Two A’s In Draag

Draag makes the music they want to make.

Speaking to the band’s vocalists Jessica Huang and Adrian Acosta, you can tell they don’t really care about what the audience wants to hear. The music is for them. Well, they did explicitly tell me that. You’ll read it in here at some point. It’s great they make what they want to make too because their music is incredible.

The band just released an EP, Actually, the Quiet is Nice, under They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s record label Julia’s War. An EP inspired by 2000s nostalgia, blockbuster overnight rentals and industrial music. It’s a great body of work that I couldn’t recommend listening to more.

Draag are also currently on a West coast tour with Wednesday and you should probably go see them if they come through your city, both bands are awesome.

I didn’t ask them about why there are two ‘a’s in Draag but we spoke about shoegaze and driving in silence. The interview starts where I started recording, I feel like it just made sense.

You guys are all from LA, right?

Adrian & Jessica: Yeah.

How did you guys meet?

Adrian: Jess and I met on Craigslist.

Jessica: When people still used to look for band meets on Craigslist.

Adrian: I put up an ad and Jess was the only one who responded to the ad. It was dead silent for a week, and she got back to me, and we just hit it off.

What did you put on the ad?

Adrian: I was looking for a multi-instrumentalist/vocalist.

Jessica: You put some bands you were into too.

What were the bands you referenced?

Adrian: I forgot what I referenced. I was into weird obscure music at the time like Melt-Banana and stuff like that.

Man, Melt-Banana are so cool! Was there some more Melt-Banana influence when you guys started making music?

Adrian: I think at the time we did have a song that did kind of sound like a Melt-Banana track.

Jess: Our sound has changed a lot, but people still tell us that we had that Draag sound somewhere in there for all those years.

Did you guys have a different band before Draag?

Adrian: I was in a few bands, when I was in a pre-teen, I was in a band called New Age Disorder.

AI generated punk band name [laughs].

Jess: I never thought of it like that, but it so is [laughs].

Adrian: [Laughs]. I used to host punk shows in the neighbourhood I grew up in. We were kids. My friendship group was literally like the kids in the movie Kids except in the San Fernando Valley. We were all just pre-teens hosting punk shows and a lot of those shows used to end in drive-by’s. That was the previous band I was in. That band broke up when I was like a senior in high school and then I started making my way through other projects for a while, then I put out the ad which is where Jess came in.

Congratulations on the release of Actually, the quiet is nice. I had a listen to it and really enjoyed it. I also really like the name. Where did that come from?

Jess: I don’t know if this is on anyone else’s For Your Page on TikTok but, the hashtag #corecore and 2000s nostalgia stuff. Where people are going on Flickr and Photobucket and grabbing random people’s old digicam photos from 15-20 years ago. Photos of someone’s house or your older brother’s gamer room that are really of the time. I started seeing that come up a lot on TikTok and I really loved looking at the photos, being immediately flooded with nostalgia. People started creating these fake narratives around these photos. It’ll be someone’s photo with the caption ‘I’m going into blockbuster today’, then it’s like ‘Saying goodbye to mom now’, then it’s a photo of a CD player being like ‘I’m about to play some music’ but then the next photo says ‘Actually, the quiet is nice’ because they didn’t decide to put music on.

Adrian: Yeah, and I relate to that. I drive in silence.

No, you do not.

Adrian: Yes, I do. It’s very bizarre. Sometimes I can’t listen to music. But yeah, that is a long version of how we came up with the name.

Jess: I kind of stole the name so I will have to speak to the TikTok creator about that [laughs]. I feel like it was perfect for the EP because almost all the visuals were related to or shot through an old TV. Everything is about the look of childhood and how it felt.

Do you think that influenced the way you worked on the EP?

Jess: Yeah, I think we started writing songs about creepy things that happened to us in childhood. Naturally our music is about looking for that feeling of nostalgia and then for some reason when we were making the EP, we were both indulging in that a lot, watching old videos on YouTube of 90s weather channel music, and looking at old photos.

Adrian: I found myself reflecting on a lot of things I wish I could’ve done differently.

You guys put out your last album, Dark Fire Heresy mid last year. Was it intentional when you finished that album that you wanted to follow it up so quickly?

Adrian: Yeah, it was to a degree. We are working on a full-length record right now. It is quite an ambitious project, and we felt the need to put together a transitional piece, almost like a bridge to what will be the follow up LP. This buys us time to work on it. It was also really fun to work on because we went into it without taking the audience into consideration and doing exactly what we wanted.  

That’s really cool. How different does it feel when you don’t really care about the response you’d get from the audience and just make the music you want to make?

Jessica: It makes us care less about how weird it is because you have an instinct to do something that you haven’t heard before. You like it and you know you like it, but you can also so easily talk yourself out of it if you care too much about what other people think and you don’t want to be perceived as weird or I don’t want it to feel weird for someone. Feeling less pressure just makes you want to do it because it’s what you want to do.

