Roll of the Dice: 11 questions with Vempire

Have you checked out Fumes the new EP from synthy and dark dance duo Vempire, yet? What about their full-length from this Summer; Your Steps? These fantastic new records are so damn good! TGEFM highly recommends you click this link to download the LP, press play on the record and repeat those steps here for the EP. Then check out our interview with the Nebraskans below, and then listen to both records again and again and again and again.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! Congrats on the new EP. Let’s talk a little bit about how Vempire came into existence and came together. Where else might our readers know you from? What was going on at the time that helped kickstart the writing and recording process?

Lindsey Yoneda: The start was pretty seamless. I had just started singing a bit more in my other band Ghostlike which I primarily play bass in, so I was excited to start exploring that more. Mikey approached me with a nearly fully formed idea for a new project. He had a handful of songs already written, we practiced them a bit, then went straight to recording.
Mikey Elfers: That sounds about right. My punk band Thirst Things First is a huge sci-fi fart joke that largely birthed from a knee-jerk reaction to my semi-serious pop-punk band the JV Allstars that I toured with extensively throughout my 20’s. I think the initial bare bones of Vempire were built on myself missing writing about my own feelings or more serious thoughts. I’ve leaned a lot more into new wave and Human League style stuff for a while now, and while I’ve known Lindsey for a long time, it was the moment I heard her vocal delivery on an Instagram Reel in 2022 that the eureka moment happened and our duo hit the ground running.

A lot of the parts in your song are intensely intricate and skillful. What is the writing process like for Vempire? How many revisions does it typically take for you to decide a track is ready? Who is usually the harshest critic?

Lindsey: Mikey does all the legwork for writing. He apparently hates sleeping so I’ll usually get a text with a demo for a new song at an insane hour of the night and I just have to practice it until we get to recording. It will change and develop a tiny bit as we record since we have different styles of singing, but nothing too drastic. I wouldn’t say either of us are necessarily harsh critics, but Mikey definitely has more attention to detail since he’s been doing this a lot longer than I have.

Vempire is from Nebraska. It’s such an interesting, diverse and generally inspiring place that has bred so much amazing music. Why do you think the Cornhusker State churns out so many brilliant musicians and songwriters? Vempire has eschewed the typical indie and post-sounds one may have thought of coming out of Sokol-adjacent basements, in spite of that, does the area feed into the music you are writing, if at all?

Mikey: It can be a bit boring in the center of the United States, we have no oceans, yet we’re topographically at sea level, we have no professional sporting teams in Nebraska… it is also horrifically hot in the Summertime and awfully snowy and cold during the Winter. It is, however, incredibly cheap to live here. A lot of LA/NYC/Chicago musicians work four jobs just to score a studio apartment to sleep in after the show. Nebraskans can live the same lifestyle with one job and an entire rental house with a tornado shelter basement that doubles as a practice space. We’re spoiled with these square feet, and practice makes perfect after all.

Vempire’s early releases have all been feature heavy.  How important is it for the duo to bring in additional hands for their tracks?  What has the diversity of sounds meant to the band’s vision?

Lindsey: The community of this genre is very strong. We’ve met a lot of new friends from all over the world who want to collaborate and getting remixes and features just breathes new life into our songs. I feel like it really keeps the creative juices flowin’.
Mikey: I’ll elaborate on what Lindsey said. I grew up in a very competitive punk and hardcore scene, everyone ate each other alive to play the bigger shows at the cooler venues, so the idea of even promoting each other’s releases was impossible. This synth/electronic/dance (whatever we’ll call it) genre has been incredibly inclusive and open-armed. Shit, just this week our friends Candid Black up in Canada emailed us a remix of a song we originally released back in February. A song, that we are very proud of and feel that we put everything we had into, now has that new shot of adrenaline and will stack up perfectly on a seven inch or maxi-single. It’s a spectacular feeling. There is a collaborative symbiosis to all of this too, now I get to get a little high and remix a Candid Black song. The opening track on our Your Steps LP we released in August was in desperate need of some tough ass vocals that Lindsey and I are worlds away from achieving, so we asked Raws from Plack Blague to step in on our chorus. When Blague is in need of our flavor profile of vocal delivery, we will be there to return the favor. 

What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?

