.
JONAS: Some big festival, too.
WILLIAM: Yeah, it was Pitchfork. They were set to play SXSW, too, and as much as touring being canceled affected a lot of people, and it did affect us to a degree, we have not been a touring band nor do I think we will be for a while.
JONAS: It’s always something we will do, but I don’t think we will be a touring band.
J: My mindset is that making good music is the priority and the tours are so everybody who wants to see us live gets the chance to. So we want to tour to as many places as we can when each album comes out, but aren’t looking for a whole lot past that.
What can you tell us about your latest release?
LAYNE: Do you like glass beach band, but not?
WILLIAM: It’s a remix cover album! A lot of our peers and friends of ours, we asked them if they would remix and cover some of our songs, and we got 18 people to say yes.
J: More than 18! We got 18 artists.
WILLIAM: Every single song on the album is being covered or remixed, and a couple of them are doubled up. We got Backxwash, Bartees Strange, Pinkshift, Dogleg, Fantasyluv, Clover & Sealife, Jhariah, and NNAMDÏ.
JONAS: That’s about half of them.
WILLIAM: Almost every single person or group that we reached out to said yes. We’re very fortunate to be able to be putting this together. It’s super cool.
JONAS: And the tracks are so good. There’s not a single one that I don’t like, and there are a good few that I just super love.
J: They’re all taking our music in very different directions. There are some faithful covers and there are some remixes that sound like a different song.
JONAS: It was incredible to hear, honestly. I think people are going to dig it. Is it longer than the album?
WILLIAM: It might be the same length because some people took the longer songs and shortened them and some people took the shorter songs and lengthened them.
Sick! I can’t wait to hear it!
WILLIAM: All the artists did just incredible work with all the stuff that we gave them. It was really exciting to hear, because we’ve heard some pre-masters and stuff.
Finally, I read somewhere that some of you met because of a college radio station. If you were still doing college radio, what would you play right now?
JONAS: I would play a lot of Mitski and Dogleg. Those are the first artists that I would want to play on a radio station for sure right now.
WILLIAM: I think if I had a college radio station now, I would be scouring DIY and introducing people to it. Pinkshift would be a priority, even though they only have like two singles out.
J: Cheekface!
WILLIAM: I’ve been a bit of a Cheekfacer. Their new album’s awesome. The one they released in 2019 was really good, too. They’re just great.
JONAS: I think if you want to see what William would do, just look at their Twitter and all the bands that they retweet — that’s probably what their radio station would look like.
WILLIAM: Arcadia Grey is also really good, too, I like them a lot.
LAYNE: I would definitely be playing fuckin’ Pinkshift, and I would probably also force people to listen to, I mean, Unison Square Garden doesn’t need my promotion because they’ve gotten huge as a band, but I love them. And Otoboke Beaver! And, if one of them happens to read this, we want to tour with you! Otoboke Beaver’s so good. And they’re right around where we’re at, just in Japan.
J: All those artists on our remix album I would play on college radio.
WILLIAM: And Jharaiah. And Phoebe Bridgers. I just love Phoebe Bridgers. Actually, if I was going to cover a song, it would probably be “Garden Song.” I love that song.
JONAS: The radio show that William and I had together in college called The Animal Show was us hosting together, but I just queued up all the music, mostly it was stuff I wanted William to hear because William wasn’t super versed in newer music.
WILLIAM: I just didn’t listen to music.
JONAS: So it’s really cool now that William is more on the pulse than I am of the really hot, active, cool bands.
WILLIAM: Genuinely, it stemmed from me feeling like glass beach was really outside of the entire scene just because we grew in isolation. We weren’t really playing shows and we were just working on a record for 3+ years.
J: We really haven’t been part of the scene.
WILLIAM: Yeah, and I just felt on the outside of stuff, so I just started trying to look for bands that I liked to see who they were promoting. And now it’s cool because people like Pinkshift and Jharaiah and Meet Me at the Altar and Cheekface — it feels like every band in the indie/DIY scene is just looking to support each other, so if someone releases something, all of those same people are retweeting it and getting it out there. Illuminati Hotties is a big one — they’re super supportive of everybody and that’s really cool to see. Teagan and Sara have been checking out a bunch of these smaller indie artists, and it’s just really cool to feel like I have connected with, for the first time, an entire subsection of peers and other artists all through the need to reach out to people during the pandemic.
LAYNE: One other group that I forgot to mention but I would totally play on a college radio station: Village Hate Society. They’re from Corpus Christi, Texas, they’re a group of rappers, and they’re really fucking good.
Anything else you think I should know about glass beach?
JONAS: Music’s changing! Music’s getting different.
WILLIAM: Like in general? Or ours?
JONAS: Both.
J: Music’s always changing. We are trying some different things now. I’ve been writing stuff that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve written before. the first glass beach album didn’t sound like anything I’d done before that, and I think people who like our music like the core of our creative identity more than any superficial aspects of the sound, and I feel like people who liked what we did before will like what we’re doing now.
JONAS: And it’s not entirely unlike.
J: Oh yeah, it’s not radically different.
LAYNE: It’s funny because I wasn’t sure how the reception for “running” was going to go just because of the development for it, but then when people were like, “Oh my god, ‘running!’” I was just like, “Oh, cool.”
JONAS: [“running” is] not a good example of what we’re doing, but the fact that “running” was so different from what we normally do and still was liked by people was very validating towards our general artistic core.
J: Yeah! I almost feel like, in an unintentional way, the first glass beach album was this kind of scattershot approach to music, just trying a whole lot of different things, and some people love all of it, some people like some of it more than other stuff, but what that says to me is we can continue to go in all different directions and people will be receptive to it.
Listen to alchemist rats beg bashful (remixes) below and follow glass beach here.
