Trying to Talk to tankerlow About Their New Album, and Failing
Photography by Griffin Ellis.
Long story short: tankerlow’s SLAGROOM is one of my favourite albums of the year so far.
Made meticulously over two years in the studio, SLAGROOM sees the Los Angeles three-piece evolve from what lead vocalist Guy Azulay called ‘a Slint cover band’ into something far more experimental. Existing in between the genres of industrial, noise-rock, and dance, the album is theatrical, characterised by a harrowing unease. Guy’s vocals echo through each track, with intense lyrics delivered as if he’s in the midst of a nervous breakdown and paired with instrumentals so full and wide they feel inescapable. It’s everything the three of them – Guy Azulay, Connor Scheff (Second Vocals, Drums, Bass, Guitar), Kyle Norvell (Guitar, Hammered Dulcimer, Auxiliary Instruments) – wanted the album to be: heavy and loud. With Connor engineering the album, there was no time pressure from limited studio time or a hard deadline, meaning they had freedom to explore their sound until it felt right.
After SLAGROOM was released by Danger Collective Records last week, I called them to speak about the album, but after Connor told me a story about having a second asshole, it was impossible to bring the conversation back to music and, dare I say, it ended up even better than I could’ve hoped.
What stood out most to me about SLAGROOM is how different it is from the first album, 5301. What made you want to go in this direction?
Guy Azulay: The most basic answer is we started listening to other shit. When we started working on 5301, Connor and I were very into Slint and June of 44 and all these touch-and-go post-rock bands. That was our inspiring force behind making music, and once we did that we were like, ‘Alright, let’s not be a Slint cover band and see what we can do.’
It’s really cool seeing how far you pushed the sound. It is music that’s very difficult to make; it’s not like it’s just two guitars, a bass and drums. You guys are doing so much more and putting so much energy into understanding how to make it the right way. Was seeing how far you could push the sound a goal for the album?
GA: We didn’t have any plan for the album’s release until after it was done, so we had infinite time to work on it. We could spend a year on a song if we wanted to. So we just kept working on songs until they had everything we wanted in them. Which maybe was both a good and a bad thing; maybe we added too much to some of them. But we had all the freedom to do whatever we wanted.
Was there a song you made where you were like, ‘Yep, this is how the record is going to sound’?
GA: “GLORY HOLE”. We had made a few songs before that which had a completely different sound…
Connor Scheff: We were Geese-LARPing.
GA: Yeah, we were so inspired by 3D Country, and we made this post-punk-funk-shit.
Kyle Norvell: White boy funk for real.
GA: I’m so glad that’s not what's on the album.
CS: We had this period after we finished the first record where we were going to the studio and fucking around. We had these cameras set up and would film ourselves jamming. I came up with that guitar motif around that time, but it was a lot faster. In the early stages of working on the record, we were listening to old voice memos and videos, trying to find something we could build on. We found that one, and was just like, ‘What if we slowed it down?’ It was pretty fluid after that. The bones of that song came together pretty quickly.
GA: I forgot about this until recently, but I found that audio file and the whole second half of that song was completely different. I think we both just realised it would work perfectly at the end of “GLORY HOLE”, and then you added the fucking Futurama bassline.
Why is it the Futurama bassline?
CS: It sounds like Futurama.
GA: There’s this episode of Futurama where there’s a sound coming from space and none of the characters know where it’s from, but it’s just some alien trying to find their car. That’s what the baseline sounds like to me.
What other good inside jokes came while working on the album?
KN: The fistula.
CS: There’s a lyric in “ERGO/OGRE” that is: ‘Blessed is the Fistulous.’ For that section, it was a similar writing style to the first record where we would all write random lyrics and see what came of it. But I feel like this one cursed me, because six months later we were in the studio and my ass hurt so fucking bad. I didn’t think much of it, then the next day I was playing Magic: The Gathering with some friends and was still so uncomfortable. I went to the doctor the next day and was like, ‘Yo Doc, my ass hurts really fucking bad.’ So I pulled my pants down and spread my ass for this doctor, and he’s like, ‘Take these antibiotics; you have an abscess.’ A few days go by, and I was still in pain. I go to the hospital, get a CT scan, and it was a huge fucking abscess, which I had to get drained. They’re squeezing the pus out of my fucking asshole, so I thought it was good. Then two more days go by, and I wake up again in pain. So I go to the proctologist; he’s a super cool, hip doctor, so he’s talking to me super casual like, ‘Alright bro, we’ve got two options: we could put you under for a surgery, but that’ll take three days, and I don’t think you’re going to make it.’
[Laughs] Make it!
CS: I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, ‘No, no, you’ll end up back in the hospital from all the pain. I think we should just drain it now.’ The first time hurt so bad, but this was so much worse. He got a vacuum tube and cut a second asshole and was just sucking the juice out. He was like, ‘Okay, so you’ve got to come back and stuff this hole or a fistula will form.’ And I guess it’s basically if you get one of those abscesses, it can break your colon wall, and you basically have a second asshole. I think that all happened because we said that lyric.
Dude, are you okay?
CS I’m okay now, but for the four days after, I had to go back, and he was fucking stuffing gauze into this second asshole. But he got me correct; I don’t have a second butthole. That’s my dog, bro. He’s got a super sick TikTok where he talks about this shit.
Did you make an appearance?
KN: So today we’re with Connor and we’re going to show you what he has.
GA: Spread 'em.
CS: This band is cursed.
What else happened?
GA: Kyle had two disc replacement surgeries, and I went to the hospital for my nuts.
Did you have a twisted ball?
