INTERVIEW: THE DALLAS COWBOYS
NEW SCHOOL PARTYCORE RAGERS
If there was one thing that permeated the American underground in the 2000s, it was an interest in freaking out over cheap keyboards. Almost overnight, nobody wanted to sound like Fugazi anymore. You had electroclash, of course, but you also had all of the micro-movements that spun out of and around it. There were various strains of DIY karaoke pop; there was chiptune; there was music that straddled the line between pop punk and digital hardcore; there was crunkcore and crabcore and scenecore and all of the other music created by emo kids who broke edge and started listening to synth-pop and rap.
The Dallas Cowboys make manic synth-punk that somehow calls back to all of those niches at the same time. The NYC-by-way-of-LA duo is the first group of 20-somethings I’ve heard reference the noise-pop band Japanther since I myself was in my 20s. Live, they do a karaoke-style throwdown in the tradition of Best Fwends or 3OH!3; back in the day, it would’ve worked at either the Warped Tour or a Todd P warehouse party. I met up with the duo at Grand Morelos diner in Brooklyn. Both of them wore silicone wristbands and attended to Tamagotchis. Great chat!
So you both grew up in SoCal?
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, we grew up like a 10-minute walk from each other basically.
What town?
Kenny Cowboy: Glendale, California.
I love Glendale.
Kenny Cowboy: You love Glendale!
Danny Dallas: You love Glendale!
I lived in LA for a few years. I used to always take the bus to go to the mall in Glendale.
Kenny Cowboy: The Galleria or the Americana?
The Galleria, usually. I don't drive, so it was such a weird experience for me in LA taking buses everywhere.
Kenny Cowboy: Same. I never had a car, which is why I moved to New York, because I was so fed up with it. But I used to take the 92 from Glendale to The Smell and the 94 to the mall and stuff like that. We took acid for the first time at the Glendale Galleria. It was awesome.
Did you go to the Hot Topic?
Kenny Cowboy: We were just standing in the middle of the mall being really happy and then we got kicked out immediately by security. We don't know why—they knew. I don't know how they knew.
At the time, you were paranoid that they knew.
Kenny Cowboy: Dude, they just came right up to us and were just like, “It's time to go.”
Danny Dallas: We were in a big group with people with skateboards and I thought it was because we had skateboards.
Yeah.
Danny Dallas: My memory of it is that we were walking through to go to Burger King.
Kenny Cowboy: Burger King isn’t in the mall.
Danny Dallas: But we had to go from the park through the mall to get to Burger King. And as we were going through, we came in with our skateboards and the security guards were like, “You guys need to leave.”
I'm always curious to know what it's like for So-Cal transplants in New York. For some, the weather alone is too much of a barrier.
Kenny Cowboy: I like living here so much more.
Danny Dallas: I think it's better.
Kenny Cowboy: I liked growing up in LA but I wouldn't want to live there right now. Especially without a car. When I visited New York when I was 18 I just immediately was like, I have to move here. I went back home for a month and then moved. I've only been back a few times.
Were you going to school?
Kenny Cowboy: No, I never went to college or anything, but Danny was going to school in California when I moved here and then transferred.
Danny Dallas: I had a girlfriend move out at the same time. It just made sense. Everything was kind of falling apart in LA.
Kenny Cowboy: And all our bands had broken up.
Danny Dallas: I honestly like normal things about New York more. Weather and convenience.
Kenny Cowboy: In California, you can never really escape the heat.
Danny Dallas: When I was a kid I always thought I would move to Seattle because I really loved rain and Nirvana. And whenever it was overcast and dreary in the mornings on my walk to school, that was the best part of the day.
What was the inspiration behind this band when you started it? You're referencing some 2000s era stuff that I haven’t heard anyone fuck with in a minute.
Kenny Cowboy: Well, we had been making music, just the two of us, for years leading up to this, and the project had changed forms a few times. It had gotten to the point where it was pretty synthy and Auto-Tuney. We were trying to do electronic rock with poppy elements.
