On album Currency // Castration Naarm/Melbourne hardcore band, Geld, have found a perfect balance of ferocity and ecstasy. Capturing the raw intensity of anxiety and the transformative power of release, they’ve dialled it up, coalescing all they’ve done before into making a brilliant record, their best yet. The album never drags, and it’s not the heavy moments that hit hardest, it’s the points of difference that have helped Geld carve out their own identity and enables them to stand apart from the heavy pack.

Geld’s guttural vocalist, Al Smith, sat down with Gimmie for an hours-long chat. He discussed the band, their album, hardcore, and the isolation the band has felt. Al also tells of wild shows, having a boner for community, and of a tour where he could have died. Additionally, we discuss Turnstile, soapboxes, and mental health. He also speaks about a Naarm/Melbourne band deserving of wider recognition, and his involvement in other bands with new releases in the works: The Neuros and The Vacant Lot.

In a couple of years, I’ll have been chatting with punk and hardcore bands for 30 years. I’ve been doing it since I was teen.

AL SMITH: Wow. There’s so much stuff in the scene aside from being in bands, those auxiliary roles of photographers and writers that are important. It seems like there’s no one actually doing any writing much at the moment. What you’re doing is pure music journalism.

Thank you. I just write about something I love and share that with people. 

AS: When I was young, I came from the suburbs and didn’t know anyone in music. The way that I would consume music and find out about stuff was through community radio. I had my Maximum Rocknroll subscription and I’d go down to Missing Link and get all the fucking zines and pore through it all. That’s not really a thing that happens anymore.

We started Gimme online during the pandemic and started doing the print issue too. In the first year I interviewed over 150 bands. We mail the print zine out ourselves, and it was really cool to see where it goes, a lot of regional places, which is awesome! We’d get nice messages from people that got it, saying that it really helped them feel connected to music and the scene, especially during lockdowns.

AS: That’s incredible. When we got interviewed to do our bio. Everyone at Relapse was like, ‘Look, if there’s going to be one thing, aside from the record itself, that you actually think about and want to get right, it’s the bio.’ Because every single publication is just going to rinse and repeat that.

I was vanity searching, seeing what people have been saying about the record. If someone does 200 words aside from them just posting the bio, that’s a lot of effort, it seems. It’s wild that that’s the landscape of music journalism.

On a grassroots level, it seems like people are just kicking these bios down the road. I was reading Gimmie, and it’s obvious you guys really care about music. It’s a dying art form to do actual hard music writing. What you’re doing is cool. We were really happy that you asked us to have a chat. 

I’ve been wanting to talk to you for ages! I only knew you through your live shows and music, and you seemed pretty scary, so I was reluctant to ask. Talking to you now, obviously you’re not scary.

AS: [Laughs]. It’s all pretend!

Just before we started chatting, I was really nervous, despite doing this for so long I still get nervous before talking to anyone. To be honest, I feel kind of awkward anyway in social situations. 

AS: I’m the same. With a one-on-one, I’m like aces. But if you get a group of four people, I’m shocking. But also, I could imagine it being a little confronting because you don’t know what this person’s gonna be like as conversationalist. Maybe you’ll be like, so how was making the record? And they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s fine.’ That’s it [laughs].

There’s lots of things I want to talk to you about, because I LOVE Geld, and other bands you’ve been part of as well. Why is music important to you? 

AS: I was a bit of a loner when I was younger, and getting into music in early high school was a thing that I actually cared about. The only reason I wanted to start playing in bands is, I wanted to contribute to the cause. All these people that I love from afar are doing all these fantastic things. And it feels disingenuous to get so much out of something without throwing your hat in the ring. Like you with writing, or again, photographers, or people that love to book shows and stuff. It’s contributing to something. A huge part of it was, on a personal level, my own sense of agency.

Playing in Geld has been something where it’s like, we’ve all been in heaps of bands and we’re all a little bit older and we just wanted to do a band that was the synthesis of everything we like about being in a band. That includes friendship, the social dynamic to how its collected in an artistic standpoint. It’s weird to think about it because I’ve been playing music for, shit, maybe almost going on 20 years now! It’s now just, like, fucking wallpaper—one big thing. 

When the pandemic happened and we didn’t have shows, that routine that we’re all so used to wasn’t there. For a while, it was refreshing because it can be exhausting going to shows and doing the whole thing.

When that period of lockdown was over and we could somewhat safely start going to shows again, I had this real come-to-Jesus moment where I was like, holy shit! I totally took for granted how much this enriches me as a person and how it’s like, magic. My mental health started to get so much better. I started going to shows and started playing shows again.

