By Sonia Schnee | Posted Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Emo punk indie band The Bummers may be based out of New Orleans, but they also have a New Jersey connection. Guitarist/Vocalist Ben Shooter grew up in Little Falls NJ and, back in July, the band performed at The Meatlocker in Montclair as part of their summer 2019 "Mass Consumption Party" tour to promote their new EP Dairy Beach. The guys recently released a new single ("Animal Familiar") as well as a music video ("NHL 2002"). If you’d like to support The Bummers, they currently have a GoFundMe campaign up to help them record their sophomore album and organize a 2020 West Coast tour. Check out our interview with band, below, to learn more about their musical roots and plans for the future.
What's your name, where are you from, where are you based now?
Guitarist/vocalists Ben Shooter and Sean Doyle, bassist Clay Hakes, and drummer Fox Capone comprise The Bummers. The band is currently based in New Orleans, but Ben, Sean and Clay are originally from Little Falls NJ, Philly, and Buffalo NY, while Fox is originally from Nashville.
How would you describe your sound? Who are your musical influences?
Our sound is most easily described as emo punk with some other diverse influences (metal/grunge/post-punk/goth/hip-hop/etc.) mixed in. But we don’t really care about fitting too easily into any specific genre.
Bands we like include Violent Soho, Car Seat Headrest, MCR, Coheed and Cambria, The Toadies, Donovan Wolfington, and Deal Casino (who we played with earlier this year for their New Orleans show).
If we’re doing classic rock covers, though, our go-to is always David Bowie.
Congratulations on the release of your newest single, "Animal Familiar." What can you tell us about the inspiration behind this song?
We wrote “Animal Familiar” while on our summer 2019 east coast tour. On the way to Buffalo, we stopped in at Nada Recording Studios in Montgomery, NY to record some songs with John Naclerio (known for his work with MCR, Brand New, etc.). We more or less put together the lyrics and music in the studio. John’s space is deep in the woods and he had mentioned that he’s also near the “UFO capital” of NY, which made for a spooky atmosphere. We had the intro riff already worked out but in the studio Sean came up with the lead guitar melody which is very minor key and eerie. So we ended up feeling like the lyrics should be about magic and witchcraft. We ended up releasing “Animal Familiar” right before Halloween and made it the opener for our Halloween night show in New Orleans.
"NHL 2002" by The Bummers - from their summer 2019 EP "Dairy Beach.”
You released a music video not too long ago (which is a blast to watch!) for the song "NHL 2002." What was the music-video-making process like?
For the “NHL 2002” video, we worked with a group called Pixel Collective. They had us drive out to their location in Baton Rouge and we filmed the entire thing in one all-day session. The song is all about nostalgia and longing for the simpler joys of early 2000s childhood, so naturally we based the music video on one of the classic video games we played as kids. The actual process involved a lot of jumping around in front of a green screen - they recorded us one at a time and then edited it all together. You can see some of that in the behind the scenes shots at the very end of the video. The studio was also great and reached out to a bunch of their friends to find someone willing to let us borrow a Nintendo 64 to use in the video. Dairy Beach
Your EP Dairy Beach also premiered back in June of this year. Tell us a bit about your creative process. Which comes first for you, the melody or the lyrics?
We started working on Dairy Beach in early 2019 as a follow up to our 2018 debut album A Very Exciting Life. We recorded the EP at the Music Shed in New Orleans with engineer Ben Lorio. On this EP we had a couple of songs we’d been sitting on for a while and songs we more or less put together in the studio. We also had a little bit more time and freedom to do new things we’ve wanted to try. With our first album it was mostly very bare bones - 2 guitars, bass, drums, vocals with maybe one additional harmony. With Dairy Beach we did a bunch more vocal layering than we’ve done in the past and we also got to use some additional instruments - for example we used a B3 organ on “Kill Yourself”, and a cool sequencer that Ben Lorio had for parts of “Pile of Little Arms”.