GA: Dude, I thought I did. I was at dinner with my parents for Mother's Day, and I was like, ‘Hey, my nuts hurt really bad. Can we go to the hospital?’ But we were okay.
CS: Then Guy drinks way too much caffeine and it gives him a heart attack every couple of months.
KN: I have shooting pains in my arm.
GA: Yo, my arm hurts, I feel dizzy, and I can’t breathe, guys.
KN: Maybe it’s the 400mg of caffeine and the fifteen Zyns.
Do you each have a favourite Guy line from the album?
CS: At the end of “PLASTICINE” he sings ‘The silly stupid shawarma smelling Afroman cover band/Singing his heart out for the steering wheel.’ That song was the biggest fucking penis explosion chamber in terms of getting the lyrics. We spent about four months getting it right. I pushed Guy pretty intensely.
GA: We had the end ready for months; that shawarma lyric was there for a while.
CS: But in terms of when Guy is in front of the microphone all I want is for him to channel the thing so he would do a take and I would literally verbally abuse him and I would be like, ‘No, I don’t fucking believe you go again.’ It would be two hours of him sitting in front of the mic. I think the verbal abuse pissed him off, and with that it forced him to fucking express the anger through the mic, and I think that’s the moment in the song where I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, there it is.’
How do you feel being a bully?
CS: I think that I like it; there’s a part of being an asshole that’s funny, but when it came to that, I didn’t want to bully him for the sake of bullying him. I just wanted the vocal take. Guy responded better in terms of performance to me being an asshole.
GA: You should ask Grant [Yansura] about that too because he does the same thing.
CS: Great, I think he caught on to the same thing.
GA: I need someone to feel like I’m absolutely worthless so I can try really hard.
KN: You know there are people you can talk to about that…
CS: [Laughs]
KN: I think my favourite personal line of Guy’s is ‘I am all and nothing/I am nothing at all.’ Guy is really good at writing metaphors and these cyclical thought pattern things, and every time we practice that one, it gets me.
After hearing all that, it means too much, we can’t encourage him to think like that.
CS: That song was definitely a crux of Guy’s vocal performance. It definitely pushed us to a breaking point, and I think both of our favourite lyrics of Guy’s coming from that song [“PLASTICINE”] are a perfect example of that.
What about you, Guy?
GA: ‘Dave Matthews Band screaming inside of my head.’
It was crazy listening to the album for the first time and not really knowing what I was getting into. Guy, you’d told me you were in a band, I’d listened to the other stuff, and I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, I get it.’ Then I listened to the album and was like, ‘What the fuck, this is amazing.’ It was unlike anything I could’ve expected. There’s this theatrical ridiculousness in it all that really comes together well, while also having really serious lyrics like ‘Throw money at the TV/Go fund your endless war.’ Like, that is real life.
GA: Thank you.
What about the album title, SLAGROOM? Where did that come from?
CS: We didn’t know what to name the album, so we were writing random ideas on the whiteboard in the studio. One of them was going to Google and searching words in other languages that sound like bad words in English. Slagroom is the word for ‘whipped cream’ in Dutch.
GA: When we heard that one, we were like, yeah, that’s the one. It sounds cool. It can mean a bunch of different things, and outside of the British slang, the word ‘Slag’ feels like the vibe of the album. Slag is what comes off of molten metal when you’re forging steel. It’s the black, crispy stuff on the outside. It’s the byproduct of forging metal.
CS: We were just throwing random shit out; there was another word, but I can’t remember what it was, but we were just throwing shit at the wall until we found SLAGROOM. I can’t remember what any of them were.
KN: That’s for the best.
You’re coming in crazy with these one-liners, Kyle. You’re all silent, then say the best shit.
KN: Thank you.
I don’t even know where to go from here, but I like how serious the album sounds and how unserious you guys are.
CS: I feel like our recording process had a good balance of extremely unserious and let’s get some work done. I’m glad you’re getting that vibe because I do think we are very unserious in a lot of ways.
GA: Nah, we’re the most serious band you’ll ever talk to.
CS: I went to bed at five in the morning last night.
Why?
CS: I got like six Victory Royales in Fortnite.
Say if Fortnite hit you up to make your own skins, would you do it?
CS: Oh yeah.
KN: Getting that bag, bro.
Get that Luigi Mangione Skin.
GA: Chill, bro. God!
So where do you guys want to take this?
CS: The band?
Are you trying to take it to the top?
CS: I don’t fucking know.
So, say the top is getting the Fortnite skin.
CS: Sell out Wembley with Pyrotechnics and a huge LCD screen. Have you seen those videos of [Redacted] playing recently? He has a huge crane with these wires that he flies around the stadium with, and I feel like that would be a super sick vibe for Guy.
GA: [Laughs] I’m so down.
Who should I change [Redacted] to? Like P!nk?
CS: Change it to Diplo.
What about residency at the dome in Las Vegas? I think that would be dope.
CS: Yeah, that’s the top for us, playing the 3D megadome. Have you gone to Universal Studios and watched the Shrek 4D thing where they spray scents at you? That's the vibe we want, where they spray you with foul scents.
What would those scents be?
CS: Guy after skating for nine hours coming to the studio smelling like some kind of fermented tofu.
KN: Guy’s car.
GA: Come on now.
CS: And the tube that was sucking the pus out of my asshole. During the end of OGRE, we would spray the scent that smells like the tube that was used to extract the pus.
KN: And for my smell: Flowers.
Was there anything that you wanted to talk about that you haven’t spoken about in any of the other interviews?
GA: Well, we’ve never spoken about Connor’s butthole before today.
And I’m so glad we did. This has been a perfect interview. Thank you, guys.
KN: It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you, Josh.