ASTRODEATH – “This is How You Rope In Drummers”
Words by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Monday 7th November 2022
Photos by: Benny Valentine
“Drummers go for snacks. Every drummer is in, like, ten bands. Yoshi’s in three.”
It’s not the number of tools you have, it’s what you do with them. Upon first listen, the wall of sound that Sydney’s ASTRODEATH create on a track like Ceremonial Blood sounds like the work of a full band, so it’s surprising to find out that such a gargantuan racket is actually produced by just two people – singer-guitarist Tim and drummer Yoshi. With the release of the sludge-y new single Red Weed, Tim taught us how to catch a drummer.
You guys have got the BLACK RHENO thing going on. No bass player – just guitar and drums.
We love BLACK RHENO … I started this band with the two-piece thing in mind. It’s just so much easier. One phone call, “Hey, you want to do this, yes or no? Sweet as.” You know? You don’t have to worry about five other dudes’ lives, and having babies or whatever, you know? It’s pretty chill. And we can just jump in a van and head off.
… The cosmic collision that has to happen for a band to form and actually have time to get good, and hone their craft. It’s a big ask.
It’s tough, man. I’ve tried the five-piece, four-piece bands, and it is. Just to get on the same level of how much commitment you want to put in, or how much money you want to put in, or how much time … That’s like the hardest part about being a band. Like you said, you’ve also got to be pretty good, but I think, by far, aligning with all the dudes in your band is probably the hardest thing.
Plus, if you guys get paid for a gig, you just split it down the middle …
Man, to be totally honest, there is no money for us. In fact, we work our arses off week in, week out to put money into the band, and it just goes. It just fucking blows off.
I feel like, as shit as it is, because obviously everyone wants to be able to make money … Like the good old days, the 80s and 90s, all the bands we grew up listening to who managed to make a success out of it, that part of the world really is gone, unless you play certain types of music. There will never be another PANTERA. An album like Far Beyond Driven is never going to top the fucking sales chart [again].
Yeah, it seems unlikely in the current climate, but I’d say to that, like, you wouldn’t have expected, say ten years ago, that a band like AMYL & THE SNIFFERS or THE CHATS would be touring the world and getting really good success, because that wasn’t popular then, but now it’s kind of like the flavour of the week. So if you choose something, you’ve just got to wait it out until that flavour is wanted. I don’t know. [Laughs]
Where I was going to go with that though is that what you’re left with now is not so much people going, “I’m going to do this to get famous!” You’re forced to do this for the love of it, because if anything, it costs money. It’s that Henry Rollins Get in the Van philosophy of, “You want to be a musician? You really want to be a musician? Congratulations, you’re going to play more often than you eat.”
100%, man. Totally. It’s so hard, and it’s so saturated. There are so many bands. We’re thirty-three, thirty-two, and for us, it’s like, now or never. Give it a fucking really good push, and go as hard as we can, because we’re only getting older, and there are opportunities opening up for us, and things are feeling good, so we just pour everything into it … to the detriment of our health, our relationships and all that shit. [Laughs]
Only the true believers remain, man. Even if you plug away at it for ten, twenty years and it never gets quite where you want it to be, you can still have these albums and be like, “We did it. We made something, we put our heart into it, and we created it. There’s something sitting there that didn’t exist before.” I think that’s fucking awesome.
Yeah, it’s a cool feeling, 100%. And especially if you remain proud of it. I’ve been in bands before and I look back and I go, “That was probably no good.” [Laughs] If you’re proud of your work, and you know you’ve given it your all … as you said, you’ve got to do it because you love it, because there’s not much else than playing and recording, you know?
How did you two get started?
We kind of knew each other. We were both recruited to play in a Sydney band … a four-piece band, dysfunctional. Yoshi ended up quitting pretty quickly, and I followed suit after that. After I’d played with Yoshi in that band, I figured, that’s the guy for sure, because he’s a weapon. I grabbed him and I said … This is how you rope in drummers. You say, “Oh, can you just record a couple of songs for me please? You don’t have to join if you don’t want.” He dug it, and we just forged ahead.
Plus, you just get the drummer over there, and as they’re setting up gear, you just start leaving snacks on there.
[Laughs] Yeah, drummers go for snacks. Every drummer is in, like, ten bands. Yoshi’s in three.
They’re in demand, man!
The good ones, for sure. He gets hit up like once a week to join a band, so I’m pretty lucky to have him.
Ceremonial Blood is fucking epic.
Yeah, that one’s been getting some good attention. Our first record was a bit more of a grungier, stripped-back kind of thing, and then we started playing with all these super-heavy bands. We just fell into the scene, and those were the bands that we were playing with, so it kind of rubbed off on us, and that’s the product of all those bands that we were soaking in for a couple of years, and got a bit heavier. We’re proud of that. I’m not really a guitarist. I kind of picked up the guitar because I was singing in bands, and thinking that, when the bands break up, the singer didn’t write the riffs, and doesn’t really have much ownership of what’s going on, but I figured that if you’re holding an instrument and you’re making the songs, then they’re yours. So I just picked up the guitar like that.
It is kind of cool, it being the two of you. You guys have complete ownership … You two steer the ship. It’s not five people vying to be heard. It’s pretty much all you guys, which is pretty cool.
That’s one thing that excited Yoshi about being in this band. As a drummer, moreso than a singer, usually you join a band and a guitarist has a riff and they’re like, “Play this,” and the drummer just sits there and plays it. Yoshi’s written half, or more than half of the songs on guitar, and we switch over. I play the drums. We decided heaps early on that we’d split everything, regardless, down the middle, in terms of songwriting credits and that sort of thing. It’s pretty chill. We’ll see how we go when the millions roll in, but we’ve never really had an argument about who did what. It’s just like, we’re doing this together, which is kind of nice.
ASTRODEATH tour nationally in November and December. Tickets available here.