You guys are young, but you've already been together nearly a decade. What was it like growing up as a band? Tom D’Agustino: I think it made us really close. It was always something we could look forward to when we were younger. Our town, Hastings on Hudson, was a great place to grow up and always had great bands coming up in our high school. How do you think your sound has evolved over the last 10 years? D’Agustino: It's definitely gotten a lot tighter. We know how to play with each other so well by now; We know how to write together and hone in on what we're trying to do. When we were younger it was still together, but a lot looser as we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to be. What's the most difficult obstacle you've had to overcome thus far? D’Agustino: A big challenge was trying to coordinate shows, practices, and recording while we were all away at different colleges. The band definitely kept us all close but it's been really helpful to be in the same place now working together.
playlists, tracking where your fans are and how to reach them—all without having to be signed. Aside from I’ve Been Going Swimming, you also did a cassette project with Primate House called Narp. Can you tell me about how that came about? Zach Slater: We grew up with Primate House and have been playing with them since high school, so we asked them if they wanted to do a split and they were down. D’Agustino: NARP stands for "NonAthletic Regular Person,” which is pretty accurate, but not why we named it that. Wolfson: A lot of our favorite bands have made splits in the past. One of my favorites is the Porches/LVL UP split. Why did you guys decide to use a cassette tape? Wolfson: Because Kanye said the CD is dead. Where do the songs from this cassette tape derive from? D’Agustino: The first track on the tape, “Dead Legs,” was a demo I made in my room a few days before we went in to
When you don't have a big label backing you, you need all the help you can get. What did you learn from that experience? D’Agustino: That it's important to communicate, keep everyone on the same track, and make sure everyone wants the same things. What's the one thing you wish someone had told you about being an independent artist? Wolfson: I never expected it to involve being so active on social media. Social media is definitely a valuable tool and has helped us gain some exposure, but it can get stressful trying to market yourself all the time. We try to use it to connect to our fans as much as we can. Right now, major artists are waging a war against streaming sites like Spotify and YouTube. For you, those are valuable platforms to help get your music out there. What's your take on the issue? How do you think it affects independent music? D’Agustino: I can't speak for other artists, but I know those platforms have helped us out a lot. When you don't have a big label backing you and pushing everything for you, you need all the help you can get. Spotify is really helpful in connecting the artist to the listener via concentrated
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record. I wrote it during my last semester of college and then showed it to the guys. Wolfson: Yeah, when he played the demo for us for the first time we all knew it had a lot of potential, so we went down to our practice space and finished the song that night. “Longport” is a song I wrote when I was 14 about an actual squirrel in a beach town called Longport, New Jersey. It was a song I wrote for my little cousins, like a joke kid song. Slater: I think people liked it a lot because it was a break from all the seriousness. It lets people dance, and people kept pushing for it so we put it on the tape. Tell me a little about the music video for “Pick Me Apart,” from I’ve Been Going Swimming. D’Agustino: I really wanted the video to include my family, mainly my little sister Kaitlyn, who’s 12. Me and Nick D'Agostino, the directorno relation, just a good dudehad been spitballing for a while, toying with concepts before we landed on the idea of trying to reconnect with your childhood. So we had this idea of me, a bearded 22year old having a slumber party and trying to get back to that place where everything seemed prettier and goofier. Having the band appear under the blanket fort was kind of
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