There’s that old adage: someone’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go play this show,’ or ‘I’m going to The Tote again,’ or something like that. When it all came back, there was this refreshed air of positivity. I think a lot of people had the same experience as me. It was like, oh, this is actually a really important community that does offer lots to people.

It’s sort of always been the only thing that’s really made sense to me. It’s like an extra limb. It’s just sort of there.

I totally get you because I feel the same. We wouldn’t have stuck with this so long if it wasn’t important to us. Music gives us so much. You find friends through music. It’s gives you community. It helps you discover and express yourself. I found my husband through music. All the things that I do, it’s pretty much because of music. It can give a sense of purpose. 

When I first got into the punk and hardcore in my teens, I became really obsessed with it. For a while, it became so much part of my identity. As I experienced more and grew as a person, I learned that there’s a much bigger world out there.

AS: Yeah. I’m always a little tentative to drink the Kool Aid too hard. Because the last thing you want to be is a really fucking boring person that is just like, ‘My personality is hardcore,’ that sounds kind of gross.

Totally! 

AS: You can draw a direct line from punk and hardcore—by extension, music in general—to basically everything in my life. Like you, I met my partner through music. My entire friendship circle is sort of geared around this thing, and, again, something like the pandemic made you take a step back and realise, oh, okay, it is a pretty seismic change to take away something that you’re constantly doing; you just take it for granted.

At one point in my life, I enlisted into this thing because I cared about it from a personal level. It started to permeate into other parts of my life, like my social circle. I’m super lucky that I was around a scene that was a real diverse scene. A lot of people aren’t as lucky as us to be in a community that has different folks from different genders and backgrounds. I’m so lucky that I had heaps of women in my life—strong women—that were able to help shape a lot of my core values, that have sort of unconsciously come into me. I’m pretty happy with where I stand with my values right now.

Honestly, if you do the Sliding Doors-thing, and I went off and did something else, maybe I wasn’t going to have those values, and maybe I wouldn’t have this kind of mindset that I hold pretty dear. Along with having mates to get pissed with and being able to see sick bands, there’s also a certain moral compass that gets defined within people in a small community that is so diverse.

What are the things you value? 

AS: I’ve got a real massive boner for community. Ultimately, at the end of the day, those are the things that are important: having a connection to people and being able to create and do things in this very holistic context. We all take it for granted from time to time, but it’s something that’s so enriching for so many reasons. I guess I’m the biggest lefto soy boy cuck there is! [laughs].

To be honest with you, it’s somewhat uncomfortable to talk about your values because I don’t want to be like, ‘Of course, I’m like a far-left leaning person that is very heavily centred around community.’

I know what you mean. I asked about your values because you mentioned you’re happy with them and I was curious to know more. I got many of my values sparked from being part of our community, even just through listening to punk bands, reading liner notes, and interviews with bands, I learned so much. For example, it made me take an interest in politics and influenced my dietary and lifestyle choices.

AS: Those kind of things can spawn from a superficial standpoint, like, ‘That cool person is doing that thing.’ But then after a while, you can look back at it and think about it, and it’s like, ‘Oh, no, this is actually something that’s pretty cool.’

I’m endlessly grateful that I fell arse-backwards into a community that was able to help me shape my ideas in a pro-human context. Because if I was to be ingrained in a corporate community or something like that, I don’t know if I would still have these same values. That’s kind of scary.

People scare me most days. 

AS: Oh, that’s because everyone’s awful by and large. 

[Laughter]

Don’t even get me started. That’s part of why I do stuff like interviewing people one-on-one or doing behind-the-scenes stuff. I don’t want to be out the front or the face of anything. I’m not interested in attention. I just want to put good work out into the world to counter all the negative I see and experience.

AS: Yeah, I know what you mean. Having a one-on-one conversation, there’s a lot more meat on that bone.We’ve done a bunch of interviews with us as a band, and you kind of fall back into canned answers. Questions are the same, and so you’re just saying the same thing, and it feels like you’re just reeling off a script a little bit. Not that it’s not true, but there’s only so much you can talk about when someone’s like, ‘So you’re a psychedelic hardcore band…’ That was coined one day, and we feel really uncomfortable about it.

I get that; I find labels pretty flaky in general. Geld have a new album called Currency // Castration. One of the first things I noticed, is the title is two meanings for geld. 

AS: Correct. We wanted that title because it’s quite good from a visual standpoint; it looks pretty stark. Playing in Germany, basically the healthiest scene in Europe (it might have changed since we were last there, but it was so when we played seven or eight shows there), without fail, there would be some lovely but also equal parts punishing German person come up to me and be like, ‘Did you know that Geld means money in German?’ We were like, yes, we have access to the internet. That’s actually why we named it that. I would be like, ‘Do you know it actually means castration in English?’ And they would be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ That’s been a running gag in Geld for a minute now.

