It’s a battle. It’s so easy to succumb to the dread. I think the greatest weapon against that is creation and art. It’s like finding the light in the dread. For me, the only time I feel truly alive is when I’m making something, creating sound and sharing that with people. That’s my lightsaber.
I like to describe the music of LA punk rockers Frankie and the Witch Fingers as “caffeine zoomies”, something you listen to when your body goes brrrrrrrrrr and you can’t sit still.
Josh: That kind of perfectly describes how we were all feeling while we were recording this last album. Maryam Qudus, who helped produce the record, constantly just had a pot of coffee and was always saying, “there’s coffee ready”. I know, by certain ends of the day, I was tweaking and shaking.
The quintet (Dylan on vocals/guitar, Josh on guitar/vocals, Pickle on bass/synth, Jon on synth/guitar and Nick on drums) have had a fun tour, playing bigger shows than ever across Europe, from Desertfest Berlin and party-central Biarritz, France, to Wide Awake London and 4 headline shows across the UK, including Brighton, where we spoke. Read our review of the gig HERE.
Dylan: It was amazing. [Wide Awake] was a little hectic because it was one of those throw-and-goes, but the crowd made it. It didn’t even matter how difficult it was, because it was so fun. We saw this 14 year old guy who was bummed because we weren’t playing all ages shows, but then he made it to Wide Awake. So we got to play for younger folks and older folks.
Their latest album Trash Classic is out now, from The Reverberation Appreciation Society and Greenway Records, with four singles trickled out over the last few months.
Dylan: We’re stoked. It took a while to make another record, a year to kinda finish it, so we’re really excited to finally be able to play it live and share it with people.
Josh: It’s always a fun challenge to translate the songs from the studio to the stage. Certain things work, certain things you tweak a little bit. In some ways, you simplify them because some songs have, you know, three layers of synths and even more guitars. So we choose the most imperative instruments and go with that.
Even when stripped down, their live performances are electric. Their latest release for Record Store Day was a collaboration with beloved Seattle-based listener-powered radio station KEXP. They were hosted for a live set in the KEXP Gathering Space to a packed crowd and the result was a set to behold, captured and released on vinyl.
Josh: We love Cheryl and Jim and everyone at KEXP. It’s always a total treat to be there.
Nick: Seattle feels like a second home. We have a lot of friends there, a big audience. There’s a record shop called Easy Street, and we did an album release party there when Data Doom came out.
London, New York and LA have also played host to Trash Classic’s release parties and when hearing the new singles live, you can’t help but notice how much more dystopian they feel compared to those off their previous album, Data Doom.
Pickle: Musically, there’s a lot more synths on this album than there has ever been on a Frankie record. So technology is integral. We had robots play for us.
Dylan: It was funny because Data Doom, it was a lot more optimistic and this one maybe isn’t. But I feel like that wasn’t the intention, to write about the things that are happening so much. [While] the last record was almost like a concept album, for this one, the intention was kind of no concept. So it accidentally happened, because of the way things are now.
This more heavy synth presence is also how the quartet became a quintet last year, when Jon officially joined the band.
Jon: We met I think in 2019. I was playing in a band in Kentucky, where I’m from, called Sweet Country Meat Boys, and Frankie was coming through. We had the pleasure of opening for them and just really hit it off with everybody after the show. I was already planning to move to LA, and then, fast forward a year and a half later, Josh hit me up and asked if I wanted to come jam, with no real intention other than just hanging out and playing music. Then Shaughnessy, the drummer at the time, was leaving the band, and I stepped in to fill in for a tour on drums. And we just naturally got into a friendship. So when, recently, they needed someone on synth duty, I was available. It sounded like an amazing opportunity to wear a different hat. I’m not necessarily a synth-forward player, but it’s been a nice change of pace to be able to jump in. It’s been extremely fun. I’ve loved it so far.
The record’s incorporation of synths, more industrial guitar and generally trashier sounds, reflect their ambivalent stance on how quickly tech has changed since 2023 and Data Doom.
Nick: For me, it’s just crazy to see how much progress has been made in just the last six months with AI. Three years ago, it was this new thing that we didn’t really think was gonna get so integrated into our society, at least I didn’t think it was, but now so many people are losing jobs and relying on this technology for their day-to-day. You kinda just have to accept it rather than fear it.
Dylan: I think it’s a bit of both. It’s crazy to see how exponential [the growth] is going to be. The unknown is always scary. But there’s a bit of acceptance too, because it’s here.
GenerativeAI especially has become the latest symbol of capitalist greed, feeding off of copyrighted material created by real artists, so I was very curious to hear how the band felt about it.