As we went along we started to notice common themes in the lyrics of our songs and we put together a sort of concept for the Dairy Beach EP. A lot of the tracks on Dairy Beach have a very bleak and nihilistic attitude about them, so we kind of packaged the EP as a bunch of anti-summer bops.
The Bummers outside First Wok in Little Falls, NJ.
There’s also a track on the EP about growing up in New Jersey which is called “First Wok.” It’s kind of a tribute to Ben’s favorite Chinese restaurant in Little Falls. When we came through NJ this summer on tour we stopped at the real First Wok for lunch.
We almost always come up with music first. Lyrics usually take us a bit longer although we usually have a concept for what the song should be about. Sometimes for lyrics we end up needing the pressure of the studio situation to get anything done and we’re still working on them until right before its time to record vocals.
Is there anyone who you actively collaborate with, or would like to collaborate with in the future?
We’ve been sending John Naclerio our songs to mix and master since A Very Exciting Life, but this summer recording “Animal Familiar” and “Fists” was the first time we’ve gotten to meet him in person and work in his studio. So we’d really like to do a full album at Nada Recordings with him.
Recently we’ve had our friend Davey Ginger joining us on trombone for select shows in New Orleans and we’d love to have him do some horns on the next record. We’d also love to incorporate some rap influence and we were thinking of collaborating with the NJ group Melting Mindset, who played at our Meatlocker show this summer.
Do you have any tour dates coming up, or any shows planned for New Jersey specifically?
We are currently planning a January 2020 tour in California. However we’ll likely be back in New Jersey sooner than you think. Our show at the Meatlocker this summer went really well - we had a lot of friends and family come out but we also got a lot of new people who were interested in the music. We’d love to come back to the Meatlocker and also try some Asbury Park/Jersey shore venues, maybe in summer 2020.
What has you personal journey been like so far? How’d you get to this point?
All 4 of us have been in various bands for most of our lives and are really avid music lovers, so we each bring a slightly different musical perspective to The Bummers. It sort of becomes a bit of a musical stew at times, with a lot of different influences converging. We started in 2014, and I think in our stuff from back then you can hear those differences isolated in different songs. In our more recent stuff, those different sounds have really started to blend together and make a sound that feels a little more unique to ourselves.
We’ve been a band for 5 years now which feels like a big accomplishment. We all work full time jobs and put a lot of time and a lot of our own money into this. We work hard to make time for this, to make the best music and recordings we can, and to put on the best live shows we can with the resources we have. In this past year we’ve started to see our work pay off and we’ve gotten to do some great things. Dairy Beach was our first release to get some real press. We got to do our first TV performance in New Orleans. We’re getting bigger and better shows and also doing a lot more shows outside New Orleans. And this summer we had our tour and it was great to see that people were into our music in places like NJ and Philly.
Being a band certainly isn’t easy in 2019, it can be pretty expensive and everybody has to really be on the same page to maintain a constant schedule. I think because of that, you really have to genuinely love it.
Do you have any words of advice for people who share a similar passion or have maybe faced similar obstacles/challenges?
Play music that makes you excited. Don’t worry about how the crowd will react or what music other people are making and don’t compare your progress to other peoples’ progress.
Find other bands you like and help each other out - share your resources so you can build a community around all of your music.
Finally, what are some ways that fans can connect with you online? (Website? Facebook? Spotify? Etc.?)
Our music is on all major streaming platforms including Spotify/Apple Music/Bandcamp/Soundcloud/etc. Here are a couple of relevant links:
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/441IiUTM9Sy6tb6wqaF2PK?si=7d8lGw0vROWMzIOwcANWHg
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/thebummersband/
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAffos5hV9OP09QQXBMxtJw
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/thebummersband
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/thebummers
We’re not on TikTok though because we’re not really sure what that is.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Be on the lookout for new music. We like the momentum that we have so we’re going to keep putting out new music constantly until long after everyone asks us to stop.