Danny Dallas: It was weird. We were growing, you know?
Kenny Cowboy: We just wanted to make one new song where we were both yelling at the same time, which was kind of the Japanther inspo, because in their live videos they're both yelling the same thing the entire show and we thought that was really cool.
Danny Dallas: But also we were getting into, like, mallcore, crabcore.
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, but that was a little after we did the first song.
Danny Dallas: I remember specifically being into I Set My Friends On Fire when we did “Holy shit we’re going to put Matt and Kim out of business.” I really wanted a guitar part that went with the synth.
Kenny Cowboy: Right. And a lot of The Academy Is… at the time, too. But one of our biggest inspo’s for unlocking that sound is Hot Leather.
I interviewed him for the blog, actually.
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah he's the best. He's a legend too. He's huge for us.
Danny Dallas: Hearing Hot Leather for the first time was super, super inspiring.
How did you find Hot Leather?
Kenny Cowboy: I just spent a lot of time on the internet and I knew him because he had that meme page. He was really transitioning out of the meme page and into promoting his music around 2019. So he was just intriguing on the internet, then I listened to that first album and it was insane to me.
And how did you find out about a band like Japanther?
Kenny Cowboy: I was with my girlfriend at Goodwill in Glendale and we were looking at CDs and there were Death Cab CDs and stuff, so someone had dropped off a whole load of cool-style CDs. I was looking at the back of the Japanther CD and it says the second half of the album was recorded at The Smell, which is our local all-ages venue.
Danny Dallas: Have you played at The Smell?
Many, many shows.
Kenny Cowboy: We just freaked out because we were like, “Who is this band that recorded their album at The Smell?” And we put it on in the car and then it became our favorite album.
I played one of my first shows with them, in the winter of 2002. I was 15. Back then, they were almost a digital hardcore band. What did that music sound like to your ears when you first heard it? I'm just curious because I haven't heard anyone under the age of 30 mention them.
Kenny Cowboy: Which is so ironic because they have that album that's called Don't Trust Anyone Over 30.
That was a collaboration with that artist Dan Graham.
Kenny Cowboy: Right, right. Legend.
Japanther were a part of this weird moment in 2000s New York when the art world was interested in bands.
Kenny Cowboy: One thing that also seemed really inspiring about Japanther was how performance arty they were. But I think it just sounded like the resolve to all this built-up tension of living in the LA music scene of the 2010s, which was really surf punky but also bad, and sounded like it was trying to get at something cool but never quite did. And then hearing Japanther the fucking month before I moved to New York, right when I was putting LA behind me, and hearing how that stuff was done well like 20 years ago and it just got fucked up to the point where I became frustrated with it. It was cool to hear where it came from organically—how it could have been cool.
Danny Dallas: To me it was just something that was a lo-fi, cooler version of that genre done ten years earlier.
At the time, stuff like Japanther and Best Fwends was totally separate from the kind of crabcore, scene stuff. There wasn't an overlap. A band like Best Fwends was more tied to a more credible underground rock tradition, for lack of better words, and the scene shit was more on a Warped Tour, Hot Topic tip.
Kenny Cowboy: Right, right.
Danny Dallas: I like both.
If kids in the DIY scene referenced the crabcore stuff, it was kind of ironic or something. But now that time has passed, it all sounds pretty similar.
Kenny Cowboy: It’s all genuine, angsty shit. It's just all frustrated sounding stuff. Except I guess Japanther reflects a little bit more of a, like, young, we're gonna have a good time, kind of hipster party fun.
Danny Dallas: It’s just more raw and punk, whereas the Warped Tour shit was extremely polished. Super radio ready pop vibe. But also blatantly weird and kind of, I don't know, jarring. But also Panic! at the Disco. Getting obsessed with A Fever You Can't Sweat Out around that time.
