Angst Party: Embracing Variety, Letting Go & Releasing Music Consistently

In a recent episode, Meagan spoke to Mika, Brett, Adam and Kat from Indie/Alternative Rock band - Angst Party. Enjoy some selects from the full interview.

Make Music Not War

Angst Party just celebrated their first anniversary as a band, now they do everything together.

Kat reflects, “I’ve learnt that working in a group is hard. Honestly, each of us have slightly differing inspirations in our backgrounds, in our influences musically, as well as in life. We’ve got all those good things, and that seeps into our play-styles and how we approach music. On some things, we align, and on other things, we have differing viewpoints. And it’s always interesting to see how an idea changes from someone else’s viewpoint. Sometimes it improves the sound, obviously, sometimes it doesn’t work as well. But more often than not, as far as I’ve seen, we’ve released how many songs, isn’t it four now? And still a bunch more to come, and each of them are so different from the next. We’ve just got such a good range of, well, range.”

Brett agrees, “Yeah, there is a lot of range.”

Adam elaborates, “I think what’s cool as well is, sometimes we’ll write a song, and it might just be a very, very short idea from one of us, taking ‘War’, for instance, it came together in like half an hour and it was done. Then we’ve got a song at the moment that we are gonna be recording soon, its working title is ‘Four Down’, and we’ve had that knocking around for the best part of six/seven months now. It’s only now that we’ve worked it out between us, where we’d like it to be. So I don’t think there’s one roadmap for each and every song, with the amount of influences that we’ve got between us.”

Brett chimes in, “And it can always change.”

Mika says, “What’s great is that an idea can come from any of us. Sometimes it’s based on the bass, a bass line that Kat would have in his mind. For example, ‘Yellow To Red’, it’s been a bass line that Kat, you’ve had it in your mind for a long time, right?”

Kat responds, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Mika continues, “Same with Adam, he’s got some ideas. Brett’s had this idea for ‘War’, and sometimes I have an idea. So it’s cool, we share the inspiration. It’s about whether something sounds cool and interesting.”

Brett adds, “Or whether we gel with it or not as well. I mean, if we don’t agree with it, then we don’t agree with it, and we don’t want each other to feel uncomfortable on the song. We wanna be able to enjoy ourselves when we play the song. Even when it comes to lyrics and all of that stuff, we’ve done all of those things together.”

Spread Your Wings

The band reflects on the final touches of their work; sometimes getting it done means letting it go.

Mika explains, “I just struggle to let go of a song until my voice comes through in the right way. It’s quite difficult to let go of that, but yeah, sometimes you have to learn to let go. It slows down the completion process if the mixes that we get are not speaking to me in the way that I prefer. The process of recording and mixing, and the feedback with a studio has a huge impact on that, because that sort of helps with being happy with the release - that the producer’s more focused on making sure that everyone’s a hundred percent happy.”

Kat says, “I don’t aim for a hundred percent happy. I’ll aim for eighty percent happy, maybe seventy-five.”

Adam shares, “I’ll take eighty percent happy every time. For me, it becomes a little bit of a… it’s diminishing returns, because you’re never going to have everybody one hundred percent happy. But that eighty percent mark, that’s when I get the goose bumps and I’m like, yeah, I can hear it.“

Brett pipes up, “Yeah, that’s what I was saying, the goosebumps.”

Adam continues, “If I was really being pedantic, I might change my guitar tone there but, at the end of the day, the song’s got to get out there and be allowed to live and breathe on its own. And if we don’t release then nobody’s going to hear it.”

Brett says, “You could always re-mix it.”

Adam agrees, “Exactly, yeah, there’s opportunities in the future.”

Brett responds, “Yeah, you could always do stuff to it.”

Kat reveals, “It’s all well and good that get to a point where it’s like, hey, we like this track, let’s put it out, or let’s record it. But it’s always good to have an external opinion on what we’ve done, so that we know, from an external point, what it sounds like to someone else. In some cases we take somebody’s trusted opinion on what we’ve done, someone close to us or someone we know has a good ear for music. We can have them listen to the track and then they’ll give us feedback and say, this is great or change this and that. And we can take that or leave it, honestly, because we obviously have an aim for where we want the song to go.”

Brett adds, “Yeah, because sometimes it can just change the whole song completely.”

Kat replies, “Yeah but it’s not going to evolve in a vacuum, is what I’m saying. It’s not going to be what it has to be.”

Here We Go Again

Angst Party knows that consistency is key; their release strategy is captivating.

Brett starts, “I mean, if you keep them waiting every year like, oh we’re gonna have an album release every year, or something like this every year… I think it’s good to keep the audience captured like, hey look, we’ve got a track coming out this month, we’ve got a track coming out another month. It keeps the crowd and it keeps the audience captivated, I think. Even with music videos and all of that stuff.”

Adam suggests, “An album’s got to, even an EP to a certain extent, has got to be cohesive as a whole, as a piece of art. And what I really enjoy with the singles, certainly at the moment, given we do have jobs and other commitments outside of this -“

Brett interjects, “Because it’s a variety of music.“

Adam continues, “Yeah, every song can be completely different and so far, every song is completely different. Even when we do ‘Hard Way’ and ‘Four Down’, and get them down as well, we’ve got quite a diverse range from those songs. So I think for now, the single approach is actually quite nice for us. People are getting to hear our music, rather than us sitting on it and waiting to release an album.”

Brett says, “Especially with the new way that social media works now, with TikTok and all these other things now, it helps a lot. If someone’s seeing something coming out every month, they will want to use that track for something, or anything.”

Kat adds, “People’s attention spans, lately, have decreased with the fact of these videos that are coming out. People have time for up to thirty seconds of attention and then they’re going to scroll onto the next thing. So we need to make a way to keep that attention and, the strategy we’ve come up with is ideal for what we want to do.”

Mika advises, “Yeah, I think the method of holding on to recorded tracks, to release an EP or an album, is not very suitable for this day and age. Release maybe one song, maybe two songs at a time, and then compile that in an EP with a couple of extra songs. It’s different, I don’t know if it’s the same as  before. But you can just release more singles, and then add two or three songs to an EP.”