To be a bit more serious about it, this record was also the most collaborative record that we have done thus far in terms of how many members are actually contributing songs. We also did think it was a pretty concise synthesis of what we thought the band was like, a good representation. For an all-encompassing record, it suits to have an all-encompassing name. 

I don’t know if we’ll make another record that we feel is so encapsulating of what we want Geld to be, or what we think Geld is supposed to be at this particular time.

Album opener ‘Currency’ and closer ‘Castration’ are instrumentals. ‘Across A Broad Plain’ in the middle is too. 

AS: A lot of the time when we’re writing these records, what we’ll usually do is write anywhere between 15 and 20 songs. There will be no preconceived notions of what the record is supposed to be or what it’s going to sound like, or there’s no kind of conceptual identity to it. We’ll just keep writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and then after, if we feel like we’ve got enough of a base to work with, we’ll start trying to put things together and see, okay, do we have a record in this? That’s when the songs go onto the canvas and we just look at it and we’re like, okay, does it need anything more

Most of the time, we are like, okay, it probably needs some kind of interlude. It needs some sort of intro, it needs other things. So I guess for a lack of a better word, the ‘Currency’ and ‘Castration’ situation are an aesthetic thing, placeholder titles for interludes that we think are important to make the record feel complete and concise.

I noticed that song ‘Hanging From A Rope’ has the lyric: Across a broad plain in the new age. That song appears before ‘Across A Broad Plain’; are they connected in any way?

AS: Not necessarily. I just thought that it was a good line. ‘Hanging From A Rope’ is definitely the most effort I’ve ever put into lyrics of any song at all—I tried a little harder. Not that I don’t try with lyrics otherwise. If you’re singing about what you know… [pauses]. I’ve always felt really uncomfortable… [pauses again] what’s the best way to put this? I don’t want to dump on anyone. But I feel comfortable standing up on a stage and screaming about something that I can then look back at and be like, ‘Yeah, this is something I believe in and this is something that I can speak truth to power to.’ 

As a cis white middle-class man [laughs], there is a lot of shit going on in the world that is really fucked up, but I am also someone that is directly benefiting from it because of who I am and my background. So, it feels disingenuous to talk about like… what are the things that actually are going on with me. Most of it is inward and it’s my own mental health. My anxiety and things that are going on inward feel much more comfortable to me. Getting up on a stage and screaming about it, rather than talking about current events. I also feel uncomfortable with people time stamping songs.

‘Hanging From A Rope’ was from a lyrical standpoint is all pretty introspective, like most of the record. That’s always been a running theme in Geld. It’s not like we are nihilistic or apathetic to the things going on around us. But, if everything has been focused inwards, all of the anger comes from our limitations and the things that we struggle with personally, rather than us projecting out what is wrong with the world. Because as a bunch of dudes, I don’t feel comfortable with that. I feel much more comfortable talking about everything that’s wrong with me rather than everything that’s wrong with the world. I understand how some people would see that as difficult.

Everyone has problems. Everyone’s problems matter to them, and sometimes someone is going through something that doesn’t seem big to you but it’s massive to them.

AS: For sure. You never want to get into a fucking dick measuring contest with someone else’s problems because there’s no baseline, there’s no manual for grief and pain. If someone feels something, they feel it, period. That’s it. 

It’s cathartic for me in my own mental health, writing about that stuff. 

By you being open and sharing those kinds of things, it can help others that resonate with it. How many times have you listened to lyrics and thought, ‘Oh my god, this person gets me!’?

AS: Totally. Also from another angle, Geld has never set out to be a band that sounded different. We’ve all done genre bands before. We’ve all been in D-Beat bands and did a whole bunch of different kinds of music. Those bands are great, some of my favourite bands in the world are like hard, dyed in wool genre bands. But we wanted to do something where there is literally nothing that is not on the table. The only prerequisite is—to do something good. We all have this trust in each other to be objective about what is good, and what is bad, and have a really good bullshit filter. You can do whatever you want in the band.

In the beginning at least, that ended up isolating us a little bit because we were too much of a hardcore band for the punks and too much of a punk band for the hardcore bands. We felt pretty alienated. Maybe unconsciously, that permeated into the way that I’d write lyrics, because I would feel that. If the band is focused inwards, it makes sense for the lyrical content to toe the line with that.

There’s themes of alienation, isolation and anxiety on the record. A lot of songs are about your own mortality and time ticking away. 

