Words and photography by Alexandra Skye.
Ballet is bringing post punk back to Los Angeles. Was it ever really gone? Of course not, but am I more than happy to have it come back into the conversation in such an authentically romantic context? Absolutely.
My first experience with Ballet was at their EP release show at Zebulon this summer, which I went into completely blind. Zach's voice lead the audience into a mesmerizing cohesiveness, resulting in that transcendent kind of special musical oneness that makes a band great. There were multiple moments where I caught the eyes of a friend and a mutual ‘they’re so good’ was mouthed. I left feeling like I had witnessed something incredibly singular.
I met guitarist Thomas Luminoso, and violinist Rowen Merrill (both of whom also play synth, resulting in countless cords on stage at all times) on the Stories patio during a heat wave, and also during an incredibly difficult trivia night that had us all questioning our mental capabilities (or lack thereof). Are we all supposed to know the seventeenth letter of the Greek alphabet? As we escaped our intellectually inclined peers, we found Zach Taylor (lead vocalist, glockenspiel aficionado, and drum machine operator) and Nico Norgaard (bassist, vocals, and… can you believe it, also synth) en route to the back of El Prado in the most Los Angeles trajectory one can imagine. Although Ballet has only played five live shows, it’s a band composed of artists whose solo projects (Dance Arts Center, Thomas Luminoso, Dreamer Boy) have all proven their merit in their own right. With their magnetic personas and tight performance chemistry, they’ve earned a spot on the Monster Children Radar.
Our conversation began as an interview, but quickly diverted into spirals of comedic bits and IRL riffing that couldn’t be further from their stoic online persona; including but not limited to nerdy tangents about Peter Ivers and his tragic life, which I will exclude apart from referencing his show New Wave Theater, which you should totally find on Youtube at your earliest convenience. Their new song Parts of Heaven is out November 10, quickly followed by their EP Ballet III on November 13 via American Death Records.
Okay, so you met in college. And Nico, you were in LA?
Zach Taylor: Yeah we were all doing different things in Nashville, but were going to the same house shows, it’s a pretty tight community. But I would say that once I moved out to LA in 2022 I reconnected with Rowen and Thomas when they came out here to feel it out. And then we all went to the park one day and I had started some demos for Ballet, which I had already been working on with Nico. It was already kind of a thing...we were already kind of going back and forth.
Nico Norgaard: And I was in LA. I was doing theater.
ZT: Yes, that's a big part of things.
Thomas Luminoso : It's kind of huge, yeah.
Why is theater huge?
ZT: Well, you're 1/4th of the band. I think that is pure Nico DNA. That's 25%.
And how did you meet Nico?
ZT: Nico and I met at our friend’s going away party at a karaoke bar, and we really hit it off and she was working on music of her own as Dance Arts Center. And then I was making Ballet stuff, but was still kind of like, I don't know what it is but I want a band.
And this is when 2023? 2024?
ZT: Yeah, yeah, end of 2024. And so we were really locked in just as friends and like sending each other stuff. And then when we all reconnected, it was like, yo, like, I think we reconnected at just this perfect moment.
How many shows have you played together now?
All together: Five
Rowen Merrill: Wait, five shows, five videos, what’s the next five?
NN: It’s our fourth video! The fifth is a visualizer…
What’s a visualizer?
TL: It's when you don't feel comfortable calling it a video because you feel like the production element of it is not good enough or there's not enough different frames.
RM: It's not long enough.
ZT: Past Life, we shot a whole video, but only ended up with a visualizer, which honestly?
NN: It’s an amazing visualizer!
ZT: It’s my favorite tidbit.
RM: The way it loops is really good, it’s very satisfying to watch.
ZT: I love, tale between legs… No, it's just a visualizer. I think we're kind of like, you know, we're doing stuff scrappy, but it's always funny, you feel like you, you made something that actualized.
RM: We only had three hours to make that video. There were people living in the Peerspace, they were like making a dinner while we were shooting with the lights off. They’d come in and turn the lights on…
ZT: It was weird, but I like... I didn't mention it in the review.
Sounds like something you should have mentioned.
A strange oin the El Prado Patio: Are these y’all’s cigarettes?
TL: Someone left them there like a gracious gift.
Stranger: Is it a trap?
ZT: No I already fell for it though.
He had, in fact, already fallen for it and smoked at least one cigarette from the now communal pack.
NN: How many releases have we had so far?
ZT: We've done our first project, which is Ballet One. Then we did a second EP and it’s called Ballet Two.
TL: Guess what the third one is!
I couldn’t if I tried…so what’s album one going to be?
ZT: I was thinking about it in the car and I was like, oh, dude, EPs? I had never done an EP until we started doing ballet stuff.
TL: It feels reckless. I'm into it, though.
ZT: And for some reason, I was thinking about in the car like, holy shit, EP’s are fucking awesome, like, you just fucking make the music and you put it out and it can be anything.
RM: What if we EP forever? EP fourever.
ZT: We want to do an album, but we have a very specific vision for what that looks like, which means all of us in Greece, basically just like, doing whatever the fuck we want and recording and swimming.
