Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week Dobbin and Joe chatted to Juni and Tyler of Second Impact on their new EP and the track meanings.
Content warning: We’ve marked a short section about half way through that includes discussion of sexual assault.
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Spotify stream can be found here.
Dobbin: How have you felt about the reception of the EP?
Tyler: It’s been unnecessarily positive, as far as people talking about it, sharing it, and wanting to talk to us about it, for a band that has only been around for about six months.
Juni: I’m really surprised you folks reached out to us, I think it’s very sweet and very cool. I’m so grateful people have actually gone out of their way to check Effigy out. We’ve been pushing everything ourselves, with not a lot of help from the outside until now.
Dobbin: I wanted to start by talking a bit about the production, because it’s good to establish that early and think about the recording process. I think the record hits this really amazing sweet spot. It’s not an AAA release, but it’s kind of exactly the aesthetic that you would want. How long did it take to record?
Tyler: We worked with Lee Dyess who has done like a lot of stuff for my other band GILT. It was done in Valdosta, Georgia. We could have recorded it in my garage, where I recorded most of my other bands stuff. I really believed in Second Impact and I wanted the studio treatment because, for most of them, they’ve never been in a real studio. I wanted them to have that experience, because going to a studio is totally different from playing shows. For a lot of hardcore kids, it’s all just play shows, play shows, play shows. That experience was very daunting for the people who were green to it, but I feel like everybody fell in love with Lee. He’s just one of my favourite people and I think he’s insanely talented.
Juni: He’s a good friend, and a good person to talk to you about the real stuff. It was an extremely comfortable process and it’s so crazy to work with people who are extremely down to earth.
Dobbin: One question I came up with is if in the in the future you were recording a LP and you had infinite money, who would you record with to match your sound or influences?
Tyler: Perhaps something like Higher Power, I really liked the kind of high production new metal stuff that they’re doing. Juni is a 900 year old man, in terms of their hardcore taste. They like stuff that sounds like it was recorded on a Nintendo DS. I don’t think it’s a question of having infinite money – it wouldn’t do us any service as the kind of band that we are. I think it has a lot more to do with working with people that we like.
Juni: I would rather go spend the money on riffs, I’m happy with how things sound. It doesn’t sound like we’re really trying to be something we’re not. Lee is just our friend, and I would be willing to work with other friends maybe in the future, and just see their take on recording and mixing and mastering our stuff. For now, I feel really comfortable where we’re at.
Tyler: Do you know Cersei?They’re one of my favourite hardcore punk bands. They have a discography that was very popular for many years that I found out about long after the band broke up. Then they came back with a higher quality recording and I was like, “Oh, the vibe is totally different”. In high def, it’s like when you take punk hardcore out of it’s kind of its low-res roots. It’s like getting uncomfortably close to somebody’s face and seeing the pores.
Juni: I would say that Cersei was a big influence for me. They were kind of one of my gateway hardcore punk bands as well. They’ve not been afraid to be different as well and lyrically, and I really love a lot of the stuff they put out. I’ve loved how their sound has evolved over the years as well.
Dobbin: In terms of other key influences, musically, and lyrically, are there any particular bands you want to highlight?
Tyler: When I was pitching the band to them, I said “what if Basement had the beatdown parts?” The riff on “Placeholder” to me is like a Basement riff. We went from there to Juni dumping all the crazy old school straight up hardcore, and then we mashed that together.
Juni: I’m sure our sound will change or whatever in the future. I have a lot of love for the DIY scene, scrams and early emo, metalcore and whatnot. I told Tyler what could be the Mitski of hardcore.
Tyler: We have a really interesting mix of tastes. Our bass player also named Tyler loves hardcore – he’s the one in the pit windmilling like every night. Also, mathcore and emo, really sing-song emo. There’s a big variety that we can pull from, and part of that is why I feel like Effigy is a little sampler platter. Here’s a straight up hardcore song, here’s a more emo, less hardcore song. And then the stuff in the middle is like mixtures of those things.
Dobbin: Let’s jump into discussing the tracks. Starting with the opening track – that title drop is so cool. I love that it’s coming out in like Spanish. Is there a link for you guys there with with the Spanish language?
