INTERVIEW: MSPAINT

HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI TO THE WORLD

My first exposure to the Hattiesburg, Mississippi band MSPAINT happened deep into the pandemic while surfing YouTube and possibly eating a sugary snack of some sort. In the cable access-like video I stumbled upon, which was uploaded by Hampton Martin of the great Hattiesburg band Judy And The Jerks, MSPAINT performs in lab coats and hazmat suits, their drum and bass and synth rock shmacking like some mutant mixture of The Screamers and “Sabotage”-era Beasties. All that’s missing from the clip is a vat of radioactive waste and maybe a Ninja Turtle or two.

In the time between then and now, MSPAINT’s done a lot. Despite not necessarily being a hardcore band by any strict definition of the term, they have infiltrated the contemporary American hardcore world. They’ve gone on tour with Scowl and Militarie Gun. They’ve put out music on the Denver-based label Convulse Records. They’ve helped to spread the legend of their hometown—long one of the best small-town punk scenes in America—and they’ve done so in a way that puts them to the left of all those jersey-clad bands that treat Set It Off by Madball like scripture.

Produced by Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steed of Show Me The Body, the band’s new EP, No Separation, is a crispy continuation of the band’s mission. I could hear it making sense at a punk warehouse, a festival field in Europe, or the inside of a suburban Hot Topic. And that’s high praise. I recently connected virtual-style with MSPAINT lead singer DeeDee. He had just come from helping a friend in town build a fence. We talked about being “the weird band on the hardcore bill,” trying to write mosh parts, and a bunch of other shit. For John’s Music Blog.

I've always been interested in bands that serve as outliers within their scene or subculture. I'm curious how you feel like your band fits into the contemporary hardcore world, because I think you're playing that role right now to an extent.

I always think back to conversations we have with other bands. One that I always think of is Soul Glo—us touring together makes sense because we're both bands that don't sound like bands that we get lumped in with. Everybody in MSPAINT, at least in our small community, we've always been in the bands that are the weird bands in town. That's what I'm personally used to, kind of being not punk enough for the punk people, not hardcore enough for hardcore people. And I don't do enough drugs for the psychedelic people, you know, whatever it is. 

The band occupies that hardcore space probably partly because of the moment that bands like Turnstile and Knocked Loose and Scowl have had—bringing that to the popular lexicon as a way to describe things. I feel like we're more influenced by hardcore now, with the newer stuff in a weird way, than we were on the first album. I had never actively been to a hardcore show in my life until we started doing this band, so getting lumped into the community for me is awesome, but it's also a thing where I kind of think of it like, if fucking Krautrock was popping off, would we just be lumped into Krautrock? 

If you would have told me we would have been playing shows with hardcore bands, I would have been like, awesome, but I would not have known that was something our band could be identified with. But I fuck with it. I really do. It is cool to be the weird band where we can play any show we want, and it makes sense to somebody, you know? 

Has your songwriting explicitly changed to suit the context, the dancers, the hardcore community? Does that inspire you, just the experiences you’ve had playing that circuit?

Nick’s the one who crafts a lot of the songs at the genesis of them, and a lot of our talks were not from a band-to-audience perspective, but from a band-to-band perspective—we’re writing these songs being like, What if we did this fucking heavy-ass part at the end like so and so did? We've seen the fucking breakdown hit 150 times. Now we know exactly how that's supposed to happen and what that sounds like. You just kind of pick up on stuff that you like and implement into your music. 

This is the first time we've ever all made music being like, People are going to listen to this. That can't be the only reason why we make a change, but we would think about it. Being exposed to hardcore and heavy music obviously changed some of our perspectives about how we approach parts of a song. I don't know if we could just play the straight-up hardcore riffs and people would mosh to it. I think it would still be too weird in some way. People will mosh to any part of our songs. Like, it'll be the chillest part in our heads and that'll be the craziest part of the night.

Have there been any particularly confusing bills you played over the past few years where you felt like a fish out of water? 

We played a show with Twitching Tongues in Los Angeles. That show was like an arms crossed, people looking at us—I always say that they could’ve walked away, they didn’t have to stand there and listen, but they were weirded out enough to have to watch it. It will usually be fests. We played a fest in France and [death metal band] Sanguisugabogg played after us. That's a pretty big stretch. Usually those shows are when you hang out with the other bands the hardest. When it’s a weird show and we're out of place, everybody kind of recognizes that, and it's like, this is just goofy. 

It feels like in Europe, they will often pair some American bands together that don’t have that much in common.

I really don't think they give a shit about stuff like that over there, they just like music.

So you've had good experiences playing in Europe. 

Yeah, we always have fun out there. I feel like, too, we're so excited about it that shit could be going wrong around us and we wouldn't know, people could be weird and we wouldn't be paying attention to it because we're just stoked to be in France or wherever the fuck we're at. That's usually the vibe over there, us being from Mississippi and being a weird band—at least over in Europe and the UK, it always seems like people are just stoked that we made it that far. From the time that we started the band, people were hitting us up to come play out of the country, even over Covid. So it was always something that we were like, We can maybe actually go do that. That would be fun. 

We went three times last year to the UK and Europe. They're just as confused over there as they are here. You know, they don't get it anymore or understand anything on a different level. They say the same exact things, just in a different accent. People are shocked there's not a guitar. They're always like, you're a fat dude who jumps. That's crazy. It’s always the same type of things that are just sort of funny. You can feel people having a hard time explaining the things they like about it sometimes. 

I have a lot of reference points for your band that may or may not actually be an influence of yours, but they still come to mind. If you're a kid involved in hardcore, it might feel a little alien. I remember being young, seeing a noise band at a hardcore show for the first time—I had to figure out what that was all about.

