#supermilk

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Surface Noise Issue 2 Part 1.

Find Part 2 here

Grab a physical copy from: https://surfacenoisezine.bandcamp.com/

MAY 2

shit and shine - chklt shk

Doe - Why Are You The Cherry Wave - Michinoku Overdriver charly bliss - glitter jeff rosenstock - pash rash

Cold Beat - Don't Touch doe - basement Supermilk - Shoryuken

Nevers - Lover's Embrace Nevers - Quicksilver the new year - recent history BB Eye - Big Cicada

Hunx & His Punx - Baby of the Band Doe - Julia Survived jeff rosenstock - blast damage days

Agent bla - Derogatory Embrace Cold Beat - Chainmaille doe - avalanche Doe - No Wonder juana molina - paraguaya jeff rosenstock - festival song

Photo by Julie Ernie

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Jake Popyura’s used to doing things himself. The drummer and vocalist of supremely underrated British indie rock band Doe, who split up in 2019, records as Supermilk, a project initially intended to be a studio-only side project, albeit one rooted in Popyura’s longtime experience self-recording. A 2017 and 2019 EP were followed by a full-length, last March’s Death Is The Best Thing for You Now, which he finally planned to tour, adopting his bedroom approach to a band on stage. We all know what happened last March. For Popyura, the cancellation of live music for the foreseeable future, the still-recent dissolution of Doe, and a dry well of freelance web development projects (his day gig) could have combined to form a full-blown existential crisis. Yes, who am I to assume that didn’t happen, but from an outsider’s point of view, Popyura simply did what a lot of artists did with lockdown: write some songs.

Four by Three, Supermilk’s second LP (and first for Specialist Subject) marks a new path for Popyura both in context of Doe and Supermilk. Though there are still buzzing tunes with grim subject matter, Popyura took the opportunity to dive deep within himself. The album’s bookended with two lilting, personal tracks, first single and closer “Used to It” and vulnerable opener “Unsafe”. The latter as well as “Lifesaver” allow him to showcase his expressive, open vocals, giving more space than ever to his lyrics. Yes, some of the album’s best songs could have fit on previous, murder-oriented releases, like choppy, Heaven’s Gate-inspired burner “Swim” and a fuzz rock sequel to Death’s serial killer tale “Agony Anne”. But Four by Three has the most variety of any Supermilk or even Doe release, exemplary of Popyura’s ability to channel different corners of his mind.

I spoke with Popyura over Zoom in May from London, where he’s “currently living, trying not to go insane.” In addition to the record, he spoke about his love for horror films, craft beer, and VHS collecting, why he chooses to be open about his day job, and when he’ll start thinking about restarting the live incarnation of Supermilk. Read the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: With either Doe or Supermilk, had you been used to the idea of putting out an album, touring it, and having that road-testing experience influence the process of the next one? Was the process for Four by Three different, having written and recorded it immediately after putting out Death Is The Best Thing for You Now?

Jake Popyura: I guess with Doe, that was the way they would usually work, in terms of touring it for as long as we could before getting started on another one. Naturally, the way you evolve as a band is through playing and touring relentlessly, and the adventures you have together influence the way you work together and impact subsequent releases. With Supermilk, I’ve been doing my own kind of “one man band” things for a long time. I’m an only child and started playing music really early, and my dad taught me to record music by myself on his four-track when I was quite young. Supermilk’s sort of another version of that one-man band thing. I’ve never really played live as a solo thing. Not having any outside influence, just doing it myself without having road testing, is something I’m used to, so it didn’t make much of a difference to the writing and recording of the new record.

The last record, my first full-length with Supermilk, we were working on a live band incarnation of it, which we were gonna tour and do some shows with. That had to be completely canceled because of COVID. That was the only hint of doing live stuff solo. It’s always been a self-contained thing, writing and recording on my own. The only difference this time is my friend Rich [Mandell] produced, mixed, and mastered Four by Three. So sadly, no road testing for Supermilk yet. Hopefully at some point in the future when we can stand shoulder to shoulder and people can be on stage again.

There was a period of time last year where I didn’t work, because I was previously freelance as a day job. I finished my last freelance contract just before COVID kicked off, and all the work dried up, and there were four months I couldn’t work or couldn’t find any work. It was all a bit dicey. So I thought, “I guess I’ll start [making a record.]” I was playing guitar a lot more and was indoors a lot more. It was a way to pass the time and naturally grew into intelligent songs. Towards the end of the year, I thought, “There might be a second record in this. I like all the stuff I’m doing, and there’s probably enough ideas in here for me to start forming it into a second album.” So it was almost accidentally born out of the situation.

