Monobloc releases debut song “Where's My Garden” and talks future plans
by Tiara Starks
Led by Michael ‘Mop’ Silverglade and Timothy Waldron, Monobloc is a newly-formed post-punk band that bloomed out of an already existing band called ‘Courier Club’. The band’s emergence comes at a very important time in independent music. Their debut song “Where’s My Garden” is out now. For listeners, Monobloc’s sound is familiar as it blends together both pop and punk elements but is unique in its approach to storytelling about being young, “dumb,” and in love. Developing a loyal fanbase is the next step. Read on to learn more about the duo, their background, their connection to the Block by Blockwest Festival of 2020 and where they see Monobloc heading!
Previously, both Silverglade and Waldron were in a band called ‘Courier Club’. Their responses to why they branched out to originate Monobloc expand upon the idea that they chose to evolve as musicians.
Timothy Waldron: Courier Club just kind of died as a project. It was a tale as old as time, a band that didn't make it through the pandemic. So it was very like a natural end to it. We're also friends with those guys, and sometimes people just move on, they have other priorities. Mop and I were obviously just like, “Oh, well, we're still going to do music.” In a way, it feels just kind of like a natural continuation of Courier Club. Courier Club was almost like a crash course. It's almost like, “Okay, we've done a lot of stuff. We've seen a lot of stuff, we've made a lot of mistakes. We did a lot of things.” Let's go back [into] this a bit more methodical and slow-paced and a bit more precise. Precision has been like the biggest thing and a more unified vision of what we're going for. It kind of feels almost like a new game plus how they do it, video games, but, yeah.
Michael Silverglade: No, I think that's exactly right. I think it's just kind of us with our next chapter as musicians and kind of just refining how we write songs and how we kind of have a band together. But, yeah, just kind of an evolution of our past work, I'd say.
TW: All the things that we really liked about Courier Club, [we] just kind of expanded [upon], explored, and focused on more. A lot of the things that we messed up on were like, “Okay, we don't have to do that.”
In comes Monobloc, a next-generation post-punk and pop band. When asked about who were some of their musical inspirations, the answers ranged from 80s superstars to Steve Reich.
TW: Musical inspirations for me, they shift every week. It's something that you're excited by. In terms of general identity of the band and some music identity, too, we took a lot of influence from a lot of factory record stuff that was happening out of Manchester in the 80s. Anything Tony Wilson touched or Peter Saville. I think that kind of mentality really inspired us. There's a movie called “24 Hour Party People” that we watched at the end of Courier Club and the beginning of Monobloc set the pace for us, inspiration-wise. There's a piece of work by a composer named Steve Reich called “Music for 18 Musicians” that I feel is how we learned to write guitar parts for Monobloc There's Internet historian, This guy named Brad Chomel, who has nothing to do with music, but he's just like a guy who says what he thinks on Patreon and he just dives into a lot of kind of very hyper-modern mimi stuff. And I think that just like, we take a lot of influence from just that way of knowing, but doesn't really inspire the music, but just kind of the thought behind the whole thing. A lot of stuff. It's always changing. This week, it's Tom Waits and Justin Bieber. Last week, [it was] Thelonious Monk; “Twelve Rules of Musicians.” It’s a stew of a lot of things that some references are strictly musical, some are worlds away from being musical, but they somehow find themselves affecting the way the song sounds in the end.
We know kind of what our influences are and just kind of try to absorb them as deeply as possible and figure out what it is about those that affects us.
With “Where is my Garden?” being the band’s latest release. I wanted to know more about their decision to craft this specific lyricism and how the writing process impacted the final product.
MS: That song was interesting because the instrumental actually has existed for probably, like, three years, and it was one of those ideas that I just always kept trying with different projects and different people and just really wanting to turn that riff into a song, and it would never really become complete. Tim and I started writing for Monobloc, and we knew what the direction of the sound was, [but] I figured I would just make one more quick demo with the idea and show it to Tim and then see if we could turn it into something. Tim came in with the vocal melodies in the chorus, and it finally came together.
TW: Similar to how Mop had an instrumental for a long time. I had the chorus melody in the lyrics. It was like, “Where's my garden? Where are my friends? Always feel like the end” and I would always just try to fit that into songs, and it never really worked. Mop's instrumental and my melody finally had a place to live with this song, which is really nice. You're like, it took two years, but I think then we were like, oh, shit, now we have to write a world for it to live in. We have to write a verse. We have to write all this stuff. And we kept putting it off until we were actually in the studio recording it. So I feel like, lyrically, it was very much on the spot. What we were just kind of, like, writing the day of and the character that we kind of created for it was. The general idea was you're at a dinner party with friends and you're talking to somebody about their new Casper mattress that they just ordered and these new CBD gummies of ashwaganda that they're raving about. I don't know, we're 25.
