Excuse Me, Who Are You? Is an emo band from Madison, Wisconsin. Their first LP, “Double Bind”, comes out May 17th. I hopped on a call with Kyle and Stu, vocalists and guitarists for the band, to talk about the new release and what else they’ve been up to this year. Check the below EMWAY? Linktree for all their socials and links to listen/purchase the album! Thanks for reading!
Serg
How’s 2024 going for you guys so far?
Stu
Busy, busy, busy.
Kyle
We currently have Stu getting his masters and another one of us is in college, so a lot. We went on tour with Moose Creek Park, played Sword Fest and 0.5 fest in Michigan, so we toured for a week. My windshield got smashed and then we came home and everyone went to school.
Serg
This is your first music video that’s come out and then this last single you guys dropped was the first one you dropped in two years, is that right?
Stu
Yeah. Wow. Two years.
Kyle
Yeah. It’s been a long time coming, at least that first single. Most of the stuff that we’re going to be releasing, I wrote on guitar in the summer, so we’ve been sitting on a lot of it for a long time. It’s been written for at least a year and a half now.
Stu
And we almost didn’t use it because Kyle almost moved. But that didn’t happen. No offense Kyle, but thank god.
Serg
So tell me a bit about what y’all’s songwriting and collaboration process is. What’s that process for you guys to get a song from start to finish?
Stu
Up until recently, I haven’t written a song since Test Chamber. It’s been a while for me. I’m just finally kicking that writer’s block and feeling good about it. For me, I’ll have a riff or two. Sometimes I’m able to piece that into a full song, but usually I just take it to the band and we workshop it together. Kyle typically has an entire song ready to go when they come to practice.
Kyle
With the release I had pretty much everything laid out and we sat down and structured it all together. Once we started learning it, it hit me that I also have to write vocals to all of it. Once vocals were added, that changed a lot of the structure. Then we added a few things here or extended something there.
Stu
There’s a song on the album, “CURSES! I’ll Get You Next Time, Powertron!” that is completely different from the way it was written.
Kyle
It was flipped on its head. There was this jungle drum beat on it. Then one practice I rolled up and I was like, “We need to go back to the way this song was initially.”
Stu
You guys might lose me for just a second because I’m stepping out of my house. My wifi is going to shut off. So I don’t know if you…
[Stu cuts out because of his technical difficulties]
Serg
How often are y’all working on a song and you’re just like, “No we’re not using this one”?
Stu
All the time. There were two songs that were ready to go immediately after the EP and Kyle put the kibosh on them. And then I very, very quickly realized that they were right in doing that. I was pissed at first, but then I was like, “Ah fuck, you’re right.”
Kyle
I go, “Stu, these are funk songs. These are not emo songs.”
Stu
They had this kind of poppy origami angel feel to them. They’re very upbeat.
Kyle
In terms of how long we’re working on stuff, it’s a constant thing. We have several things we’ve been working on for a long time now. Songs sometimes write themselves overnight, but sometimes it does take a certain song to be written in a year or two. Sometimes you just gotta put it to the side and then revisit it with fresh ears and a new mindset.
Serg
Do you have a signature sound that you’re trying to shoot for?
Stu
As of right now Kyle and I definitely write different songs, they sound different. You can tell when Kyle wrote a song and when I wrote a song. I think that comes from what we listen to and of our separate backgrounds. But I’ve never I’ve never wanted to be in a band that’s like, “It has to sound like this, otherwise fuck it.”
Kyle
I guess from an outsider looking in, it might seem a lot more similar than they actually are.But especially with this next release, I think there’s a bit of a deviation.
Kyle
Jamie wrote two songs on our EP, but they both have this charm, like happy go lucky. Jamie songs are actually really hard to play.
Stu
Full six string jazz chords, playing fast and switching them fast.
Kyle
That’s our old drummer that we’re talking about, by the way. At the end of the day we’re just all linking up and saying, “Hey, this is something that I wrote and that I’m vibing with.”
Stu
Everybody’s got their own input to the songs that we’re bringing to the table.
Serg
We talked a little bit at Sword Fest about “Excuse Me, Who Are You?”being a reference to Perfect Blue, which is the Japanese psychological horror thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon. I don’t think you all started necessarily with the Perfect Blue imagery. Correct me if I’m wrong, but how has that changed over time?
Stu
That was actually the plan with the first EP. I had originally wanted to call it Double Bind. I wanted to put a bunch of Perfect Blue samples in there, but before we could even record the shit, Kyle was like, “I already did that with another album.”
Kyle
We had decided on the Half-Life song names, so it made sense for us to lean into the Half-Llife vibe. And then we were like, “We’ll lean into Half-Life because we already got Half-Life song names and samples.” And then we were like, “What we can do is lean into Perfect Blue and say that we did the damn thing.” It felt like it made sense to some extent.
