Interview
Interview
Stage Times: Cults
Ahead of the release of new album To The Ghosts, the New York duo look back on their best, weirdest and worst performances
For a band whose name summons imagery of the murky and ominous, New York duo Cults have always created a space of bright and blissful nostalgia that they have built on from their beginnings a decade and a half ago. To The Ghosts, Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion’s fifth studio album, released today, sounds equally dark, and yet tracks such as ‘Crybaby’, ‘Onions’ and ‘Honey’ are heady, expansive and euphoric, recalling the tropes of their beloved 2011 debut.
Written during the pandemic when there was a dearth of inspiration, the pair were forced to look back in time, finding earlier versions of themselves as their muse. “That’s why the album’s called To The Ghosts,” explains Brian in the days leading up its release. “It’s this reference to a past that doesn’t really exist in our day-to-day anymore. We’ve been a band for 14 years now. Take a breath and look back, you know? We’ve always tried to metamorphosize so much with different records. And with this one, we’re like, what if we just write a Cults song? Almost looking at ourselves like a foreign entity. That was really freeing. It’s exciting to see our moment in music almost come around and be new again with a lot of young people.”
Another move that will help – to put it lightly – connect with new, younger fans is a recent remix of Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’. That kind of co-sign would be enough pressure for anyone, so it’s remarkable that it’s Cult’s first ever remix. “Our manager was like, ‘Let’s get this done really fast,’ so I think our manager pressuring us with time got rid of the pressure of making the track. We didn’t have much time to second guess anything.”
Cults return to the UK in November for a string headline shows, and as they enjoy the release of their awaited fifth record, Madeline and Brian reflect on their best, weirdest and worst performances over the last 14 years.
The gig that made you want to play music
Madeline: I think for me the first gig that made me realise it was something I could even do was The Donnas, a girl group from the early 2000s. My parents took me to see them and I remember I ran into the drummer in the bathroom, and I was like, whoa, this is crazy. I had never seen a group of women on stage before, so that kind of inspired me to pick up the bass and start playing.
Brian: I think the gig that really changed everything for me… Well, first off, it was probably the Warped Tour. But second off, slightly later when I actually started playing music, The Cure did a tour called Curiosa Festival. They did a traveling festival that came to San Diego, they took over the fairgrounds and it was them and bands they had selected like Mogwai, Cursive, The Rapture and Interpol. It was kind of spaced out so everyone was playing one at a time on different stages, and just seeing that whole day of music, seeing these amazing worlds that all these people have created. I was like, I want it and I want to be a part of it.
The first
Madeline: We had put out these songs and we didn’t put any photos out with them. We didn’t think anybody would ever listen to them. But people started contacting us. Gorilla vs. Bear and Pitchfork had picked up the music and everybody was like, “Who is this band? They’re so mysterious, what’s going on here?” And really, we just hadn’t prepared – we didn’t know anybody was going to care about what we were doing, and we definitely had not prepared a live show. Everybody was emailing us like, hey, we want to come out and see you play, and we had no idea what we were doing. I had never played a show, definitely not singing in front of an audience ever before. We got a lawyer, that was the first thing we did, and she was like, “You have to play gig”. I don’t remember who exactly suggested it, but they were like, “Why don’t you just play a secret show?” So we booked a tiny punk rock Tiki Bar in the East Village. They have a little back room where they have shows and it’s mostly punk bands. We booked a show on a late night on a Sunday and they billed it as Lady MJ and The High Water Bong Boys. Our lawyer and her mom and my mom came and they sat in really uncomfortable chairs. I don’t know why they were sitting but…
Brian: It was definitely a talent show vibe.
Madeline: Yeah, we made it through, I’m sure it was not good. But I think at that point we were already booked for Hammerstein Ballroom which is one of the most massive venues in New York with Goldfrapp maybe three days later.
Just off the back of the 7″?
Brian: Yeah, it was a crazy time. I don’t think that just happens anymore. That was just such a moment. There was such an appetite at that time for new music, you know? Now we take it for granted. There was no such thing as Spotify, so finding something new felt really exciting and we kind of got wrapped up in this blog explosion, kind of thing. Maybe we were one of the last people that had that experience and, yeah, it was crazy. Back then, knowing about something new was like its own kind of currency. People were like, “You have to hear this thing!”. And sharing that was a gift of friendship and status, and now it feels like we have everything at our fingertips. We’re just like, oh my gosh, more things to consume.