AS: Yeah. Bemoaning the concept of time being created. It’s a day of me just being stressed as fuck and thinking, ‘Who the fuck started this?’ Someone did it. I want to find that motherfucker and I want to beat them up because they’re the worst. Someone just went, ‘Aaannd, go!’ and that’s how our lives work now. 

Yeah. Then you’ve got calendars and everything else that measures our existence, and keeps us on a schedule. 

AS: [Laughs] Another thing, from an aesthetic point of view, when I deal with anxiety in an episodic standpoint, re: panic attacks, obviously they’re bad experiences, but the other side of the coin is that that’s one of the times in my life where I feel the most powerful. Because just in terms of pure energy that is being put out, it’s quite confronting to feel so much emotion surging through you. In the most uncomfortable way, it’s also cathartic. 

I’ve always related the idea of all the hardcore bands and punk bands I like, when you can see sound, the aesthetic correlation; punk and hardcore sounds anxious. Everything is a tight spring that’s about to break. I’ve always loved it so much, it’s like techno. It’s about attack and release. That’s why people can mosh to it and people can dance at club nights. I see a like direct correlation between anxiety, pent up and then releasing.  

Yeah. I know that feeling.

AS: Isn’t that the best feeling in the world? Where you are seeing a band that is killing it and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you realise that your whole body is tensed. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I haven’t breathed in a while.’ [Laughs].

Totally! That was me at your show on the Gold Coast when you played Vinnie’s Dive.

AS: That was such a weird show [laughs].

It was the wildest show I’ve ever seen there. One of my all-time favourite live moments ever, is when you were talking to the crowd and told them, ‘Do better!’ Just after that, I saw a table thrown right into the middle of the pit. After your set, I saw at least five people bleeding. 

AS: Sorry. Now we play on a lot of different lineups, a lot of them being HxC lineups, and they don’t really know what to do with fast music because we’re not a two-step band.

For the longest time, again, being a generally uncomfortable person, I wouldn’t say anything to the crowd. Because it’s staunch and it’s stoic and it has this nihilistic standpoint… I’m like, I’m not even going to speak to you. I’m just going to yell and yada, yada, yada.

And then after a while, Cormy [Geld’s guitarist] said to me, ‘Hey, you should actually say stuff and engage because it’s a good thing—you should do it.’ I was like, ‘That’s so stupid, I hate that!’ Eventually, it started to happen, and I started to actually engage and verbalise.

I always thought that the things some people said on stage was sort of time-wasting, placeholder things like, ‘Oh, yeah, thanks for coming out,’ stuff like that. When you see those hardcore bands, the singer going off on some fucking diatribe, I’m just like, ‘That’s so uncomfortable. I feel so weird about that.’

But it’s true, though, people actually engage with the words that you’re saying. People aren’t necessarily present of their own place at a venue and someone’s like, ‘Can you actually do something?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, okay, what? Sure!’ Again, it’s all pretend.

I was standing at the front at your show, and when that table got thrown, I was like, ‘Nah, I’m out.’ I’m going to go stand at the back now because I didn’t want to get hurt.

AS: I seem to remember me standing on that table and immediately regretting it because it was not stable. 

So we were talking about you telling the audience to do better…

AS: Oh, yeah. Geld, we’re really big pro wrestling fans. It’s not a character, but… it would be disingenuous, especially for hardcore front people, to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that is totally how I am all of the time.’ Like, no, it’s not. Even if it is honest with yourself, it’s like this cartoony amplified version.

For me, it’s quite liberating to admit that it’s just a fucking… I’m just being antagonistic because… I don’t care if people move. It’s not going to keep me up at night [laughs]. But it’s fun playing to it. I get a giddy little thrill of just poking the bear and seeing if it’ll incite some kind of reaction. And it did at that show—win!

After seeing that show, we thought the Jerkfest set you were going to play, would be similar so we sat up on a table to avoid the craziness. But it didn’t end up being as wild.

AS: I’ve gotten to this unhealthy way of gauging the quality of shows by how much chaos happens. That is a bad road to go down. Especially because there’s a lot of variables that go into people going crazy and you would just be like, ‘Oh, not many people moved, so I guess we suck!’ Being a hardcore band that doesn’t make people move, you think it’s a bad show. But that’s not necessarily it at all. 

Do you have a show that you’ve played that was really memorable?

AS: Yeah, when we played in Boston in 2018, it was off the back of us doing Perfect Texture, the first record. People had moved at our shows before and we had some pretty crazy stuff happen, but it was the first insane show and probably because someone happened to film it. It’s on YouTube. I remember watching that back and it was like, oh, yeah, all of these wasted years seems like… it was really validating. 

it was during the summer in Boston and it was just like it would have been at, conservatively, north of 35, pushing 40 degrees on stage. Soon after that show, I ended up getting pneumonia. We still had four or five dates on the tour. I’m about to say something that’s going to be a real big flex, but if I hadn’t known it was pneumonia, 100% would have cancelled shows. But I just thought I had the flu or a bug. 