Kenny Cowboy: At first we were trying to do a pop punk band. We were trying to do a band that was really like Panic!—our main plan was we were going to do this pretty simple rock, pop punk band. We made the first Cowboys song as a fun side project to distract ourselves, and then we decided to make a different name for it, and then it just took over our focus and we haven't done the pop punk band since, really.
Do you put some of those ideas from that other band into The Dallas Cowboys now?
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, definitely. Now all the other pent up influences we have we can just shove in there and they kind of fit.
Danny Dallas: We'll perform other songs from that other band.
And the live show is full karaoke style?
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, it's full karaoke style. It's just the laptop plugged into the aux. We have Auto-Tune pedals. But we do perform with a full band—like every 12 shows, we get the time to do a full band show. Which is fun. But it just takes a lot of coordination.
You toured Europe?
Danny Dallas: Technically we went over twice. It's not like anything crazy.
Kenny Cowboy: No, yeah, we just did it. We did it Vaguess style. He's cool. He's an LA DIY legend. He would always go over to Europe and just do his own tours, it was really inspiring.
Danny Dallas: I am really proud of the second time we went because it was a bigger band who asked us to go.
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, Mitsubishi Suicide took us on the second one we went on and that was the most fun time ever because they're an insane band. I'm proud of both because the first one we did ourselves. Dude, I'm gonna hit this joint like two times before I eat just because my stomach is fucked up. If anyone wants to hit it?
Danny Dallas: I'll hit it.
Kenny Cowboy: I'll be right back.
Kenny Cowboy and Danny Dallas leave the restaurant to smoke a joint and return roughly ten minutes later.
How was it?
Kenny Cowboy: So good.
What's better: New York or LA dispensaries?
Danny Dallas: Is that even a question?
Kenny Cowboy: LA all the way dude. In New York, you can buy weed, it's everywhere, it's nice, and you don't need an ID. But all the weed is the same. And they're all priced kind of the same. In California, you walk into the Walmart of weed store and they just have all these different brands. Also you know where everything is sourced. In New York, I started to get really paranoid because my friend said he worked for a weed store that got their weed from a Chinatown drug ring and would spray it with all this stuff to get it to weigh more so they would sell it for more. And I just got scared.
The whole thing feels crazy. I do like the way that a lot of these stores are decorated, though. The Rick and Morty graffiti murals, it's pretty sick.
Kenny Cowboy: The LA ones are so boring.
Danny Dallas: Yeah, they look too clinical.
Kenny Cowboy My friend made a point that soon people are going to be really nostalgic for the 2020s era weed stores like Smokers Hub and like Zaza Land and stuff like that.
It's funny, I've been thinking the exact same thing. Somebody needs to make a coffee table book.
Kenny Cowboy: Because they're all getting shut down already and it's only been like two years and we're going to take it for granted.
No, it does almost feel like we're living in the past already. This is so clearly a temporary part of this process.
Kenny Cowboy: It’s like when hyperpop came out and you're like, Okay this is really cool right now, but this is going to look crazy next year already, you know.
It feels like hyperpop opened up the door for people to understand this 2000s style synth-punk again.
Danny Dallas: I think so.
Kenny Cowboy: I think probably.
Danny Dallas: It was really important for me. I honestly was very hesitant about Auto-Tune until I got into hyperpop. Just because I was a fucking kid, you know, who was just like a punk purist and pretentious. But yeah, hyperpop, specifically 100 Gecs, got me into electronic music.
Kenny Cowboy: I feel like we still had hang-ups about pop music even—before hyperpop.
Danny Dallas: Yeah.
Kenny Cowboy: Hyperpop just makes the pop melodies so appealing and then you can trace it back to regular pop and then all of a sudden you like regular pop.
You’re in another band, too, right?
Danny Dallas: Our other band is this indie emo project called Branching Out, based around this songwriter, Evan Wasser, very talented guy. He just writes really good songs. We write our own parts and then help everything kind of fit together.