Stu
I’ve always been addicted to pop culture, doing stuff like throwing samples in or throwing an image from Perfect Blue on a t- shirt and putting our name on it. That reminds me of when I had a binder in fourth grade and I’d cut out pictures of the Ying Yang twins and Eric Clapton and paste them on there and be like, “Hey, this is what I’m into. This is how I tell everybody.”
Kyle
We decided to lean into HalfLife for that first release and I don’t think we’re going to come back and do another Perfect Blue themed release. I don’t know if we’ll do that with HalfLife either.
Serg
So it’s not necessarily like, “Hey, going forward we’re a Perfect Blue band.” It’s more of, “This is what we’re focusing on for the release.”
Stu
We never set out to be an anime band when we first chose that name.
Kyle
We’ve talked about doing other stuff like Evangelion or Oblivion for future stuff.
Serg
What are you trying to say with this release? What is the message here?
Kyle
Truthfully, we wrote songs the way that we normally do and had Perfect Blue references and had that accompany our stuff. So there’s definitely stuff pulled from it and themes that are similar to some extent. But at the same time, we still wrote it and made it our own without starting with Perfect Blue and being like, “What are we going to write?”
Serg
That’s interesting because you have this body of work and then it’s like, “Okay, how do we connect the two things?” That must be a fun exercise sometimes.
Kyle
When I was first doing it, I didn’t catch all the correlations that I made, but Stu has this thing that he says. It’s the David Lynch thing.
Stu
You make the art and then you decide what it means later. Sometimes you’re just creating art because you’re feeling creative, not really thinking about it. But you always come up with your own story. That’s what happened with the EP. I threw most of those samples on there willy nilly, but it did have somewhat of a progression, at least I think.
Serg
So let’s talk about the music video [Let’s End All Of This Music Video LINK] for a little bit.
Stu
That was one of the funnest things we’ve done together as a band that wasn’t playing music. We went out to this land that Jackson’s grandparents have, got drunk, rode some ATVs around. Yeah, had a good time. There were a couple of specific shots that I wanted to get, and we built everything else around those. I want to say really quick that like 90% of the visual artistic direction and idea shit goes to Evan (the director) in terms of shooting the video.
Kyle
Like 5 to 8 hours at least of footage and based on what we did, it was pretty much all flipped on its head. That was really interesting to see the final product and the interpretation that Evan had of everything. I really like how it turned out. We didn’t want to do a played through, you know, “us all playing music” music video. We wanted to do some sort of movie based thing that’s not like someone waking up in bed and hitting the radio off type of bullshit. There’s that part where we’re rubbing paint all over Stu’s belly and face. That was at the very end of the night, too. We were all drinking, having fun. And then we’re doing that out of nowhere. Lights and blood. In the middle of the woods.
Stu
Shooting that scene, the rare moments When I would open my eyes during that, I had nightmares that night. That scared the shit out of me. Seeing that even though everybody was laughing while they were doing it, visually that scared the fuck out of me.
Serg
The laughing might have made it worse.
Kyle
I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in years. I was crying laughing.
Stu
I do actually have to get going because I did have plans at like 6:00 and I’m a little bit late for them. But Kyle, you keep going. Good talking to you man. [Stu leaves the voice call.]
Kyle
That’s a hilarious part of the interview. Stu loses his connection. Stu abruptly leaves.
Serg
Stu informs us of his plans. What are some other good pieces of media, like companion pieces for listening to your music?
Kyle
[Stu’s] a huge fanatic of Twin Peaks, you bring up Twin Peaks and he won’t stop talking about it.
He introduced me to Satoshi Kon and when I joined [EMWAY?], I didn’t even know what the reference was from. I thought the name was stupid. Then I finally saw Perfect Blue and I loved it. Basically anime psychological thrillers, stuff that you watch and you’re like, “What just happened?”
Serg
Stuff that requires a second or third look.
Kyle
100% that is my cup of tea.
Serg
Talk to me a little bit about what’s going on in Wisconsin. Who are some of the big names coming up? What are you all up to over there?
Kyle
Madison, Milwaukee, Wisconsin in general, I haven’t seen it like this as far as having as much community as we have right now and all the bands that are coming up. Not only that, but how good all of the bands that are coming out of the frameworks in this area
I’d say, bands like Barely Civil, Garden Home, Bug Moment. Obviously the homies in Tiny Voices. Shameless plug Endswell. snag’s incredible. RIOTNINE, even though they are hanging stuff up for a while and going on hiatus. There’s no shortage of fantastic bands around here. I’m not trying to leave any bands out. Especially with Brady here at Thumbs Up [Records] and J.J. with Burn Bright Fest. We did Homie Fest last year and want to follow it up at some point. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop as far as I can see right now.
Serg
A sign of good things to come, you know?
Kyle
Yeah.
The Diygest 
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