Every single night was hell. I was in the van shivering, freezing and sweating and just before we’re about to play, someone from the band would knock on the van window and I’d be, all right, let’s go do it! Peel myself out of the van and go and do it. I immediately get back into the van after, and be freezing. It was terrible. 

The last show was in New York and I had a couple of days with my partner. Luckily, I got travel health insurance and I went to the doctor. I was honest and told him what was actually going on. He was like, ‘You fucking idiot! You very easily could have died! Pneumonia is straight up, like water in the lungs. You had water in your lungs and you were screaming!’ [Laughs]. In a toxic masc[ulinity], part of my brain, I like, ‘Oh cool.’ But then I felt so embarrassed, like, all humans are supposed to not kill themselves. I felt like I did really badly at that. It was embarrassing. 

That’s so full on! Is there anything you do to look after your voice? Have you taught yourself ways to scream where it doesn’t harm you? 

AS:  Yeah, I think the latter. I try not to be an idiot about it because I have lost my voice on tour at times. Speaking of embarrassing moments, that is terrible. 

Do you feel like you let people down when that happens? 

AS: 100%. We played a show in Leipzig, and I had lost my voice. There was 250+ people at the show, and I was standing up in front of people being, ‘Sorry!’ It’s like, oh, god, no. I try and not overdo it. There’s ways to fake it without actually yelling. I’ve found a spot, because I haven’t lost my voice in a really long time.

You mentioned that playing the show in Boston, you felt really validated; did you feel validated signing to Relapse?

AS: Super. It’s so very validating! The nerdy suburban kid in me just feeling like I was listening to all of those Relapse bands when I was a teenager. All of us feel really over the moon with it.  

Because of the pandemic, by virtue of time, we ended up, this is the longest we’ve ever worked on a record. We  were working on the record for two years. It’s super validating, and it feels super rewarding to know that, the scope that Relapse has in terms of distribution and, how much effort goes into what they do; they’ve all been so fantastic. It feels good that something you’ve worked on for so long is getting the platform that is rewarding after that whole process. 

You guys have been doing it for sometime! In the next couple of weeks, it’s the anniversary of your first demo.

AS: Obviously you know more than I do [laughs]. It’s been a while. 

Your first demo came out in 2016.

AS: Oh, my god. Fuck. Yeah. So we’ll be skirting around 10 years soon. 

The discography that we’ve had, we are hyper-aware that it’s atypical for hardcore bands to exist for this long, and getting to a third record is not the most common thing for hardcore bands. We’ve spoken about it a bunch of times; we definitely do attribute that to the initial mission statement of Geld being a band that we all want to be in and that we all are concerned about each other. We’re concerned about how we all feel about it. We’re concerned about being able to be as artistically and socially free as possible.

It’s meant that whenever we finish a record, we don’t have time off. We’ll finish the record, and then it’s rehearsal the next week, and we’ll just start writing the next record. The initial mission statement of ‘nothing is off the table’ means that it’s always enriching to write stuff. It’s not like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just cut out this riff again.’ It’s, ‘No, let’s mess around and see what happens.’ That’s exciting.

We rehearse at Cormy’s house and have a bungalow that has been really poorly soundproofed. Cormy just had his third kid. There is another side, quite a familial side to it, because we usually roll up to practice, we spend time with Cormy’s wife and the kids. We hang out for a while, play with them. And then eventually we’ll just go and rehearse. We’ll rehearse for like a tight 2 hours and then bail. So we’re not at a rehearsal room on a Tuesday night being either hungover or just mentally bereft from the week ahead, being in a rehearsal room for like 6 hours. That’s so draining and unsustainable. We’ve put a lot of work into the personal sustainability of the band. That attributes to being a band for almost 10 years.

In that 10 years, we haven’t had a break. There’s been forced breaks of someone might go on holiday or something like that, but usually it’s, Thursday, every week we go to practise and do the thing. No one’s really over it. We’re just going to keep the thing rolling. 

You have something to look forward to every week? 

AS: Yeah. I get to hang out with everyone. I get to see Cormy’s family. Cormy and I are the only people that drink at practise. That’s one of my socialising nights. I’m sort of belabouring the point right now, but we’ve designed the band around us being happy and being enriched, so we want to actually do it. We want to make it the best thing it possibly can be. We are in love with this routine and this process that we’re in. 