Kenny Cowboy: That's where we get our fill of a more traditional style of rock band, which is what we grew up doing, getting to actually play instruments. Because the Cowboys we started so we wouldn't have to play any instruments.
Is there a crossover between the two scenes you play in?
Kenny Cowboy: We play the same shows sometimes.
So you will play emo shows as The Dallas Cowboys?
Yeah, we like to play emo shows. We play the screamo scene a lot. We like to play with hyperpop artists, emo trap artists, hardcore DJs. That's kind of the scene we've been most accepted and well received in.
The newest single seems like you're leaning heavier on the other side of the 2000s synth-punk coin.
Kenny Cowboy: We've always been trying to make the same music, but our limitations of production have just lessened slightly. When we were first making stuff, we only knew three different presets on Logic and only really knew how to do that.
Danny Dallas: And our sound has kind of changed, too. We would do both our voices on every vocal line, and I would have clean vocals, usually. Now, it's like we usually split every line and we always have everything Auto-Tuned to heaven and hell.
Kenny Cowboy: I think we're trying to push the danciness and the breakdown side of it, both more extreme.
Yeah.
Kenny Cowboy: To just create something intense.
When you play, do kids mosh?
At the right show, but honestly, kids almost never mosh. The best case scenario is a dance pit and people jumping up and down, sort of. That's when we have a really hype crowd. But honestly, kids almost never ever mosh to any of our songs.
Even at a screamo show or something?
Danny Dallas: We played a screamo show recently in Brooklyn with Silver Dollar, I think there were some kids hardcore dancing, for a sec. But that was kind of rare.
Kenny Cowboy: But it's true that our first album has one breakdown and our new songs all almost have breakdowns. So maybe it'll change slowly. I don't know.
I've read somewhere that you're working on a concept album.
Kenny Cowboy: We are, but we're behind on it.
Danny Dallas: It's more of a concept right now.
That's when it's at its best, when it's the pure concept. Then it all goes to shit when you try to execute it.
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, that’s what we're scared of. It's a little intimidating. Everyone we love writes concept albums, but we always write lyrics without even really knowing what they mean until later.
What's the concept?
Danny Dallas: Basically, we don't have a story. We only have these characters. We have to figure out the characters and create motives and try to make a story.
Kenny Cowboy: Yeah, we just want to change the process a little bit so that all our songs are more cohesive and we're writing together.
Danny Dallas: Yeah, every line is written together.
Kenny Cowboy: We've been doing exercises for that. If we have a new show or a new set of shows, we'll record new live intros that try to break the fourth wall with the lyrics and describe the situation that we're setting up. Because then we can just practice writing narratives together.
The album seems like something that could be performed live.
Danny Dallas: Yeah, I think it could, because it's gonna be the same setup. It's just, we have to make everything sound like a song and not sound like an ambitious attempt at a story. It still has to be listenable.
Kenny Cowboy: When we have that album come out, we wanna start always having a full band with us, we want our phase two to be with the full band, less karaoke, just to have a really fleshed out performance aspect. We used to want to have dancers on stage and we had all these ideas for the show. We would hire actors to play our parents and then they would be in character all night, but we just didn't end up actually having enough money to do any of those things. Except we hired a mime one time.
Sick.
Kenny Cowboy: She started doing all this sexual stuff that we didn't ask her to do. She was like, “What kind of mime stuff do you want?” We wanted, like, a traditional French mime, and she came dressed all French mime. We were like, this is gonna be awesome. She's in character all night. She's not talking to anyone. And then we start doing the song, she started air humping, twerking, and simulating blowjobs.
Danny Dallas: The blowjobs part I forgot about.
That's why you need to give specific instructions to a mime.
Kenny Cowboy: I thought she'd just be, like, locked in a box.
Danny Dallas: You know, classic mime things. I don't know.