I think that you hit this phase where you're officially out of the phase where being part of counterculture is easy because you're young and now you see people kind of just jumping ship, per se. They're “drinking the Normie Kool Aid.” Is this all worth it? Should I just kind of assimilate into it all? Maybe I want that subscription smoothie service. That sounds a bit nice. Why am I so hard about not wanting those things or being so against it? It's just kind of like wrestling with that idea. Maybe God and football will save me something like the lines of that, which it won't, but there's moments of weakness. So I guess the song lyrically is about just in that wishy-washy brain kind of view.
With that, I asked about a potential music video or visualizer that would help illustrate the emotions and undertone of the song.
TW: I'm working on it right now, actually. It's like a screen share video where somebody is going on the Internet looking for gardening supplies and then getting sidetracked and just going down a rabbit hole. So it starts off very tame. [It’s] something very simple. All of the designs are all going to be real websites that I'm making on different web pages. It’s going to be down the rabbit hole of this world and viewers are going to get caught up in all these different places of the web, almost like you're on Wikipedia and you just keep clicking the blue link to the next page. That's kind of the mentality and searching. They're going to be searching for something, but along the way they're going to get trapped up into some absurd nonsense and pits of why the hell am I here kind of stuff. But it's not done yet, so we'll see. That's all I can say for now, I guess. Hopefully, I will get it done by the release date, so. Mop keeps telling me about it, though.
In addition to listening to their debut single, “I'm Just Trying to Love You.” the music video had caught my attention. The duo spoke about how their own day jobs played a part in crafting the visuals as well as diving deep into the production process.
TW: Yeah, me and the guitar player and Mop, for our day job, we make music videos. The whole band is very visually inclined in that way where just, like, something we all really care about. But that video in particular, the idea was to be very simple with it and for it just to be like, a representation of, like, this is this band, this is how they look live, this is how they act live. This is kind of like them under a spotlight. That's it. It's very. Just simple. When you're starting out as a band, you're really excited about your visual direction, but it's hard to pin it down. So the idea was to be very simple with it and not go into any one direction, something that's almost timeless or out of time...
This is how we look when we play live. This is what you're getting, basically. Now going off, we kind of teased some of our visual ideas with that, with some of the glitchiness and the kind of little sprinkles on top. And I think we're going to really explore more conceptual stuff going forward with the rest of the songs and that.
MS: Yeah. Tim's getting all the details, but the contrast of a clean intro to the band and then kind of ‘doing a 180’ and showing this other side. It's a bit more experimental for the second song. I think with the rest of the songs, we'll kind of connect those two worlds a lot and show some of the in between spaces.
Monobloc recently performed at The Berlin venue in New York City. I asked about their experience and where they plan to perform next.
TW: We've been playing in New York pretty much exclusively since we started, like, six months ago. [We’re] just trying to really get the live sound of the band tight and ready for bigger things. Now that we're starting to release music, we'll try to start playing a bit more regionally, hopefully internationally, too. The British are big fans of us so far, so we're trying to get out there. That's pretty much what we're trying to work on.
Yeah, it seems like right now, the only interest for Monobloc is across the pond, and we're like, “Right, so how do we get there?” [The Berlin] was a good show, though. I feel like we're finally getting to a point where the band is just, like, meshing and playing off each other, because we all came into the show actually a little under-practiced because everyone was kind of traveling over the holidays and stuff.
MS: We were also talking about how all these songs were kind of born in the studio, on the computer, and not really in, like, a live band setting. So all these months of shows have been kind of figuring out how to get the songs to come across in a live setting with the full band. And I think in the past couple of shows, everyone's really found their voice for how to play the parts with everyone else, and I think that just takes time to kind of have that synergy together.
After listening to both their latest release and their previous releases, I could tell that the members already knew themselves. They already have a really good, cohesive sound for just kind of coming out with this band. Their self-titled EP and tracks like Irish Goodbye and New Order speak to their sound’s self-awareness. They explained their future plans, what the musical throughline is for the band, and how listeners can define them musically.
TW: Yeah, I mean, there's this one idea that we've really kind of taken to heart, and it's that pretty much the idea of complete minimalism in the composition, but using that to create texture. So pretty much everything.