Nice! One of the songs on the album is called ‘Success’; what does that looks like to you?

AS:  To be able to do this, you could argue that signing to Relapse is one of those things that would suggest that we have grander ideas of what we want to accomplish. But I think it’s more so that we just want to be a success making records that we’re proud of; that’s the most important thing. And going on tour and all of the other stuff that we got going on, that’s all just icing on the cake.

Success is feeling like we have done our best. When we eventually stop Geld, we’ll be able to look back on it and be like, ‘Yeah.’ We’ve been really lucky to get opportunities like Relapse. Being able to look back on that stuff and be like, these are opportunities that we seized rather than chased.

Someone made a gag the other day, ‘If we wanted to be successful, why the fuck would we start a hardcore band?’ [laughs]. A successful hardcore band is the biggest oxymoron of all time. There’s the gag of being ‘hardcore famous,’ where it’s, ‘Oh, you sold a thousand records.’ We’d start a fucking hyper-pop band if we wanted to actually be successful.

You’ve got bands like Turnstile, who I love. They’re a hardcore band. 

AS: Yeah. Turnstile is incredible! But they’re also incredible because they obviously did whatever the fuck they wanted  to. They’re a really good example of a band that emotionally puts work into connecting with people. It makes old-head hardcore dudes really mad. 

I love that. I love how Turnstile pushed hardcore to make something new. Glow On was one of my favourite albums the year it came out. To me it’s got all the cool bits I love from hardcore, but without all the gross bits of hardcore like toxic masculinity.

AS: Of course. Hardcore is inherently gross. [Laughs].

It seems disingenuous for someone to dump on Turnstile when it seems so (I’m starting to reuse words here but whatever) disingenuous, that hardcore as a style of music is this synthesis of emotion, and Turnstile have been so fantastic at that—they’ve opted for a different emotion. That emotion is still super synthesised and really full on. 

Cormy went to see Turnstile when they played here, and he was like, ‘Oh, my god!’ and was in awe of the reaction that they incite. It’s still aggressive. You still see motherfuckers headwalking and aggressive stage diving, but there is an air of positivity to it. You’d be the biggest idiot in the world if you didn’t see that, and be like, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s pretty cool!’

The guy who mastered your record, Arthur Rizk, played guitar on a Turnstile record. 

AS: See, this is some fucking Nardwuar bullshit, you know that! [laughs]. Did Arthur actually play on a Turnstile record? 

Yeah, he played additional guitar on the Time and Space record. 

AS: Really? I don’t believe you. 

The info is out there, have a look. It’s there.

AS: I believe you. 

I love the positivity that Turnstile have. Even though hardcore is an aggressive kind of music, I’ve gotten positive things from it. It’s been a positive force in my life. 

AS: Exactly. That’s like, again, going back to that’s the way that I felt connected to people. And obviously Geld isn’t a positive band, but I would like to think that there is some level of positivity in the amount of emotion that anyone puts into anything. 

The artwork for your album has a pretty positive and happy feel to it. Like, the colour choice. 

AS: `I think we were talking about earlier, about us not wanting to subvert hardcore, but just do whatever our take on it is. If that happens to be something that is currently going on or what is a standard thing, we’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ but at the same time, we never want to be that. One of my big pet peeves is people doing a style of music and trying to intellectualise it because it’s just, you know, ‘I’m playing hardcore, but I’m actually a smart person too.’ So I’m gonna do this in an interesting way, and it just ends up being super contrived and, like, really unnecessary.

The only time I think that we have wanted to subvert stuff is through, the artwork on records. 

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with all the Geld artwork. I really enjoy what you’re doing with it.

AS: The main thing is that for Perfect Texture (and for all three records, actually), Thom the drummer for Geld, he painted the new record cover and he painted the Perfect Texture artwork. In fact, the Perfect Texture artwork is right there [motions to the wall].

You have it! That’s awesome you have the original.

AS: It’s not the original. You know Tom Lyngcoln? 

Yeah, I know Tom. 

AS: That bastard owns it [laughs]. Thom painted that, and then shortly after Tom Lyngcoln bought it, and we were like, ‘Oh, shit!’ We really wanted to use that for the record cover! So we had to go to Tom’s house in St. Kilda, and take a photo of it.

I love the music Tom makes.

AS: Yeah. We’ve just got so many good bands right now. Swab is one of my favourite bands in Melbourne. They deserve to be gigantic!

