let it all out After their hardest year yet, !!! frontman Nic Offer talks Reef Younis through the less wild than expected ‘Strange Weather, Isn’t It?’ and in doing so explains how these New Yorkers are more punk than ever. Photographer: Guy Eppel Writer: Reef Younis It might be the release of Chk Chk Chk’s (!!!) first album in three years, or perhaps the gruelling global tour that’ll see the band more or less play up to the first day of your advent calendar, but after three days worth of hustling and hoping, juggling time zones and pinging countless emails back and forth, we reach the conclusion that Nic Offer is a difficult man to pin down. “Yeah, sorry, we’ve been travelling around so it’s kind of easier to co-ordinate time zones this way,” Nic explains, crackling down a trans-Atlantic phone line. “I’m glad we’ve finally got to do this.” It’s been a few years of upheaval for the band, with John Pugh leaving in 2007 to concentrate on his own project and Jerry Fuchs’ tragic death after falling down an elevator shaft, but !!!, it seems, are a band resolute to overcome any obstacle. Imbibed with a reckless punk spirit, they’ve long been considered one of the early purveyors of dance punk continued and popularised, to some extent, by the heavyweights of NYC: the funk of The Rapture; the condensed chaos of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; the electronic gloss of LCD Soundsystem; and the distorted creativity of TV on the Radio. As club-friendly as any contemporary cross over, they’ve always carried a frenetic dance floor appeal, meeting writhing funk rhythms with Nic’s sultry murmurs and excitable yelp. But things are a little different this time round and here we find them, over a decade and four albums into their career, on the cusp of the US leg of a punishing album tour. Not that Nic sees it that way.
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