Pickle: I’m so glad to talk about this because I have a lot of thoughts about it. I am an artist and we are musical artists together. And I think for me personally, AI generative art will not take the place of actual artists. I think, in fact, it’ll make real art made by humans more valuable.
If you can see mistakes, if you can see the painter’s hand or hear the breath of someone breathing as they’re performing, all of those little mistakes and human elements are gonna be more valued and people are gonna search those out.
And when you have a painting on your wall that you can tell has been painted by hand versus a piece-of-shit computer-generated one, you’re gonna be able to tell. I know it’s getting hard to see and I know people feel it’s stealing our art and it’s taking from artists, but I I think the same thing happened with the invention of the camera. People thought, no one’s gonna buy realistic paintings anymore because you can capture it on film, but in fact, it made paintings even more sought after and the value of art went up. So I think that’s gonna happen again. I don’t know the future, but that’s my optimistic viewpoint of it.
Optimism much needed. In their third single off the new album, Dead Silence, the chorus goes “Dismantling warhead / Balancing existential dread / A new story instead / Considering everything is dead”. The second single, Total Reset, captures a snapshot into a robot apocalypse, but it wasn’t how the song started.
Nick: We wrote the music for that song almost two years ago, and I don’t know how much you expanded on the lyrics and the themes when you actually first started singing it.
Dylan: Usually, what happens is I am just collecting ideas and things. And when we all create a song together, there’s some sort of gibberish that happens. Usually, one of the ideas fits in with all the gibberish and then we build it from there. But it seems like I’m just always talking about technology.
The consequences of unmitigated growth are playfully and painfully explored in Economy. The music video follows the band members as characters going to extreme lengths to make a dollar in a world where “the market is God”: Pickle as a beauty guru promoting toxic products, Josh as an angry finance bro, Jon as a man desperate enough to sell his own teeth, and Nick, in a hospital robe, going to the ATM to exchange blood for money.
Jon: Filming for it was really fun. My girlfriend Jenny Baumert did all the camera work. It was very DYI, a single day, all hands on deck, great ideas flowing. [On the day of filming] everything was prepared. We wanted to make the most of the limited time we had, so we went in very regimented.
It was a harder shoot for some.
Nick: Don’t get me wrong, everyone absolutely killed it. I’m a pretty extroverted person, but having my ass out on Hollywood Boulevard for twenty minutes that felt like an hour was pretty grueling. I was ready to get in the car and get the hell out of there.
Dylan: Jenny, the director, works on super professional stuff, so it was really kind of her to do this DIY thing. And so we were in the van driving around, because this is kind of illegal (it is illegal). Jenny was walking backwards down Hollywood Boulevard with all these people around, Jon’s spotting her to make sure she doesn’t knock anyone out and Nick is just stumbling around with his ass out and an IV bag. Pickle’s the getaway driver. I’m safe in the van watching the screen, just loving everything
Josh: “That’s a good shot”.
Dylan: And then as soon as it would get weird (at one point we even saw some cops), Nick would have to jump in the van and then we’d drive off. So it was pretty adventurous.
This sort of guerrilla filming fit the themes of Economy perfectly: a subversive dialogue between capitalist apologists and the horrified onlookers. The opening verse goes “This has got to be the best economy”.
Dylan: There are people in the world who think that. Which is hilarious, that someone is sitting right now going, “Oh, this is pretty good”. It’s crazy that no one sees that there needs to be progress; they’re just happy with the way things are.
How does late-stage capitalism feel for them now?
Dylan: It’s so bleak. I think we just have to hold on to all this gratitude, at the end of the day, the fact that we’re over here and we’re doing what we love to do. But it is really hard and disheartening to see what’s going on in our country and almost being, like, complicit with that, even though it’s not really our choice. That’s just kinda how the thing’s built, which I guess is what the record is about in a way – at least for me, it was a little bit of “we’re all in this trash together”.
Nick: Everything’s trash.
Dylan: Everything is trash. But America is especially trashy at the moment.
Many thanks to Frankie and the Witch Fingers for their time and to Harry Portnof and Carlo Miles for the invitation. You can hear our whole conversation over on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bonus question: what’s the biggest difference between US and EU shows?
Dylan: The age range. You go to a show in LA, you’re getting people from 20 to 40. But here you see kids and you see elderly people and they’re all having just as much fun all together. It’s awesome.
Nick: I met this kid and his dad at Desertfest in Berlin; the kid was like 10 years old. They recognised me from playing drums in the band, and after our set, I made sure to have a stick ready for him and a set list. You don’t get that a lot in the States, believe it or not, because a lot of times we have to play 21 and up shows, and I feel like most things are all ages here.