INTRODUCING: DISCOPUNK TRIO THE CROOKED STUFF

San Francisco Bay Area discopunk trio The Crooked Stuff are gearing up to release their new album Synthetic Signals on 31 July via The Unknown International, and the latest preview makes it clear they’re not interested in subtlety. New singles “Shallow Shores” and “Sci-Fi Radio” bottle up the chaos of modern life — media overload, fractured attention spans, the endless churn of bad news — and fire it back out as wiry, propulsive, body-moving discopunk.

Blending DC hardcore roots, electrofunk, post-punk tension and synth-heavy new wave, The Crooked Stuff have carved out a sound that feels both cerebral and combustible: music for dancing through the collapse, or at least staring it down with the volume turned all the way up. With Synthetic Signals on the horizon, we caught up with the band to talk about the push and pull between overload and agency, the strange chemistry of humans and machines in their recording process, and why groove can be its own form of resistance.

1. “Shallow Shores” and “Sci-Fi Radio” feel like two sides of the same coin — one grappling with the chaos of the external world, the other turning inward to find clarity and momentum. Did you always see these songs as companion pieces, and what made them the right pair to introduce Synthetic Signals?

Not from the start, but it quickly became clear that the two tracks conveyed key energetic elements of the album, both sonically and lyrically, that we felt worthy of leading with. Sci-Fi Radio actually came first and was distinctive in it being both the sonically hardest track while also the most first-person focused. The contrast is a powerful tie-back to my hardcore roots and the intensity and agency that so much of that music was about. It's really a juiced-up creative declaration that hopefully will inspire people to dial in their own energy sources for pushing forward in these ever more turbulent times.

Shallow Shores is observing outwards and built to bounce. Its lyrically cutting feedback on the relentless and dire news ticker tape, paired with the stripped-down gritty synth and beefy beat, gives it a forward-leaning energy that blasts through the mire.

One turns the dial inward and one stares down the noise. Putting them out first is meant to be a preview signal of the tensions the album moves between. More so than a two-sided coin, Synthetic Signals is really like an 11-track sided die. These two tracks are the first we rolled.

2. There’s a real tension in these tracks between anxiety and movement — the lyrics are dealing with media churn, overstimulation and uncertainty, but the music still pushes forward with this propulsive discopunk energy. How conscious are you of using rhythm and groove as a way of processing or resisting that noise?

Very conscious. That tension is the whole idea.

The lyrics deal with overload, rumination, the feeling of being pulled apart by the feed. If I set that to anxious music, I'd be handing you the problem twice. The groove is the response. It's the part that says you can be inside all of this and still move, still be in your body, still be in a room with other people.

I think of dancing through a crisis as a form of confrontation. The body has as much right to be in the room as the head does. When the music hits and you feel it before you've decided anything about it, the nervous system gets a vote back. That's agency you can actually feel.

The propulsion carries the argument as the music pushes forward, because staying still is how the noise wins.

3. Your sound pulls together DC hardcore roots, synth-driven new wave, electrofunk and post-punk in a way that feels pretty distinctive. When you were building Synthetic Signals, were there any reference points — musical or otherwise — that helped shape the world of the album?

I really believe we stay true to what creatively arises from within us. The riffs and melodies appear in our minds and then get translated and captured through synths and mics. We are all sonic and cultural sponges that have naturally absorbed countless influences throughout our lives. I like to think of this band as some sort of philosophy-injected sci-fi action thriller.

Camus is in there, honestly. The Myth of Sisyphus, the idea that you face an absurd world and keep pushing the rock anyway, with your eyes open. A lot of the record is that question in a modern shape, where the absurd thing we're all answering to is the algorithm. The science fiction is in the way it holds a slightly warped mirror up to the current moment. And my twenty-plus years in design have taught me to build creative worlds, with a point of view, that give the songs somewhere to live and grow.

Musically it's a collision by birth. I came up in DC hardcore and the new wave 9:30 Club world, playing on bills with bands like Sick Of It All and Clutch while simultaneously soaking up large doses of the soul and go-go vibes that the district was propelled by. John was born into the Bay Area's funk and psychedelic rock scenes and learned to navigate and channel it all through his ten synthesizer-ruling fingers. Nick drums like he arrived from somewhere else entirely. Precise, heady and cutty. Our sound is an amalgamation of electronic four-on-the-floor running under punk urgency that's been dosed with DNA snippets of Herbie Hancock, Bernie Worrell with P-Funk and Talking Heads, Devo, PiL, Bad Brains, Judas Priest, Sisters of Mercy, Ministry, Praxis, Chemical Brothers and on and on... hell, even some ZZ Top and Jamiroquai.

We treat all of it as bloodlines we carry into the room. The goal is always the thing that doesn't sound like any one of them at a time. Our creative mission is to walk and keep pushing that crooked line.

4. The way these singles were made — riff sketches on the Moog, live drums, drum machine builds, and a blend of hi-fi and lo-fi gear — feels very in keeping with the band’s sound. How important is that balance between rawness and precision to what The Crooked Stuff is trying to do?

Balance is the key. Just like life, nothing is simply just one thing; there's always a push and pull going on. We love the precision that hits sharp and infectiously drives people to move, but we always want to drag it through the sonic dust, dirt and tweaks that serve as beacons to the absurd and twisted nature of this life.

We aim to make the human feel and the machine grid both fight and lock at the same time. Our hi-fi and lo-fi blend is meant to both wrap and expand on that tension. Clean where it needs to hit, dirty where it needs to bleed. The tracks are humans and machines tangled up together. The friction in the gears is the friction in the subject.

5. Both songs seem to circle around the question of how to stay human and creatively switched on when everything around you feels relentless and over-mediated. Is Synthetic Signals ultimately a record about overload, or is it more about trying to find connection and agency inside it?

It's all of it, the full experience; the relentless external feed, the subconscious internal processing, and ultimately the honing of awareness to hopefully arise, release and be free. It moves from overload toward agency. That's the arc of the record.

It opens in the overwhelm, because that's the honest starting point. Most of us live there. The middle gets surveilled and pulled under, the feed at full volume. The back half is about getting some footing back.

The frame underneath all of it is simple. You've got the body, which absorbs everything and reacts on its own, and you've got the conscious awareness that can sit back and watch the body do it. The work, in a song or in a life, is to widen the gap between a thing hitting you and you reacting to it, and ideally get more careful about what you feed yourself in the first place. Better inputs, better next thoughts, better next actions. Do that across a whole room of people and you have a shot at something bigger than any one person.

So the record lands on connection and agency, with the overload still running the whole time. The world won't get quieter. What we can change is how we meet it. It's existential discopunk for the people!