We love them too! Christina [Pap] is in my punk book I’ve been working on for a couple of decades that will be out soon. It’s been important for me to include voices that don’t normally get a chance to be heard in punk rock and the history of punk projects. Women, people of colour, queer and non-binary people. Lots of people could learn a lot from the punk community

AS: 100%. There is a weird kind of utopian level of idealism that permeates through punk and that doesn’t always shake out. Obviously, no community is perfect and has issues within it, especially when it comes to diversity and especially when it comes to hardcore. But there have been some pretty incredible stories from ultra-diverse people. It’s not all just white dudes having a yell, shirtless.

[Talk continues about the punk book]

AS: I’m pretty overwhelmed by this conversation. The attitude that you bring to all this is so infectious. There is definitely a purity to the way that you’re speaking about your book and the things that you want to talk about within punk and hardcore. It’s pretty inspiring, to be honest. 

That’s the plan!  

AS: Do you actually have any downtime ever? 

Not really. But everything I do is fun. So usually it doesn’t feel like I’m working. My day job is working as a book editor with fellow Indigenous writers to tell our stories in our own ways. I just like making art and talking to people too. I like sharing things that I find exciting, like we do with Gimmie.

AS: Are you like me? Where unfortunately for my friends and my partner, I’m a bit of a Punisher when it comes to things I’m excited about? I have that feeling when I might be overseas or somewhere, and see something that moves me in a way, and I wish that I could transport a specific person that I’m thinking about to be there right next to me. So you can hold them and have them experience the thing that you’re experiencing. 

Totally! That gave me goosebumps. 

AS: Then it can transcend into something that’s a little bit more like punishing, where it’s like, ‘Have you heard this band?! You’re showing a band to someone and you’re listening to a song and you’re like, ‘This bit, ready?’ And then, ‘Isn’t this the greatest thing ever?’

Yeah, and then you rewind it, so they can hear it again!

AS: Oh, my god, yes! It’s like I have all of this stuff inside me right now, and it’s too much for me to bear on my own and I just want to give some of it to you [laughs].

All that stuff that you and Jhonny are doing, it’s obviously coming from a place of an emotional connection. That you guys are creating with the things that you consume and love and are wanting to actually permeate that emotion out into the world. That’s really cool!

Awww, thank you! That means a lot that you can see that. Well, I’m so excited about your new record. And it’s so cool that you’ve found a home on Relapse Records. I love when cool stuff happens for other people, especially when they work hard like you guys have. Like you were saying, the record is an amalgamation of all the things that you believe in that you have been working towards.

AS: Yeah. Bands always want to try and create the perfect package that will give someone all of the information that they possibly need to understand what you’re trying to do. I reckon we have done this on this record. But having said that, by the time the next record comes along, that could be completely different. We always threaten each other that the next record is going to be the ‘make it’ record, where I’m going to start singing-singing [laughs]. 

Yes! I’d buy that. 

AS: It’s kind of like, okay, we’ve done the record that we wanted. Now, let’s just be really silly about it. I don’t think we’ll ever do it, but you never know. 

It’s a really good feeling when you record, and it comes out exactly how you want it to be. Seldom does it ever happen. There’s a lot of accepting that maybe you didn’t get the best takes on something or maybe you didn’t spend enough time on mixing—you have to be happy with whatever it is. This album is the closest we’ve been to whatever the hell was in our heads.

That’s cool! Is there anything at the moment that you’ve been super into or excited about? 

AS: I have started boxing and I am training for a fight now. The biggest thing that’s not music in my life right now, aside from my partner and all my loved ones, is, I am all the way into boxing.

My grandfather boxed, in an amateur sense. When I was young, he sat me down in front of the Lennox Lewis/Mike Tyson fight ,and I have followed boxing and MMA ever since. I’ve actually been training with one of my mates, Kristy Harris, she was a bronze medalist at the Commonwealth Games.

She’s great! She plays in a band called Eyeroll too.

AS: Yeah. That’s who’s been training me. I got to know her because she bought some Geld stuff and we got talking. She’s close buds with Emily from Straitjacket [Nation], who also boxes.

Boxing, like learning the steps, is like learning a guitar riff. It’s body mechanics. Learning those body mechanics was my way of being like, ‘Okay, I’m into this, so I don’t have to worry about the fitness thing because I want to do it. Totally. 

When you started playing music, you started playing guitar?

AS: I’ve been a guitar player mostly. I write a lot of the Geld songs. Well, everyone everyone writes a lot of the Geld songs now. The demo was mostly me. As the records have kept going its changed; I only have three songs on the new record.

What was your first band?

AS: Going back to high school, I was in a metal band called Trench Warfare. I played in a garage punk band called, Bad Aches. Then I played in a band called Gentlemen with Tom.

