A QUICK CHAT WITH MILKSICK

Congratulations on the debut single, ‘Midas’!
For those who don’t know you, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

 We’re a bunch of psych noise punk losers from Naarm/Melbourne who’ve been kicking around Melbourne’s underground punk scene for around a year now. In that time, we’ve been rattling windows in the stickiest of venues alongside the likes of local legends Batpiss, The Maggie Pills and Black Bats. We all met on a Facebook group around 2 years ago and have been jamming and writing for just as long.

What’s the story behind the track, what’s it about?

 A little while back, our vocalist Sam was waiting on his tax return and expecting to have to pay a little bit of cash to the government when he got a really professional-sounding call from the ‘ATO’. “They had a few of my details and it felt legit. I was told I owed a lot of money, I got flustered and started asking how this had happened and giving personal details. When they started getting impatient and telling me to pay over the phone to avoid penalties it clicked that I was being scammed. I’m usually pretty good at spotting this kind of thing immediately so it really made me think about how far scam language has come in the last 20 years. So much sophistication, but they stumble on simple things like sounding too impatient. I tried to embody that kind of character in this song with the language becoming more manic and obvious as it progresses. For me, the story of Midas was a great parallel to the twisted reality scammers offer, so we kinda just took that and ran with it”.

We hear the tune was entirely self-recorded, can you tell us a little bit about the recording process? 

So ‘Midas’ was recorded at our rehearsal space in Brunswick and our guitarist Darcy’s house. We toyed with the idea of heading into a studio to get the song as crisp as possible, but we sort of looked at the track and thought “the trashier the better”. The setups were pretty hodge-podge if we’re being honest, we kind of just pooled the recording gear we had between us and went at it! Most of us a used to recording in professional studio environments so this was definitely a change of pace for us. At the same time, recording the tune ourselves was super freeing and relaxed, wouldn’t have done it any other way for this one. After everything was tracked, we packaged it up and sent it off to Salvador Peralta (Pet Therapy, Dole Manchild) for a mix and master. Got to give massive props to Salv, made our scratchy stems sound absolutely huge!

We hear you’ve got a music video on the horizon, can you tell us a bit about that? 

When Midas started coming together, we knew that we wanted some real psyched-out, glitchy imagery to push the concept of distorted reality. We got in touch with our close mate Llamma Lab to whip up a music video based on that premise and he smashed it out of the park! He grabbed a bunch of old public domain clips and illustrations that had these super creepy undertones and reflected the themes/lyrics of the track. In the end, he pumped out this psychedelic, retro cult trip of a music video that we feel is a perfect introduction to our overall vibe!

What have been some of your biggest influences as a band (music or not)? 

We all come from really different musical backgrounds, we listen to everything from psychedelic rock, noise, funk, grunge, punk and that definitely comes out in our back catalogue. If we had to narrow it down though, we’d probably have to say our biggest influences are Frankie and the Witch Fingers, Ty Segall, IDLES and Tropical Fuck Storm.

 The topics of our songs come from everywhere though, be that personal experience (like in the case of Midas) or maybe we’ve just seen something making the rounds on socials/news media that we’re bursting to have our say about, it's different for every tune.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it?

 That’s kind of a toughy if we’re being honest, but if we had to, we’d say eccentric, off-kilter, psych noise punk when we started this project, we were very much of the idea that we wanted to create a vessel to do whatever we want with musically and I feel we’ve managed to do that. A lot of our music has this boppy, punky basis but we’re able to branch out into more doomy, surfy and even noisy type stuff while still having it sound like us.