SILY: How would you say it’s distinct from the first record?

JP: I’d say the first record is a lot more agitated, if that makes sense. It had a theme where a lot of the songs were about death and entitlement and the combination of death as a result of entitlement. Even though there were a lot of pop songs on it, it was bleak, angry, and fidgety. The fact that I recorded it by myself made it rough around the edges. This second one ended up being gentler, in a way, which was not intentional at all. But maybe it was because I was in a slightly different place from when I wrote the first one. 

I have a wide rage of influences. I grew up listening to a lot of punk and hardcore and still have a love of heavy, fast music and post-punk. Stuff like Devo, B-52s. There’s also a lot of gentle, ambient stuff that I love, and I don’t get a chance to or think to write in that style. Naturally, I ended up writing quite a few more personal, gentle, acoustic songs as well. The first time I’ve really kind of used acoustic [guitar] on any Supermilk stuff.

Nicola [Leel] from Doe, I’m looking after her acoustic guitar while she’s living in the States, and I ended up writing a lot of the songs on that, which helped me play around with full open chords that were jammy and gentle, instead of playing through fuzz pedals all the time. It’s got less spikes and more curves. A bit smoother around the edges. And the lyrics are a lot more personal too, referencing things going on in my life over the last year and a bit.

SILY: You still find room for both the gentler/more personal and the more raw. The former is immediately apparent on the opening track, “Unsafe”, but you still have sharp barbs of guitar on the second and third track, and “Fears” is really fuzzy. Then “Lifesaver” goes back to gentle. Did you try to sequence the album in a way that goes back and forth between different levels of noise?

JP: I’m always quite fussy about the track sequencing. Not so much anymore, but I used to have a thing where I couldn’t have songs together that were the exact same tempo or key. Then I realized that sometimes works against you, because it’s sometimes nice to have two songs in the same key that flow into each other. I used to be way more anal about that. I never write an album in sequence, but ones the songs are mixed, I spend a while putting them into different orders.

SILY: The song “Used To It” is a great closer, but you rarely see the closer issued as the first single. Why did you release it as the first taste of the record?

JP: The first single was really “Pelican Pete”, but we put it out with Specialist Subject before we announced the record because we were keen to get something out there. But with “Used To It”, it’s the most different compared to what I’ve done before. I really liked the idea of putting out a track that wasn’t entirely consistent with what I had done before. It’s one of the more personal songs on the record, too. It weaves a bit of a story and hits a few different places and notes than singles I had put out previously. It’s more chill and gentle. The most downtempo thing I’ve done. I thought it would be interesting instead of releasing the standard guitar ones to let people know, “Here’s something from the record you might not like, just to give you a heads up.”

SILY: Who or what is Pelican Pete?

JP: There’s a song on the first record called “Agony Anne”, a loose story of a serial killer called Anne who meets her victims through Tinder, or “insert name of dating app here.” The story is from the perspective of her soon-to-be victim, and in an attempt to spare their life, they say, “Hang on a second: You must be very lonely doing all this killing on your own. Maybe I can be the person to do this with you. You can spare my life and we can do this together and form a partnership.” “Pelican Pete” is the sequel to that song, and Pete is the person from “Agony Anne”. “Pelican Pete” is from the perspective of Anne, her saying, “This was a bad idea. You’ve gone rogue and are not abiding by my code. You’re gonna get us caught. I’m gonna have to kill you.”

SILY: That’s not a personal story, is it?

JP: I hope not, unless it’s channeling some sort of other life. On the whole, this album is a lot more personal and gentler than the first one, but there are still a few songs on here dealing with death. It would be unusual if there weren’t any songs like that on here, especially considering the time in which I wrote it, where there was a lot of death around us and gnarly shit happening. Also, I’m a big horror fan and have always been fascinated with the slightly more macabre side of things and weird interpersonal relationships that tie into those things as well. Especially when you have a pair of serial killers. It’s interesting to me, this love affair and bond can be tied up in such a sadistic way.

There’s a song on here loosely based on the Heaven’s Gate cult, which I’m also quite fascinated with. So I’d never allow myself to write a completely gentle album, even though it’s more gentle on the whole and definitely shows a softer side. But a big component of my personality remains in the uncomfortable, slightly infatuated with death arena, so it felt right to include those in there too.

