Barcelona’s Acid Snot have returned from a five-year break with a pair of new singles from Lockjaw Records and Thousand Island Records. “Amsterdam” and “Biopsy” show the band gearing up for a new full-length, brimming with the melodic punk sound the band perfected on 2016’s Attitudes. The quartet was kind enough to join TGEFM on a Roll of the Dice interview to chat about the new music, the band’s return and living amongst a region seeking sovereignty.
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. What can you tell us about Acid Snot and your sound for readers who are just discovering or rediscovering the band?
Yooo! Thank you, for real! We are super humbled and honored. Acid Snot is a 4-piece Tech Melodic Punk band based in Barcelona, Catalunya. We want to think that our sound has been on a constant evolution, but in broad strokes we mix alternative metal / modern melodic hardcore riffing and leads with fast and bouncy pop punk and metalcore drums and catchy vocal melodies with lots of harmonies. As for the lyrics, we want to think we don’t go over the top with super snobbish stuff. We tend to rely on the imagery and narratives of left-wing, antifascist, green political philosophy and discourses, as well as on more heartfelt “emo” themes such as heartbreaks, mental health or nostalgia, just to name a few. Everything singing in English as if we were from friggin’, let’s say, Cardiff, hahaha. Can you believe it?
I mentioned rediscovery because you just recently released your first two singles in 5 years. Obviously, there was a window of inaction because of the pandemic, but what else was everybody up to over that break? What brought Acid Snot back to the studio for these new tracks?
That is actually a very good question. Of course the pandemic was a turning point for almost everyone we guess, but it was not the thing that made us stop per se. After our 2017 Euro tour and our last show at Punk Rock Holiday 1.7 in Slovenia, we knew that we would have take a break. At that moment, three of us were 21-22 years old and were still pursuing our university degrees. In September 2017, Edu (guitar and back vocals) left Barcelona to move to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for a semester abroad. When he got back in February 2018, Àlex (bass and main vocals) left Barcelona to spend a semester in Thessaloniki, Greece.
We played a reunion show in the city with our Gs from Bates Motel from València, who were doing a short run of shows to make it to Slovenia to play Punk Rock Holiday 1.8, and our local friends from Fastloud. We think it was July 2018. However, in August 2018, Edu left Barcelona again to pursue a Master’s degree in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Uri (drums and back vocals), left to do the same but in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Shortly after, in April 2019, David, our former guitar player and exmember of the Valencian punk rock band Kill the President!, with whom he wrote their critically acclaimed EP Citizens, left Barcelona and moved to Toronto, Ontario, indefinitely. Then Uri went six months to backpack around Australia and… BOOM! Pandemic!
Then, by the time the pandemic was over and we were allowed to move here and there, Àlex, Edu and Uri were already back in Catalunya and we decided to start thinking for real about recording new music. Since David was (and still is!) in Toronto and had no plans on coming back, we had a conversation with him and, unfortunately, we decided to part ways in very good terms. Now, Pablo aka LOA (member of the Les Fonts-based modern punk rock band The Fox 196) took his spot as axe-slayer in the spring of 2021. We want to use this opportunity to send a huge hug to our main man David who, even though he chose to pursue other life goals, is always supporting us and is the number one –and most strict and honest- fan. Plus, is one of our best friends and we miss him (and getting blackout drunk with him) so much.
We must say, though, that during all these years, we never lost contact and kept on writing songs in a rather-cooperative way. We have always used TuxGuitar (the Linux guitar tabs app) to write our songs so all of us can collaborate and be super tight when it comes to choosing notes and all. Plus, we can do it outside the home studio/rehearsal room and, most importantly, we can write songs that we don’t know how to play at that moment. By the time we could finally meet in a more constant basis, we already had an insane amount of finished songs and ideas. We started writing “Biopsy” around 2016 so you can imagine. Then it was a matter of refining everything, demoing and making sure that every song we moved forward was a banger. We have never been on a rush to release music.
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?
It is difficult to say or choose something specific. We guess that when we were around 8 years old or so, watching any American Idiot music videos on TV was like “Holy fuck. This is so cool”. Well, we don’t think we knew any swear words when we were 8 but you know what we mean, hahaha. Also, back in 2011, discovering local bands like Daylight, Adrenalized, Mainline 10 or The Holybuttons changed the way in which we perceived what we could actually do in the sense that we were like “man, there are bands around us that are writing this super solid songs. Why aren’t we pushing for this sound?”. Seeing A Wilhelm Scream live or playing a show with Darko in 2014 was also life-changing as we saw that we didn’t need that many resources to go and play around. With that said, if you talk about Acid Snot right now and the approach we have on music for the latest songs we wrote, let us pick these 9 that, as you mention, are not only influences or albums that we like but pieces of art that blown our minds at some point, and still do, in order to motivate us:
1. City of Evil – Avenged Sevenfold (2005): Crazy-ass, super iconic and melodic guitar leads, and fast metal drumming. For us, one of the best metal records of all time, even though we don’t share the patriotic rather-conservative stance A7X had on that era. A song: “Bat Country.” Best metal song ever. Period.
