Kill The Artist, Hype The Trash: Solid Gold from Wiredogs
by Tim Wenger
“I feel like we’re ending the year on a really high note,” says Wiredogs front man Dan Aid of the band’s work in 2014, the energy in his voice forcing a smile onto his face. “We got to play Riot Fest and got to play with bands that we really love and really admire.” The band will be carrying that momentum into 2015 and wasting no time building on it- Wiredogs will drop their much-anticipated album Kill The Artist, Hype The Trash on January 24 by throwing a party at the Marquis Theatre with Allout Helter and Slow Caves (see CMB’s review of the album on page 16). The show will be a benefit for Youth on Record, a local non-profit that “works to create positive social change by harnessing the power of music and those who love it,” according to their Facebook page.
Wiredogs will be wasting no time bringing the album to the masses following its release. “We’re immediately getting on the road that week and heading out to LA,” says Aid. “We’re (also) going down to South by Southwest in March for the first time.”
The group also has demos for over 20 new song ideas, and hope to put out an additional release later in 2015, but for now the big focus is on Kill The Artist, Hype The Trash. The name alone appears to say a lot, and there is a good a reason as any for choosing it. “The name of the album came out of a conversation,” says Aid. “Our drummer Stefan (Runstrom) was a driver for Riot Fest last year when it was out in Byers, and one of the things that he got to do was drive Iggy Pop around. At the end of his set, (Iggy) mooned the crowd. He busted his zipper and he couldn’t quite get his pants up to his hips again, and he couldn’t get them down, so we has just waddling to the car with his British manager and his wife. He gets to the car, his manager tells him to sit down and he pulls his pants off. Stefan was sitting in the driver’s seat while (Iggy’s) manager strips him naked. Then Stefan had to drive him back to town. He drove him to the airport the next day too, and I guess Iggy had been reading an article about the state of the music industry and he said this thing that Stefan remembered. He said that the whole attitude of the industry these days was about killing the artists and hyping the trash.”
“He just through it out there so subtly, but to Stefan, he remembered it,” says bassist Mark Hibl. “He profoundly stated what we want to say, and he summed it up in six words. It was perfect.”
Earlier this year, Runstrom moved to Chicago to live with his wife for the first time since their wedding, leaving the three to figure out how they were going to continue functioning as a band, and more importantly, as a band that is rapidly gaining momentum around Denver. While the challenge has proved a tough one, the three guys have been able to continue progressing and playing key shows, although they’ve had to deal with flying Runstrom in and the challenge of getting just as much work done with less time. They look at the challenge as a positive, another way to tighten themselves as a group, and a way to learn how to maximize their efficiency when they were together. “Part of it was trying to figure out what that relationship was becoming with him not living here anymore, it shook things up but not in a bad way,” says Aid. “We knew that the relationships were important enough that we had to keep working together. It made us be very purposeful about the time we spent together, but it was hard to figure that out.”
As far as the songs on the album, Aid sought to tell a different story with each one. “The whole album, writing wise, came out of a really hard year for me and for all of us,” he says. “I moved twice, I got robbed at gun point, I came out of a relationship in a pretty dramatic way. Mark started a new relationship. “Incapacitated” is a song that I wrote, just stream of consciousness in the aftermath of the breakup I went through, just not wanting to feel present.”
The song “Fear Is A Lie” deals with loss. “I had a high school friend pass away really suddenly, she passed away seven to ten days after I had another friend O.D.,” says Aid. “The last thing that she posted up online was this photo of a wall and across it in big black letters were the words Fear Is A Lie. I wrote that down because I knew I was going to use it at some point. I’ve had a lot of young death in my life, it’s all been traumatic, so that song is about that.”
“They’re all about different things in a way,” says Hibl. “About personal things. There are some social messages that we’ve had in a lot of songs before. “Violence” is more of a social message.”
“’Violence’ came after we decided that we wanted the album to be called Kill The Artst, Hype The Trash. I had written this super aggressive guitar part, and I couldn’t find the write lyrics. I always want my first lines to be really cool because if you don’t grab people there than you missed out. Then I came up with this first line, ‘This is the violence,’ and I started to think about what I hold media and social media has over my life. I started to think about how that process of being controlled by the technology we have in our lives drives us further apart and drives us away from communicating and away from connection. To me, music is connection.”
One thing Wiredogs actively do not want to do with this record, or anything their band does, is pigeonhole themselves into one genre or one scene. Though their music may lend itself more the the punk rock genre than other genres, they actively play shows across genre lines and in venues that don’t generally book bands. Hip hop, for instance, has been appealing very much to Aid and Hibl of late. “We’ve been wanting to align ourselves with hip hop bands because we feel the energy and immediacy of hip hop music really fits well with punk rock and rock and roll,” says Hibl.
“If we like what you’re doing, we are getting better at telling those people that,” says Aid. “I feel like if you don’t reach out and don’t let people know that you like what they do, you’re robbing them of the inspiration to write something new and you’re robbing yourself of the relationship with somebody that’s probably going to inspire you to create something totally new.”
“The underground hip hop stuff that’s happening right now is, to me, way more punk rock than punk rock is right now,” says Aid. Aid actually reached out to BLKHRTS about having them on the bill for the album release, but they are in LA these days. “We’re gonna meet up out there. We have such respect for what they do.”
“I think we’ve always wanted to write honest music, and just do it the best we can,” says Aid. “We’re learning and growing, and we don’t always get it right, but we’re willing to share that process with everybody. We’re not scared of that process. We know we’re going to fuck up sometimes, but we always want to bring ourselves to the table as honestly as we can.”
Online: wiredogsmusic.com
Category: Buzzworthy
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
 |
 |