There's a lot of moving parts, but they're all doing very simple things. That kind of idea and this taking that idea into all the songs we write, even if it's a song that's wildly different and kind of verging on a different genre, that same mentality going into it, I think it's almost like the Monobloc stamp. We'll write a song, and it feels like we're just dumping just paint onto a canvas and being very. Just overdoing it. And then after that, we kind of mine away at it, and we only leave what needs to be there.I think that's the biggest thing is leaving no extra fluff. I think we have these conversations where we'll just see something and there's, like, all the band members, and we'll be like, “Oh, that's very Monobloc.” it will be a particular part of a song, or it will be a painting, or it will be a random candid photo that someone took that day. The things all, from a quick glance, don't really go together, but it's funny how we're all starting to pick up on these little things, like, musically and visually, that are just like, “Oh, this is very us”.
MS: The sound is kind of a product of just the way me and Tim kind of pass the demos back and forth between each other. One thing we also say is how we're not really afraid to tell each other what we don't like in the process of writing. That really leaves kind of the best stuff at the end of the stuff that we agree on is kind of, like, what's left in the song, and then kind of, like, the more we learn what that is, I think the more Monobloc songs we can write together. So, I don't know. I think the ep was kind of, like a way of figuring out what the process was, and kind of how to make more of a collection of songs based on how we got to those ones that we have now, if that makes sense.
TW: Not being precious is a really big thing and just being able to just throw something out and not feel attached to it and move on.
As previously mentioned, the band already knows themselves, which gives them an advantage as there are artists who are still kind of still figuring it out. A fun question that was asked sparked conversation about the Block by Block West Minecraft Virtual festival which was created and covered in major publications such as Business Insider so I wanted to get some insight.
TW: Oh, yes. Crazy time. It was almost like “committing to the bit too hard.” It started off as just a Minecraft server for Courier Club fans. We posted what was kind of a meme of a text conversation of, “What if we throw a Minecraft festival?” It got a lot of feedback. From there, we just kept exploring the option and it just snowballed [into] being 170,000 people tuned into it. And we have Michael's younger brother, who was kind of like a Minecraft wizard kid. Like, he kind of knew how to do it all, and that was it. So we were a very small team and we got into deep, and it ended up just being like this very stressful but also beautiful collaboration with people from across the world. Everyone was just coming together and offering their skills, and it became this machine. It was a very crazy experience that I feel like was very much of that time. And, yeah, it's hard to sum it up as just a classic example of a snowball effect.
I mean, everything from us getting almost sued by South by Southwest because we had to lawyer up for it, to the server blowing up the first time and having to go in the BBC and explain, to explain the festival. Our headliners were Idols and Pussy Riot, [and] Massive Attack. It was really funny because it ended, and then it was just like, “Poof, it's done.” We were just like, “Okay, we need to rest for months, but it was a blast.” It was one of the fondest experiences of my life. Crazy. I still wake up in the middle of night hearing that little discord sound, freaking out.
Yeah, it was definitely one of those times where no one had anything else to do, so everyone was so focused on it. And I think that's what helped it become such a global thing and reach so many people because it kind of stemmed from not being able to play shows or go on tour. So we're like, oh, we'll just have our fans hop on this Minecraft server. And then it turned into 40 bands and all their fans. And then figuring that out, I think it was simultaneously very stressful but also very rewarding and really was still probably the biggest thing that we've done together. And now with Monobloc, we're kind of always asking, how are we going to get Monobloc to that level of scale? Basically, because in the end, I think we kind of were left with after the first one, we were like, we could do this again, or we could go back to just writing songs and playing in a band together. And we kind of decided that's what the latter was, what we ended up feeling more passionate about. So that was also kind of the in between Courier Club and Monobloc, there was kind of that part, too.
I think that's also why Monobloc is so reserved and the image is so trying to just do some form of mystique. It's almost like, kind of, we did the whole online thing. We did the whole everything showing all the time, and then now we want to just kind of find more of the timeless band of just. We're writing music. Here are the songs. You come to the show, but then at the same time, I think Monobloc is a wrestling match between the two, because what we talk about is, like, we want to be this very classic, reserved band, but we're very much like two kids raised by the virtual world. They're very much clinically online, and we're kind of hiding it. So it's that battle between, I always like to say in the city, there's, like, the kids who are pretending it's the. There's the kids who are hyper online. There's, like, the two factions. And I very much feel like I am kind of in between. I think maybe that's where the real world is, potentially.
For updates on when they’re debut album is set to be released, you can follow the band on Instagram here. You can listen to “Where is my Garden?” on Spotify as well. https://open.spotify.com/album/6yUz8troB2dYhqkyb49AC6?si=946flBZ4R8KeEhzTkR_d6Q