Juni: I am half Mexican and half Irish. I grew up in a Mexican household with my father. I had a very tumultuous life where I’ve been uprooted and disconnected culturally from that side of myself. In these current years of my life, I’ve been trying to find ways to reconnect and reteach myself the language that I knew when I was younger. I’ve been really trying to do that because, I feel a great void of community within myself. I know I’m half white and all that, but I still feel like it doesn’t take away from my love and appreciation I have for my culture. And I would like to represent that in my heart as well.
Tyler: Juni does all the lyrics, but my step mom’s half Spanish and I grew up with her and my step grandmother who is an immigrant from Spain. So as soon as Juni was like, “I want to focus on like my heritage”. I was like, “let’s go”.
Dobbin: I love the tempo shifts on “Hedonist”. That must take some practice, right?
Tyler: I don’t think it’s necessarily even the tempo shifts which are more natural. Ones where there’s a space, then we just need to come in at a different speed – you all have to be counting the same way in your head. Last night, we had a filler drummer because our main drummer Joel is on tour with his other band Tala. You forget that he does the service of giving you little cues that aren’t on the record. When the filler drummer comes in, it’s like, “oh, shit, what? How do we communicate this to each other…”. You forget, because you’re such a tight knit group that you have to communicate for live settings versus the record.
Juni: Shout out to Josh for filling in, that was awesome. With Joel and the group, we just have we have really good chemistry together. It’s crazy. We’re just usually mostly on the same page.
Dobbin: On “Nine Lives” you have Asha coming in from GILT. For the uninitiated, what’s like the connection to this band and GILT?
Tyler: I’m in GILT,and they are my ‘main’ band. I’ve been doing it for eight years at this point. Juni and I met because they moved to Florida and within like two weeks, we met on the internet. I was like, “hey, GILT has an Audiotree and our bassist can’t do it. Do you want to come and join us?”. They played about eight shows with us on tour on the way to Audiotree.
Juni: I was going through like one of the worst times of my life and kind of rusty on bass. I had gone through this horrible breakup, and when we meet up I was just going through it. Tyler was just pounding the parts into me all through the road, and I had my tabs on stage for the first three shows.
Tyler: That’s sick, that’s real shit. I loved working with Juni and so when Nico, our bassist, came back, Juni was still on my roster of people I wanted to do something with. When I got back from a Europe tour, I wrote some demos, just because. They were just not GILT, it was too hardcore influenced. I showed it to some friends and questioned if I should do this. They said that, unless you want to be a hardcore band, this is a different project. I asked Juni if they wanted to do vocals on it but the being the little fucking gremlin that I am like, yeah, of course, I want to double dip I want to get my singer to do the cool little scream bit in the emo a song. The other night night, Asha came to the show and just gets to walk up on the stage whenever we play a local show and do the bit. I love that shit.
Juni: I love it because GILT l are some of my best friends as well. I love and respect to everyone in that band. The time I got to spend with y’all was so, so meaningful, and important for my development as an artist. I’m so happy that Asha got to feature on “Nine Lives”. That means the world to me, they are incredible and also one of my best friends.
Content warning: discussion of sexual assault in this section.
Dobbin: “I am going to kill you, I have a gun.”, this is fantastic name, and unsurprisingly it’s it’s very much one of these ‘I am going to hurt you’ hardcore songs. I do want to ask specifically, who is this about? The lyrics are not overly specific, but it does help to hear a song like this have it clarified.
Juni: I am a victim of sexual assault, and many people around me that I love also have experienced that. I had an encounter last year from someone in the hardcore scene that took advantage of me, and definitely manipulated me into feeling like I was safe when I wasn’t. I had just started writing demo at the time. I’m really happy I got to get that out there, and I hope people can relate. I feel like this is a topic that needs to be discussed more. These fuckers can’t be getting away with this shit.
Dobbin: The track is super effective and it absolutely gets you pumped. If you read the track lyrics, that is what you’d assume it’s about, without naming it. It works on on so many levels, so if somebody’s not really ready to completely engage with the topic because of you know, personal reasons, then they can still rock out to this song.
Juni: I feel like I’m way, way, way too personal with my art and my lyricism and my poetry. I feel like I’m too blunt and I’m too raw, and I get scared that I isolate people. So I’m really happy to hear from an outside perspective that it could be interpreted in other ways as well.
Dobbin: Lyrically, I feel like I was able to read the lyrics of most of the songs and come up with an interpretation of the track. However, “Vultures” is one that I wasn’t able to pin down. What is that song about?