Recently, I’ve been playing bass in The Vacant Lot; it’s been great—obviously I’m a real massive nerd about Australian first wave punk. I can’t wait to record with them because it’ll be like the smallest part of me being involved in history of Australian punk. Obviously, Australia as a fucking massive colony fucking sucks. And having any kind of nation pride or civic pride is pretty fucking hard to do at times. But the one thing that I was speaking to Pip, my partner the other day, the one thing I actually am quite patriotic about is the particular brand of punk that Australia has created. It actually sounds like Australian, and it does sound like there is something unique to it. And that’s something that I’ve thought about quite a lot. There’s not much to be proud about about our country.

You did the band Rabid Dogs too?

AS: Yeah, I did that with Kate and Kirk. Yeah, I did rabid dogs with Kate [Curtis] and Kirk [Scotcher]. That was awesome. I was living with Lee [Parker] at the time, and we were listening to The Damned a lot, and we wanted to do a band like that. I don’t think it ended up sounding like The Damned. Then Kate moved to New York, and shortly after that, Kirk and I started The Neuros. 

That’s my favourite band you’ve done. The 7 inch is amazing! 

AS: We basically have an LP together now. 

I can’t wait! That news makes me super excited! Anything else you wanted to talk about? 

AS: Sometimes the most liberating thing is to say to someone, ‘Hey, I actually really care about this,’ and being excited about that, and excited about what you are, and what something actually means to you. There’s no shame in being excited about something. I’m excited about lots of things all day long. Who doesn’t want to wake up and be excited about something? Again, like when I was talking about getting out of the pandemic and people being excited to go to shows again, that people had previously taken for granted. Not realising what a fucking gift it is to be able to pay $15 and have an evening’s worth of entertainment that is literally world-class. It’s bananas!

I didn’t say it outright earlier, but a big thing for me about lyrical content and presence of being a singer in Geld, is understanding, like not wanting to make everything inward focusing when it comes to content. Because I am essentially, as an existential form, checking my privilege or trying to check my privilege. Because it’s difficult to complain from such a comfy seat that I have. I deal with my own problems, but at the same time, from a societal systemic angle, I got it pretty good. I’m privileged enough to not have to deal with experiences like that. And that’s terrible. 

Again, I never want Geld to come off like I am…[pauses and thinks] I don’t have a plight. There’s no plight in me. I’m lucky, and I don’t want to take that for granted when I’m expressing myself because there are people that I know, that deal with things from a societal standpoint that are much more serious. I never want to minimise that by being too loud about issues that I don’t really feel like I have the right to stand up on a soapbox and talk about. Does that make any sense?

It does. 

AS: People that know me or people that know Geld understand our politics, and I don’t want to use our platform for that. I have thought about doing a call to Country (Acknowledgement of Country) at the start of our sets and decided I don’t want to do it, because when I see a lot of white people doing it, speaking as a white person, I don’t want to claim any cachet from anyone else, from First Nations pain. Does that make sense? 

Yeah, and I respect that. 

AS: Doing an Acknowledgement of Country in the community that we exist within, it’s not exactly an outrageous thing to do. But it’s just being conscious of the space I’m taking up and thinking about, why am I actually doing it to a whole bunch of people that already want a treaty? What is the subtext of me doing it?Am I doing it because I feel like I should? Or, am I doing it because I think that people will think higher of me for doing it? I know where my politics lie and it feels disingenuous, to me, personally.

I find it interesting that people talk about caring about mob and our struggles, and acknowledge they’re on our Country, but then how many of those people actually engage with us and actively support what we do or make. How many Indigenous people does the average person in hardcore know?

Yeah. For me, hardly any. I have a couple of friends that are mob, but what does that really mean? Nothing. Obviously I’m an ally, and I’m someone that cares about this stuff from a personal standpoint. But I never want my band to be a soapbox, or I never want my presence as a singer to be a soapbox for issues that ultimately have to do with me in terms of my responsibility, but also have absolutely nothing to do with me. Sometimes I can feel like it’s people taking up space. 

Speaking honestly about myself, if I’m making an Acknowledgement of Country, I don’t feel like I am doing enough in my personal life to warrant that, because a lot of the time when someone does that, what are you doing aside from that?

That’s what I always think—what are you doing outside of mouthing some words. I appreciate words but I appreciate action in the day to day more.

AS: People can always do more than what they’re doing. If other white folks want to do, do it. I don’t think it’s problematic or anything. I think it’s cool, but for me personally, I just feel a little uncomfortable about it. I apologise if this is too intense of conversation for a Sunday [laughs].

No, not at all.  I love these kinds of conversations, they’re important to have and I don’t see enough of them happening in the punk and hardcore.

AS: Totally. I really enjoyed chatting with you, seriously, though, it’s been actually really cool conversation. 

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