The biggest
Madeline: After the first record the shows were pretty modest – we toughed it out through the tiny clubs, couch sleeping, but we toured a lot for three years. By the time our second record came out, I think we moved up a venue size at that point. And I think that is also when we ended up playing our biggest show that we didn’t expect to be big at all. It was in LA on the Santa Monica Pier, they did a series in the summer of free shows, and I didn’t even realise how many people were there when we were playing until we got off. The next day the promoters contacted us and they were like “We’ve never seen anything like this,” because it was people all down the pier.
Bryan: They had screens on the beach, so we couldn’t really see the beach, it must have been like 20,000 people or something. But I remember when we got off stage, I ran to meet up with some friends and I got in their car and we left to go to a club night or something, and we were stuck in traffic for like an hour. One of my friends turned around and looked at me and he’s like, “This is your fault.” Being stuck in your own traffic jam, that was a real trip.
Madeline: It’s funny, because you tour and you have your sound people and everything, and then it gets kind of hard afterwards because you do these like fly-outs or one-offs and your sound person is probably out with another band by that time, so you just have to get somebody who’s not used to doing your sound and I remember he was just happy about his job, or the job that he had done for that show.
The best
Madeline: I think the show that I felt pure joy doing was the first show after Covid. We just really didn’t know if it was ever going to happen again. We put out a record, we weren’t able to tour on it, so it just felt like kind of like, okay, well, alright, that’s done. And then we ended up getting booked for this festival in Atlanta called Shaky Knees. I felt like crying, actually. I mean, there’s a lot of gigs that I felt like crying at, but I was not nervous anymore, I was just grateful to have the opportunity to be doing that. I’ve always been really nervous about playing shows, and at that gig I think a lot of my anxieties about playing went away.
I still get a little nervous, but not like before. I would throw up before every show. Like I was like, very, very nervous. But now I’m like, OK, we’re here, we’re doing this, people are coming to see us. It’s not our first time, they know our sound. I feel more confident now, I guess.
The worst
The worst gig we’ve ever done was also in 2014, I think. We got a really last minute offer, I think it was like two days before, to play at Sundance Film Festival. And we were like, “We have to go. This is so cool!”. We’d always wanted to go to Sundance. But we contacted our drummer and he couldn’t make it. We didn’t have time to get another drummer, we’d always been curious, so we decided to try doing the show with programmed drums on a drum machine. We programmed them, we rehearsed at our rehearsal space, everything was amazing. It went really well. And then we got to the show… It was in a store, I guess they took over a house or something. It was something. It wasn’t a venue. There were a lot of celebrities there and the drums didn’t work at all.
Bryan: It was a combination of missing the cues and coming in at the wrong point, and because they were recorded drums, they just didn’t adjust to us. And then there was some glitching, and I remember having to restart a bunch of songs and spending minutes on the ground in front of my computer with dead air. And then the funniest part is I kept explaining to the crowd of celebrities what was going on, but we had in-ears in, so I could hear myself telling all these jokes and nobody was laughing and I’m like, what’s going on? This is a tough crowd. We’re really blowing this. Then after we finished our sound guy came up to us and he was like, “I could never get your microphone on.” I was just whispering to noone. It was crazy, man. Yeah, so Ethan Hawke, we’re sorry, we can do better.
Oh no, he’s the last celebrity you’d want to disappoint…
Madeline: He was like “That was so great. I loved that.” And we took a picture and it ended up being on line. There’s a picture of me and Ethan Hawke at that show if you Google it.
The weirdest
Brian: Our weirdest is that we have played more than a handful of malls. I don’t know why they give us those offers. I mean, we’re always down to play, you know, we’ve played in the food court of a mall in Boston, and our green room was an empty store.
We were thinking 80s malls like Tiffany, you know? Like, maybe it’s cool. Turns out it’s a really tough place to play. People are there with their shopping bags, just mystified.
Cults perform in Manchester, London and Brighton in November – find tickets here
To The Ghosts is out now