I think that's a big part of it. At hardcore shows, too, there’s definitely been times where we've played a set and definitely been the first not-hardcore band these kids have seen. In our scene, the only type of bands that came through town were, like, some noise band that just hit us up randomly. So we never really got to see a lot of the flagship hardcore or punk or whatever type of bands. You just get the people that are on the underground touring shit. I can say the first probably 30 or 40 bands that I saw when I moved to Hattiesburg were all some weird band that was some from small fucking place. That kind of became the normal for me. 

It got weirder for me in like 2016 or 2017 when a lot more punk bands started coming through here. It was kind of like all the same band, you know, there's this concentrated flow of bands that are coming through here to play with other bands from here and they are all on this similar inspiration, with similar influences. That was my first time realizing that you can sort of get stuck. Then once my homies started going to school and getting into jazz, they were getting really scholastic with the music, and the music was getting weirder for them, with what they listened to and what they were into, but their approach became a little bit more sterile. They put up the blinders. Like, what's a breakdown? Why would you even know what that is? 

Playing to a lot of kids in hardcore is cool, but now it feels like younger kids that are coming into music communities are doing it as a music enjoyer—people that sat around for two years trapped in their house just listening to shit and trying to find out shit about bands. People are definitely more open to our band being sort of grouped in with shit. Some old heads in hardcore that I've met, they're like, You know, I thought I was gonna hate y'all's band, but it's cool. I don't think there's nothing wrong with that either, I'm that way in some ways with music, but it’s interesting when you're that band on the show. People are just sitting there waiting for the part to happen and you're like, it’s not happening, it's not coming up anytime soon.

Ten percent of those kids with their arms folded, they're just processing. 

Yeah.

And maybe they will get inspired by it.

Exactly. And our scene is not a scene of fucking high-flying moshers or nothing. It’s kids that stand there and listen to your band, they nod their head and they just watch you play. I've never taken that as a slight, but we've definitely finished shows and people have been like, That crowd, what was up with that? And I was like, Our band's fucking weird. That's what's up with that. It’s not them. It's not like there's a problem with all these people that fucking, you know—they’re not break dancing to our weird-ass music. I enjoy that feeling of, like, we're in the fucking lion’s den right now.

We've played songs at shows and people just haven't clapped. They've been looking at us like, Was that a fucking song? Are you done? And then on the other side of that spectrum are people with their arms folded, and then when we play our last song, they're fucking screaming and we're selling merch and shit. Maybe some people think we're just put on by people or whatever, but when they actually see us play they're like, Oh, this band is good. They're good at the live show. 

If you have an energetic live show, even if it’s a little leftfield, you can get across. That’s ideally the great equalizer in punk music.

I've seen bands play in town that are like a fucking mathy, indie band, and they'll be fucking putting their ass into it and people get into it. If you're lit, everybody else is lit, is kind of how I think about it. It just depends on what you need out of the show. We have shows where people are freaking out the whole time and we have shows where people just sit there and watch. To me, it’s the same interaction. If you're comfortable with yourself, then there's really no interaction or validation that's going to change what it actually is.

If we just handed it off our instruments to other people, they wouldn't know what to fucking do. The synth or the bass just sounds crazy, and there's little attachments on the drums and shit. It’s so hard to implement musical styles into the band in a sense. It wasn't so thought out to be like, Oh, let's have a breakdown-ish part at the end of this. It’s more like, we need a heavy moment. We've never thought about trying to just directly pull from something, it just kind of happens that way.

The thing that we talk about missing is being able to just pick up a guitar and be like, That's the note. There's no other mystery to solve here. There's no knob we got to turn on the synth. It honestly would be a lot easier if we could just sort of be like, We've been playing these hardcore shows. Let's just put a breakdown in a song. But it's so fucking convoluted and there's so many more layers to how we have to write the music than that. I remember we were talking with Julian [Cashwan Pratt of Show Me The Body] when we were writing. We said, “We feel like both of these songs have a breakdown at the end.” And Julian was just like, “No one's ever gonna think that y'all have too many breakdowns.”

That’s funny.

Because you don't even have a real one in here. It's just y'all's version of one, type shit. That was a moment where we were like, he's right. You can't unweird the band. This is the simplest form of the band, that's kind of where it is now. In terms of gear, we could have so much more shit to worry about. We're just trying to make it as simple as possible, it just never really turns out that way, and that's the same thing with writing. It always takes us on this journey that’s either fun or sometimes everybody gets a little like, man, fuck this song.

The sound palette serves as a funnel, so no matter what you try to write, a tough hardcore song, whatever, it's gonna go through that funnel and it's gonna come out totally different. 

Even when we'll try to tone it back and write a chiller song, like some post-punk shit, we're just like, how? We sit down to do it and then we push one note and it’s the worst fucking sound you've ever heard in your life. And we're like, That sounds kind of cool, though. What if we use that instead? That's kind of what always happens. Nick’s brought this whole song, this idea is great, and then by the time it gets filtered through everybody, it's so different. 

They'll show me a song sometimes and I'm like, I don't know how to do vocals to this. Not playing an instrument in the band has been an interesting thing because I've always played instruments in every other band I've been in. It's just so weird to not only be outside but just as confused as anybody else. I'm like, Y'all, I fought for my life to make this a song that we could all listen to together. That's where the frustration of it comes in for us, sometimes, where it seems like the possibilities are endless, but also we're stuck in the parameters of the band that we've created. There's times where Nick is just like, If we just did this as a guitar part it would be so much better. And I'm like, We should have started a fucking guitar band then, because we don't have that! We have to stay true to the form of it. 

No Separation is out now. MSPAINT on Instagram