You guys want to go to my grandpa’s house? (I did in fact invite them to make their first album at my Grandpa’s house on Crete, so who knows maybe Album 1 will arrive next fall.)
NN: Right, we’re making an album.
I’ll tell him.
ZT: Grandpa, have you ever heard of post-punk?
He’d love it.
ZT: We gotta get us to the Greek. We could go really old school journalism mode where you like live with the band while we're making the record, and you're in a corner with a notebook, and we're all like strung out.
TL: Actually, I'm thinking this is more of like a two-year piece.
Hey Naz, just a heads up. I think we're gonna extend this.
TL: We have really weird, somewhat extravagant goals, but I feel like in other ways they aren't that extravagant. I mean, writing an entire album in Greece.
I would oddly say that that is an attainable goal. It's confusing to say that out loud, but I do think that that isn’t really that much of a stretch.
ZT: We’re manifesting.
Until then, it's just Ballet one two three…
RM: We’re going to skip a number to make people confused.
ZT: Maybe we don’t skip it, we just make bootlegs.
TL: It will not be streaming anywhere, but we’ll put it on Youtube. In my mind, I'm like a fake A&R person, and there's a couple of albums on YouTube that I covet and...I'm gatekeeping a couple things. But there's this band from Australia called Girling. And there's one album called like Children of Telepathy or something. And it's all just fucking Pavement style songs mixed with jungle style beats, which now is a real real deal thing…but when it was being made, combining those interests was not.
Why have we dedicated ourselves to the black and white stoicism?
NN: I would say that's just kind of how it happened at first. And then we're like, wait, wait, let’s keep doing this.
ZT: I think we recognize the value of giving people an experience that is, like, aligned. It's timeless, so like rock & roll you know.
Yeah yeah yeah, classic. How did we settle on the name Ballet? Did anyone here do ballet?
NN: I did ballet!
ZT: I had the idea for the band called Ballet. There was just some little glimmers and signs of that being something that I was drawn to. I have never been like a practiced dancer, but I love dancing. I love, like, dance music. I love movement. I love performing.
TL: And the idea of like creating music that is maybe supposed to be minimalist and angular in some capacity mixed with this identity of it being like ballet, which is like the strongest form you could have.
ZT: Strength, distortion, beauty. And I think LA is kind of a ballet of sorts. It's like beauty with like sort of bloodied knuckled feet, you know. So many spaces in our world are this sort of really, like, tense juxtaposition of beauty and terror. So I think that's Ballet.”
Have you guys thought of doing a group ballet class?
NN: I pushed for it!
After every recording session, a ballet class.
ZT: I think we should push ourselves.
(We did go on a pretty long tangent here about Myspace coming back, Chairlift being the og Caroline Polachek synth pop outfit…but I will pick up at a place that will indulge your playlist fantasies.)
What would be on your MySpace playlist? We’ll do top two.
NN: That’s a lot of pressure…
RM: I would do Leonard Cohen or Pulp. But I don’t have a specific song yet.
ZT: I mean, shit, like... It's hard to pick like a specific song right now, but maybe an Arthur Russell song and a…
RM: Belle and Sebastian song!
TL: I was thinking you were going to say that!
ZT: Are you switching? I’m going Bruce Springsteen. We’ve collectively realized that Belle and Sebastian are the best band.
TL: It’s weirdly main influence.
ZT: It’s like The Velvet Underground, but a little sillier.
TL: More twee too.
ZT: Okay, actually I’m going to do Arthur Russell and Lives of Angels.”
TL: I knew you were going to say that, it’s a huge influence.
NN: It’s hard because I feel like I would be constantly changing it. You know I’ll do one all timer and one like whatever. Okay Empire Ants Gorillaz as like the all time base, and Autobahn by Kim Petras, I’m addicted right now or Lower East Side Girl by Madonna, that’s my song of the month. I would change it everyday.”
Thomas, you’ve had the longest time to think about it.
TL: I know, and I’ve been the most judgmental. Glenn Branca, that’s big for me. Lesson Two or something. But honestly, Just Like Honey would be like a totally fair song to put on a profile.
RM: I feel like that was in a movie.
A stranger on the Prado patio: Lost in Translation.
TL: Lost in Translation honestly, has a killer soundtrack because you also have My Bloody Valentine literally doing a track just for that soundtrack. Fucking unheard of.
ZT: Damn, bring Myspace back.
Do you think that TikTok is launching artists similar to the way that MySpace may have?
NN: I mean, even existing musicians. Like if you have a song that becomes a TikTok sound or something. And you're like, Mitski. She's not on TikTok and had a TikTok song.
I mean Deftones.
TL: Deftones, Duster.
ZT: I think TikTok probably is where things are being dug up and sort of immortalized again. I think anybody who's putting out music, late into their life. It's just like fucking beautiful and, I don't know, I think we're seeing that with the TikTok thing, people reviving stuff that, you know, was a hit back in the day, but now, has its moment with a younger generation.
How would you guys want people to find your music?
TL: At our shows.
There’s nothing more fulfilling than going to a show and being like ‘Wow that was really good live.’
TL: People need more of those experiences regardless.