Juni: When I wrote the lyrics to that song, I was actually on my way to see GILT at a parking garage show in Orlando. Apparently these shows have been happening on top of the UCF parking garage for like 10 years and it’s never been a problem. Suddenly, the cops roll up and they shut the gig down and they start ticketing people. I don’t think anyone got arrested but it was definitely shut down. It was just heartbreaking and extremely fucking unnecessary. This has been literally happening forever and you’re just now deciding to make a problem out of it. It was just really scary, it’s like, “oh, great, another little DIY space where we could all be safe and making music shows”.
I was living in Austin, Texas, before I moved to Florida. I’ve seen the dwindling of DIY spaces and as well as just how easy and violent gentrification has been in our lifetime. It’s just really scary. It feels like the world around us is not even a real place.
I wanted to find the right place to live. I thought on the GILT tour, visiting friends and other cities, I would find where I belong. With gentrification, every city is the same, it’s all the same chains. All of the smaller businesses are getting gutted and replaced with soulless white people taco places. I’ve just now come to realise, it doesn’t really even matter where you go with the people, it’s the culture, that’s what’s most important.
We got to keep fighting for these DIY spaces, and fighting for people of colour and for people to exist where they’ve always existed, and not be pushed out. That was my inspiration for “Vultures”.
Dobbin: In the UK perspective, I think we sit here and we hear about these basement shows in the US. We don’t get a lot of that here. We all know that DIY spaces that are good and really feel welcoming are suddenly becoming so important because it just galvanises everything around it and accelerates everything.
Juni: It’s not even as simple as like, “oh, we could just play under a bridge”. Conceptually that’s so cool, but now the city is requiring a fucking cop to be there.
Tyler: What Juni is saying is not hyperbole specifically. Florida doesn’t have basements, you can’t dig into the ground in Florida, you’re just going to hit the ocean again. Florida has this issue where music culture is very tied to bar culture, which is extremely exclusive to young people. Specifically in Jacksonville, which is our town, a lot of the kids took to playing under the bridge under the overpass because Jacksonville is a massively loud city. Nobody even noticed.
Tyler: They set up their own thing, nobody’s getting hurt. The city has cracked down and they have to get an official permit, which means there must be a police person present, which of course goes against everything like the punk kids care about. That puts us in a weird position. Do you sell out some of your ethics, and you play the free show under the bridge? And there’s a cop there? Or do you play the show at a venue that costs you $200 a night to rent, and then the touring band doesn’t get any money or the locals don’t get paid? It’s a really rough decision to make.
Dobbin: The final track, “Placeholder”, is my favourite track on the EP. I love hardcore and I also love emo, and you come straight out with it on this track. Would you do this a bit more in the future?
Juni: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been a pretty divisive band. Since we’ve released it people are like, “Oh, y’all are so interesting. You’re a breath of fresh air, you’re doing something different”, or it’s “Oh, y’all are cringe. You’re soft. You’re pussies. Oh, you’re fake. You’re posers. You’re Tik-Tok core”. Just because we have multiple influences and we’re just doing what we love and trying to combine it. I would be interested in still doing similarly or exploring it or seeing where it goes in the future – but also, what if we just got nastier?
Tyler: If I can talk small shit on the hardcore scene and not get my ass kicked… We played a lot of shows before we dropped the thing because knew what the songs were going to be. We wanted to know what people thought of them live, and then see what the reception was on the internet, as the listening experience of a record versus a live show is different. I really was excited to get into ‘hardcore’ spaces and with “Vultures” when we have a song like “I want to kill you, I have a gun”, which like you said, is kind of open to interpretation. So because that song has a lot of ‘I’m going to hurt you’, that’s generally universally liked. Also, it has a cool bass groove.
With “Vultures”, Juni would usually lead with like, ‘fuck gentrification’. If it was a punk show, like a hardcore punk show, those audiences would care about that, but like proper beatdown-y hardcore bands aren’t as socially political, and they would just kind of stand there. I feel like it’s the same with “Placeholder”, where it’s like, ‘okay, I know you can windmill, I know you can spin kick. But can you dance? Can you groove? Can you just stand there and bob your head and enjoy yourself?’. A lot of the tough guys can’t, which is crazy, because those same tough guys are the ones who are going to like, like, ‘Oh, I love Citizen’. There is music for like hardcore guys with feelings but they feel weird when we mix it in at the show.
Juni: I don’t know if it’s because I’m a femme and we’re queers. And everyone feels weird about it.