SILY: You repeat “You will not be safe” on the first track. Does that go along with the macabre themes?

JP: Not really, actually. One through-line in a lot of the stuff I’ve written is about mental health and my own struggles with mental illness. That song’s more about the fear I have that all of my friends are one day gonna get up and say, “Why have we been friends with this person for so long?” When I actually speak to my other friends or people in general who suffer from generalized anxiety that comes with several different types of mental illness, that kind of fear that someone wakes up and realizes I’m a terrible person, is a common feeling that a lot of people have. “You will not be safe” and the line before that, “Some day you’ll believe me / Some day you’ll release me,” it’s some day you’ll believe me when I keep telling you I’m a piece of shit and not worth it. “You will not be safe” is like, “I’ll still be there--the stain of our friendship will still be on your life.” 

It sounds bleak, but I find this stuff quite funny as well. You’ve got to laugh about your own mental peculiarities. I find them amusing when talking to someone else about them. They’re just floating in my head, so me talking out loud about them is funny. [laughs]

SILY: What’s the purpose of the interlude, “Hale Bopp”, within the narrative of the record?

JP: That’s a portion of a song I made 10-11 years ago. I made a chiptune-esque project that was Nintendo-style bleeps and bloops, emulating a rock band sound made entirely in the computer. It’s a portion of that, been fucked with a little bit, pitch shifted and reversed. “The Skin”, the song I mentioned about Heaven’s Gate, is almost a fictionalized version of it from the point of view of the two last people standing in a suicide cult/pact, looking back over the events that have led up to that point and realizing they’ve got a choice to make. Hale-Bopp was the comet they believed [would transport them] if they took their own lives, if they timed it right and left their own “vehicles”, which is how they referred to their human bodies, that they’d be able to ride the comet back to their alien origins and join the people they left previously. [The song] sounds a bit spacey, and you can listen to that and imagine a bunch of people jumping to a comet and riding back to where they think they come from. Because of the way it’s been reversed and pitch-shifted, it feels melodic and hopeful but sad and tragic at the same time, which is fitting with the themes.

SILY: Are you a fan of contemporary horror films?

JP: I’m a fan of horror all across the decades. I usually reference 80′s horror because the style of it--when effects were starting to be used a lot more and there wasn’t quite as much CGI yet, so there was a gritty feel to the stuff that was happening even thought it was fake, because it was happening in the studio in frame with the actors. Including the gore or creature effects. It forced people to get creative. There’s something special and magical about watching that happen and how it’s captured by the filmmakers. But I’m a big fan of the genre on the whole.

SILY: You’ve shared in your bio that you’re also interested in craft brewing and that you have a day job as a web developer. I normally don’t see bands or band members including that in conjunction with information about the album. Why did you choose to share these things about yourself, whether they pertain to the music or not?

JP: I feel like the vast majority of my friends are musicians, or if not musicians, are involved in the arts in some way. I know one or two people who do music as their job. The eternal struggle, trying to find that right balance--especially if you’re doing music on a small indie level--you can have a fan base and people buying your music and big sold out shows and be established--but there’s still a good chance it’s not gonna be your living. Almost everyone I know subsidizes it with a day job. I thought it would be a nice thing to throw in there because it’s something to be proud of, too. The way most people I know do music, it’s essentially a job even though they don’t get paid for it. They dedicate just as much time to it and put just as much effort into it and care just as much about it than any other job, if not more so. Sometimes I feel like people are ashamed to say they don’t do music full time and can’t call it their job if not making a full-time living from it. It’s nice to get rid of that stigma and say, “We’re all in this together.” We all have to take other jobs we don’t like 100%. It’s good to be honest about it.

The homebrewing was just something to amuse myself. It made me laugh. It read almost like a dating profile or something. [laughs] I actually had another line in there I chose to take out, which is, “His best feature is his butt.” I don’t need to rub the fact that I’ve got a fantastic butt in people’s faces. They’ll figure that out.

SILY: What style of beer do you brew?