Adrian: Even going back to how I drive in silence. When I am working on a record a lot of the time, I won’t listen to other music to stop it from influencing me.  

Woah, I’ve never heard anyone say that before. That is crazy.

Adrian: What can tend to happen is if you are working on something and if you’ve got a vision for a body of work you can very easily be influenced by someone else’s work. I’ve had it happen before where I start second guessing myself because I’m listening to what other people are doing.

Were there any songs in particular on the EP where you were like I really don’t care what anyone thinks about this?

Adrian: Yeah, ‘Recharge’. It’s funny because even when I introduced that song to the band, they were a little perplexed by it at first.

Jessica: Yeah, we were like this isn’t going to work.

Adrian: But I am really happy everyone in the band trusts me when I decide to go a little crazy with song ideas. That was one of the ones, I just didn’t care.  

Yeah, how did ‘Recharge’ come up?

Adrian: Recharge was supposed to be an ambient track. The original idea was for it to be an ambient track, almost an intermission in the middle of the record. I don’t know how but it eventually evolved into what it is now.

Jessica: We had a modular drum machine beat and we were like this could be chill.

Adrian: It reminded us of the stuff you would hear on a Throbbing Gristle record. We are really into that stuff, and it just naturally evolved into what it is now. We just kept on adding to it and before we knew it, it became the song.

I really like that song, it kind of shocks you when you’re listening to the album.  

Adrian: Thanks, that song live is one of the hardest songs to figure out how to play. When we write songs, we don’t think about how the songs are going to translate live, so that was a tricky one.

Jessica: We love industrial music too. Sometimes it can be industrial to the point of being cheesy and we play that with a little bit in ‘Recharge’. Cheesy not in a bad way either.

Adrian: Yeah, no it all comes from a genuine place. The subject matter behind the song is very serious and I felt like that was the only way I could get across what I was feeling emotionally when I was working on the song.

It is nice that you can convey that meaning in more ways than just lyrics and you aren’t bound by the way your other music sounds.

Adrian: Exactly. That’s been the number one goal of this project, to not feel like we are stuck in this category because everyone is so obsessed with genres and pigeonholing a band.

Well yeah, I feel like you are working with the perfect people to allow that.

Adrian: Yeah, there is a lot of trust in each other. I have been in projects where you get that sort of look, of ‘what the fuck’ but that doesn’t very often in this band.

Yeah. I read something recently that was talking about if genre is dead. I feel like you guys fit into that too.

Adrian: Yeah, I agree, we are constantly being called a shoegaze band and there is nothing wrong with that, because I’d rather people interpret it freely.

Jessica: When someone sticks really hard to a genre it feels like you are cosplaying a genre and following the rules about what it’s supposed to be.

How do you guys feel about the exclusive shoegaze label sometimes?

Adrian: I’m okay with it but I personally don’t like a lot of shoegaze music. At least like what Spotify says it is. I feel like most of it is a vibe more than it is good song writing. I feel like I just hear the same generic riff in shoegaze music these days that is being spoon fed to people and I just can’t get into it.

Jessica: Are you talking about zoomer shoegaze?

Adrian: I’m talking about a lot of shoegaze, but there is this wave of TikTok shoegaze that I just can’t get into.

Yeah, there is so much I’ve seen stuff that is not shoegaze being labelled as shoegaze.

Adrian: Yeah, it is lazy.

Jessica: It’s just like a popular word right now.

Yeah, it’s like a buzzword.

Adrian: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

Actually, the quiet is nice is coming out on Julia’s War how has it been working with They Are Gutting a Body of Water on the album?

Jessica: I don’t know if he would like this, but people call him the ‘Shoegaze Dad’. He is the only person we know that is really going hard taking care of the music community and encouraging people to do things yourself, super independently. We are all really into the music coming out of Philly, all our favourite bands are coming from that scene, and he is basically running it. In LA it’s different we don’t have a lot of that, and our sound is more compatible with what is coming out over there, so it just felt right to release our music through the label. It sounds like it belongs on it.

Everything going on in the Philly scene and with what Doug is doing is so good.

Adrian: Yeah, so far, I haven’t seen anyone on that label miss. It’s been cool and he is such an easy person to work with.

Jessica: He is really caring about our process.

To wrap this up I found an interview you guys did in 2020 and they asked you ‘What do you love about your music?’ and now four years on I’d love to ask you the same question. What do you love about your music?

Jessica: I like that it is very heavily synth oriented. We were just talking about this yesterday about how a lot of bands we love right now that are doing a lot of experimental shoegaze adjacent music, I hear a lot of synths in the music, but I don’t see any synth players in the bands. Our music live has just as prominent synth sound as guitar.

Adrian: What I like about our music is that it is so unapologetically us. It comes from a place of anger but also blissfulness.

Jessica: I think we are all these really emotional people who have these really high, highs and low, lows. It is a blessing and a curse, but for us music is such a familiar way to express that.