Tyler: I will say that the first show we ever played was a house show for this teenage straight edge, power violence band. I love them so much, shout out The Critters! They came up afterwards and like, I can’t wait to hear this recorded, because I know that last song is going to be my favourite song. There’s a lot of people who do like it and come up if they’re a ‘lyrics’ person, or a ‘mood’ person. It’s like Juni said, it’s completely divisive. Do we have to prove ourselves to the tough guys? Do we have to just write some chromatic speeder chugs? Or do we just do our own thing? I don’t know. I like Regulate, I like One Step Closer, I like bands that are doing something that isn’t just chromatic chugs, but I also love chromatic chugs.
Juni: I want to be the Mitski of hardcore and talk about my feelings, but also I love listening to just the nastiest riff like a caveman just discovered fire. That also tickles my brain and in a good way. I just wanna to do both of those things. “Placeholder” is definitely my favourite track I’ve ever been able to lyrically write as well as record vocals for. Tyler gave me a lot of room to explore, so it felt like I could come on the topic I was talking about from multiple angles.
Tyler: We had a really good time working together specifically on the “Was I at least your favourite?” part. The the dichotomy of the soft and hard and soft and hard – I think that’s gonna fuck up somebody’s mood, but it’s going to be really effective.
Juni: Many people have come up to me at shows, or have just hit me up, said “I cried to this song”.
(Joe raised his hand.)
Tyler: I’m so used to that from GILT. The only thing people ever say to us is like, ‘this music makes me cry’. Then tell me about a family member who died or something. In Second Impact, it’s very strange to see that.
Dobbin: When I read these lyrics, I get a bit of a breakup song, kind of vibe. It also goes a bit beyond that with ‘I am a graveyard where love goes to die’. That is way more than breakups, what were you exploring with that?
Juni: I had a pretty rough life; I was in foster care, homeless, and in an orphanage. I was very not-connected to my family throughout the majority of my childhood. Now I do have some relatives that are there for me in the ways they can be, but it’s been a pretty lonely journey. I tried to find that community and comfort through my romantic endeavours. It felt like, anytime they would fail, something was just inherently wrong with me, like I was truly unlovable. Like, ‘oh, it happened again, and again. And again, I can’t do it, right. I’m never good enough’. No matter how I try to force myself or make myself smaller, it’s not enough.
Through the trauma I’ve been through, I have cPTSD and I have borderline personality disorder. I have been in extremely toxic and abusive relationships because it’s honestly really easy for people with my kind of brain to get into these situations, really hard to get out of. It’s different in the sense that lot of people can handle a breakup and be like, ‘Oh, I’m sad that person didn’t work out’. I’ve got to focus on myself and for me with how my brain is wired. From the things I’ve been through, it almost feels like I’ve lost family or a part of myself every time, and it takes me to a really, really low place, and it’s something I still struggle with. I think I’ve come a long way, trying to be nicer to myself and treat myself like I would treat my friends. I’m very loyal and understanding, and see my friends as these beautiful complex people that are allowed to navigate their hardships and be better from it. I haven’t granted myself the same grace. “Placeholder” is about a particularly bad breakup where I was cheated on by someone, but it was about a lot more than that.
Dobbin: In the lyrics “Placeholder” you sing the line ‘Am I an effigy?’ which becomes the title of the EP. Does this idea of an effigy encapsulate that up in any way?
Juni: I would say so. A lot of this is really just my yee-haw BPD ramblings, and I have felt very much like that, for a long time. From familial abuse, toxic friendships, toxic relationships, I have just been someone that is easy to project onto?
Dobbin: I wanted to ask about another name, and that’s the band name. I am assuming Second Impact is a subtle Evangelion reference?
Tyler: Yeah it is. We keep running into this issue that probably wouldn’t happen in Europe, but in America, everyone keeps going, ‘Oh, is it a 911 thing?’. I keep having having to be like, ‘No’. Everyone has said ‘oh, you should make Twin Tower shirts’. I really don’t think we should. Yes, I’m very lefty and I’m very anti-government and anti-military, and I have opinions on the war and stuff. But a bunch of people died in 9/11, so I don’t really know about leaning into that. Instead, everybody on Earth dying and turning into one consciousness, and then that consciousness turning into the pain of existence again – totally fine.
Thank you to Juni and Tyler for sitting down us with us, you can find links to the Second Impact socials here.