JP: I’m actually drinking one right now. I’ve just brewed a very nice stout, about 5.5%. Some nice chocolate, licoricey notes. Chocolate malt and roasted barley. I didn’t actually start brewing that long ago, but...I feel comfortable building my own recipes, putting in different yeasts, etc. There are a couple recipes I go to now that are my own that I can brew very quickly.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

JP: I’m a VHS collector, which is supremely nerdy and very uncool. It’s funny, because in the VHS collecting community, there’s a running joke that hipsters are ruining the hobby because they’re making them too cool. Everybody just wants to buy these rare tapes and take pictures of them just to show off. It’s full of grumpy old guys. It’s such an uncool thing and clunky, redundant bit of technology that any self-respecting hipster probably wouldn’t be caught dead with VHS tapes. Regardless, I’m a big fan, and it lends itself to horror as a genre. They go hand in hand with the way a lot of people discovered horror for the first time, renting movies when they were kids. There’s something about the low-grade, crappy standard definition that lends itself to the grubby, slightly seedy nature of watching an old school horror movie, with scan lines and flickers and dodgy special effects. As a horror fan, it’s a match made in heaven. A lot of the tapes I have, there’s a series of movies colloquially known as the “video nasties.” In the 80′s, they were banned because the conservative government at the time whipped up a big moral panic about violent video tapes corrupting our nation’s youth. Evil Dead, and I Spit On Your Grave. Quite revered movies. Blood Feast. They ended up prosecuted in the UK. Video dealers were raided and their videos confiscated and burned. I’ve got some of the original tapes, and they’re highly sought after now.

This is a very long-winded tangent, but Four by Three is the aspect ratio of VHS. I called it that to loosely describe what the album was about in a nutshell to someone. Mostly from a personal place that follows my journey through the last year of things that have happened to me through the backdrop of the pandemic. The story follows a bit of a timeline, of the pandemic breaking out. One thing that kept me on the sane side at times was shutting myself away and getting very nerdy about this hobby. I had these online friendships to get nerdy about this specific thing, trading tapes and such. It helped take my mind off the absolute shitshow happening around us all. Gave me something to be excited and passionate about. That’s why the record [cover] is a video with tape being loaded into it.

SILY: Do you have any plans to play live?

JP: Not at the moment. I’ve got a lot of friends who have started booking shows already. Doe split up just prior to the pandemic, but if we were still a band, we’d probably be cautiously booking shows. But since Supermilk was never really a band, even though we formed something and had intentions of playing and touring, because it never came to proper fruition, it seems like there’s not as much pressure. It still is my thing, since I call the shots and play all the instruments. If you just want to write music and don’t fancy playing live, there’s not yet the expectation of you that you have to do that. Even though it’s very frustrating we can’t play music yet, and people have been put in a really difficult position and lost their livelihoods, it’s also been refreshing to know that people are able to create music without feeling the need to tour behind a record.

I think it will happen at some point, but I’m not making plans for now. I’m gonna enjoy the record coming out knowing I don’t need to worry too much about playing live for a little bit. When things are even more stable than they are at the moment...I think I want to stand back and watch from afar for a bit, and see what shows look like. Definitely at some point in the next 15 years.

SILY: Anything else next for you in the short or long term?

JP: I’m probably gonna watch some Netflix in a bit. Go to sleep, maybe. Eat a sandwich. Not at the same time.

I’m always writing songs. Whether those go into a pile I’ll use at some point, or whether I feel like I need to record a full-blown demo, I’ll never not be doing that, even if just purely for my own enjoyment and satisfaction. The fact that a few people might hear it is a bonus on top of that.

Continuing to be grateful I get to make music and that I’m alive.

SILY: Anything in particular you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

JP: There are two records in particular that came out this year that I really love that I’m finding any opportunity to plug. There’s a band called Fake Fruit that put out a self-titled record earlier this year. They’re from Oakland. They’re snarky post-punk. Every track on it is an absolute banger, exactly the kind of album I wanted to hear this year. There are bits and pieces of it that remind me of Bodega a bit, and that kind of end of post-punk with wry humor and slight wink-wink-nudge-nudge lyrics. The other record is Mr. Goblin’s Four People in an Elevator and One of Them is the Devil.  

I just started watching the Son of Sam documentary on Netflix [The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness], which is very good. Since I’ve been a small child, I’ve been a true crime, morbid weirdness fan. The only thing I’m annoyed about now is that it’s cool and a commodity. It’s widely accepted and great, but I miss telling people I’m into it and them looking at me in disgust. Gory horror movies still have that edge, where people say, “What’s wrong with you?”

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Track of the Week: Supermilk – Agony Anne

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