Lindsey: We’re still super fresh and only have a handful of shows under our belt, so for me the most memorable moments are recording. We just have fun, we have it down to a science that makes the process pretty relaxed so we can goof a bit but we still get shit done, and it’s always exciting seeing the song come together. The most unexpected and weirdest for me is just the reception of our music. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback and it’s crazy to me that people from so far all over the place want to collaborate, talk to us, or review our music. 
Mikey: Witnessing the songs coming together has been the most memorable, unexpected, and weirdest moments for me. Some of these songs have been written about some pretty important or traumatic shit for me, but the demo can only beam as bright as my shit-eating voice. Lindsey’s singing is so beautiful and graceful, and she can emote in every way that I have only wished to. I’ll never not look forward to hearing the song in its final mixing stages. Then we get to dance and perform it live. It’s great.

What album or band or significant singles made you go “Yeah, this is what I want to do”  Not just an influence but who or what was the catalyst?

Lindsey: I wouldn’t say any particular band or album made me feel that way, but the general experience of going to shows when I was younger. My first show was We the Kings at the Waiting Room when I was in 7th grade, it was on a school night and my dad had to come with me, but I remember walking in and thinking “yeah this is it”. I loved going to Warped Tour, I just loved the energy and the community and I knew I wanted to be a part of it forever.
Mikey: One of my very oldest memories is dancing with my father to the Cars 1985 Greatest Hits albums on vinyl. I was three or four years old? Way too young to remember this so well, but that was all I needed. My parents live and breathe music, and hearing that juxtaposition of the Moog Sub 37 synth on the leads with organic drums and palm-muted guitar? It spoke to me in diapers.

We’ve all got a few, what is your biggest regret? A gig you turned down, advice you didn’t take, what one thing do you wish you handled differently as a musician?

Lindsey: I have terrible stage fright, always have. I guess I wish I would have put myself out there more when I was younger, I think it would’ve put me in a bit of a better place as an adult in my first couple bands. 
Mikey: I am a huge Men Without Hats fan, some people don’t know this, but they are still putting out QUALITY albums and playing shows. They are like a time capsule… I noticed Ivan runs their Instagram account on his own and asked him to sing on one of our first songs. He responded very quickly and politely to decline and explain that collaborations are one of the few things he doesn’t really participate in. I still feel like if I had held my fucking horses and let our discography expand a bit before I blew my wad I could have talked him into it.

Mikey is pretty big on video games and collecting cartridge sized relics of consoles past… What game’s soundtrack would Vempire best fit on?

Mikey: Ooh a question just for me! So I have a bootleg of this Playstation game that was supposed to come out in 1998 called THRILL KILL. It is a four player fighting game that got canceled right at the end of development because of the graphic content. A bunch of humans die and are sent to hell to fight to the death at a chance of reincarnation… all of the fighters have all of these rad cutscenes about how they died being various abhorrent people. Some of our more industrial shit would fit in that game perfectly.

One of our obligatory questions in these interviews also tends to be the one I have found most important on a personal level. Who are some bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?

Lindsey: Carrier, Your Own Knife, Nightosphere. My best friends’ bands. They inspire me everyday and I want to be like them when I grow up. 
Mikey: The never-ending list of collaborative, rad folks in this weird, dance, music community come to mind for me: Toilet Rats and the Violet Ghost from Minnesota, Synth Lovers Cafe from London, Candid Black in Canada, Plack Blague and Permadeaf from here in Nebraska. This list is kind of growing as we speak and I am elated.

What’s next for Vempire?

Lindsey: We’re gonna keep on fuckin rockin’!
Mikey: Yeah absolutely. There is a lot of really fucked up, depressing, shit to write dance songs about, the reception from the Your Steps LP and Fumes EP have both been really lovely and positive and we’re looking forward to 2025.

Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?

We’re really trying to promote our releases anywhere we can if you have any time to dip in those. The Your Steps full-length came out on August 16th of this year and the Fumes EP just came out on Halloween. Thank you so much Ed! <3 

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Roll of the Dice is a short interview format with a variable amount of questions. A pair of dice is rolled and the total, between 2 and 12, is the amount of questions we can ask. All questions are given to the interviewee(s) at once, and no follow-ups are allowed. The interview may be lightly edited for content and clarity.