Chasing Fridays: RIP Magic, Liam Mc Cay, Dylan Thom Q&A, more

It's been a week since I revamped Chasing Sundays' business model, and I'm thrilled to say that thus far it's been a tremendous success. In case you missed it, I'm now putting 85% of my site's output behind the paywall. The only thing free subscribers will be able to read going forward are my Chasing Down mini-Q&A's and the intros to everything else I publish on the site: weekly criticism, longform interviews, subscriber-only playlists, lists, and much more. I recently began doubling my site's output, so now, in addition to my weekly Chasing Fridays roundup, I'm also publishing a longform piece on Tuesdays. This week, I shared my latest 100-song playlist with 10 accompanying blurbs about 10 standout songs.

I want to profusely thank everyone who's become a paid subscriber over the last couple weeks. Your contributions are working toward making this site the career-sustaining entity that I'd one day like it to be, and I'd encourage any stragglers who value my work to support me for just $5/month. In return, you'll get articles like the one you're reading now, in which I wrote about Sign Crushes Motorist entering his ear phase, the debut album by the London buzz band RIP Magic, djent's increased assimilation into the hardcore underground, and a dope new noise-rock band.

I also reviewed three amazing shows I saw last weekend, and interviewed Dylan Thom, a fast-rising L.A. artist who's really good at making the kind of music I write about on Chasing Sundays. Tap in below.

Chasing Down

Dylan Thomas
aka
Dylan Thom

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

I can't stop listening to the new Dylan Thom album. It's really well-made. It's immediate when it wants to be, but also graceful and restrained in a way that makes each electrified high feel like a well-earned payoff. I thought his album from last year, t, was kind of cheesy and hollow, but here I think the cheesiness – a nicer word would be "earnestness," but I do think some of The Day leans a bit schmaltzy – is endearing. Like, the hook of "Since the Day" could've been plucked from an Of Monsters and Men song. "I want you in my lungs and I need you in my life," Thom chirps boyishly, as if his nose is pointed toward the sky and his hands are clasped behind his back. His pitched-up harmonies circle him like a wreath of bluebirds. It's saccharine, but it works because the production is glitchy. And because you can tell that Thom means what he's singing.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Thom about the new sounds he pulled onto The Day, the idea of lampooning hope, whether the album has a political throughline, collaborating with his partner, his favorite rock songwriters, and more.

Read the full interview below – and the 80+ others in the archive.

The Day is a pretty big jump from t in my opinion. The production, especially, is a lot glitchier, sharper, and more intense. How did you find your songwriting sensibilities/taste evolving between those two projects, and what do you think accounts for the new sounds on here? 

With making The Day, I wanted to push myself to make something more wholly reflective of me. Not in the sentiment of forcing yourself to be more "original"
or whatever just for the sake of it, but not just doing things because you've done them before. I was drawn in a more raw/unfiltered/acoustic direction, and simultaneously in a more synthetic and electronic direction. I really love the sort of rock band-y style of t, but it just didn't feel right to do that again.

"Hope Over Everything" is an interesting song. Are the lyrics kind of a personal reassurance about hope, or are you moreso lampooning the idea of the eternal optimist? ("If you know something about me, I'm always winning," is a funny line lol). 

I really love these sort of ultimatum, yoga-mom bumper sticker slogans, because they hold so many layers of meaning and hypocrisy. I feel the same way about "we don't need the house and the car and the money." I feel like it's both. "Hope Over Everything" is the last song I made for the album, like three days before I submitted it for release. I really wanted to capture that sort of paradoxical feeling in a positive symbolic song.

The first bit of the song was from a demo I never used, which is in the lampooning territory for sure, but the next verse is definitely a very truly felt thing for me. I've had a lot of dread and unexplainable (and explainable) emotions about the world, and in general, which is what I feel like a lot of the album comes from. But at the end of it all, I wanted to write a song about hope, and it's stupid and ignorant to have hope, but it's all you can do. So it's both. 

You sample Obama in "Hope Over Everything" and GW Bush in "SAS," which both feel like juxtapositions to what you're singing about in those songs (GW talking about the "honorable and decent American spirit" in a song about smoking after school and breaking rules lol). Is there a political message – or even a social one – that you're trying to get across with this record? 

I think it is very hard to really "say" anything today given the general structure of the internet. Everything has an equal and opposite reaction and incentive, which can make genuine dialogue next to impossible, especially on social media. That's why anti-war songs or political songs are usually just quickly memed out. That's why everything feels performative. There is no direct message, but my goal was to create something that reflects on my thoughts and feelings, and transmit it into something that can be useful.

I like that Hannah De Vries frequently pops up on your songs to duet with you. Your voices sound good together. Tell me about your creative relationship with her and why you always want to pull her onto your tracks. 

I like it too haha. Hannah is my life partner and creative confidant. We live together and she is a director/photographer. She loves to sing on my songs and I love to have her. If she wants to sing on something she'll usually come out and we'll just do it there or vice versa I will ask her and she'll come do it. We also write songs together sometimes ("Vaseline," "If You're Gonna Kill Me"). She is extremely talented and I love that she is involved with my project. Having someone to grow together with through life is the ultimate cheat code.

Who are your three favorite guitar-based songwriters? Your music has lots of electronic production, but I can also sense that you're a student of indie/rock music as well. 

I love John & Paul's writing so much obviously. I do think John is the coolest Beatle, but Paul's actual output post Beatles is much more compelling. I am also extremely inspired by Phil Elverum of the Microphones/Mount Eerie. Life-long influence, and I know this is technically four or five now, but Blink-182's music also had a major influence on my life. Hearing their self-titled album as an eight-ten-year-old changed my life forever, undoubtedly.

You're about to be on tour for a bit. What music are you preparing to listen to on the road? Any artists/albums in particular that you want to sink into? 

Nothing in particular really. I've been wanting to listen to more punk stuff, and emo things. In general, I can get in the habit of really running a few albums into the ground at a time, so recently I've been trying to listen to more music at once. It helps me feel more like a student than a fan I guess, which can be inspiring. Help me rewrite my brain chemistry a little bit.