2. Self-Titled – Belmont (2018): The coolest pop punk meets djent ever made. Heavy and bouncy drumming, craaaazy solid riffing and very catchy vocal melodies. Plus, Belmont have taken this path of using samplers and more electronic stuff that we are in one way or another trying to experiment with as well. A song: “Convalescence.” Simply mind-blowing.
3. The Difference Between Hell and Home – Counterparts (2013): Brutal post-hardcore with super rad drumming and massive breakdowns. A song: “Wither.”
4. Leopards – Fair Do’s (2018): When our Manchester boys released this record we could not believe what we were hearing. Modern skatepunk plus djent? Yassss. And Danny and John singing and playing that insanity at the same time? We remember when some of us went to KNRD fest 2018 some months before they released Leopards. We can tell you it made no sense at all. Stupidly underrated band. A song: “Cowabunga.”
5. Origins – The Human Project (2013): This was a truly game-changer in the scene. Best harmonies in the business and there is no way anyone will change our opinion about it. Pop melodies infused with melodic punk in the coolest way possible. A song: “Tragedy of Commons”
6. Partycrasher – A Wilhelm Scream (2013): The legends themselves. Their energy, their deep and razor-sharp lyrics, their riffs. Loss for words. A song: “Hairy Scarecrow.”
7. No Good Left To Give – Movements (2020): Super tight emo/shoegaze record. But, pals, the lyrics are in a whole other level. Super personal, very specific with the slight amount of rhetoric needed to sound beautiful without over-dramatizing things in a snobbish way. Amazing record front to back that radically changed the way we wrote about more personal stuff. A song: “Seneca.”
8. Un Verano Sin Ti – Bad Bunny (2022): The aesthetics and music videos, yo. Top notch stuff. Still thinking if one day we’ll gather the courage to drop a reggaeton song being a punk rock band. We think we will at some point. A song: “Moscow Mule.”
9. Language – The Contortionist (2014): A life-changing experience front to back. It opened the eyes and minds of a progressive world never seen before. A song: “Language part 1.”
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?
It is inevitable to think about all these years apart when this question comes over. However, life is what it is and we chose to pursue different things. Who knows, maybe if we had toured more, we would have played cooler and cooler gigs. Nevertheless, and contrariwise, maybe we had not had the time to reflect on certain things and write, re-write and be so specific with our new tunes.
As for gigs turned down, we have not been offered that many insane gigs that we regret turning down. We cannot talk about how the underground or alternative/punk rock scene works in other countries because we have this biased lens when looking at other places. However, we can certainly talk about how thinks work in Spain and Catalunya. The scene and music industry are pretty much an oligarchy that give closeto-none access to important gigs to smaller independent bands. Plus, it is so old-school that makes us puke. We live in Barcelona, which is an amazing city with lots of cultural offer and gigs, so we are in a very privileged position in this sense, though.
Nonetheless, if there is no broadening of perspective when it comes to, let’s say, pop punk or modern metalcore for instance, what the hell are we doing? Like, in terms of well-established bands that play in clubs (not talking about Blink 182, Avenged Sevenfold or Sum 41 for instance, that tend to play in stadiums), the last time we had a modern pop punk show was Neck Deep + Real Friends + As It Is in 2017. No modern melodic hardcore ever stops in Spain unless it is to play at Resurrection Fest in Viveiro. Why? When it comes to punk rock and all their subgenres (metalcore, pop punk, melodic hardcore, whatever it is), the promoters tend to book the same bands all the time and there are no promoters that book more ‘Warped Tour-vibes’ bands, or modern-sounding bands if you know what we mean. Like, no disrespect and we are so glad it happened, but we had 3 NOFX farewell shows in a row last May but have not had any Counterparts, Knuckle Puck, Polyphia or Four Year Strong, to name a few, when they have done EU tours in their last years because there is no one willing to bring them around, which seems so crazy for a city like Barcelona or Madrid. And we are sure the same thing happens in most of the scenes, too. Sorry, we think we side-tracked so much in this one, hahaha.
That said, we truly appreciate the work people do to keep the scene, in a bigger or smaller aspect, alive. And, obviously, we are super happy for all the non-DIY opportunities, even if they can be counted with the fingers of one hand, that we have been offered.
The world has been going through some shit over the last few years. What effect, if any, have the cultural and political landscapes of the last few years had on your music?
Undoubtedly shit is pretty scary right now. We are from Catalunya which, as you may know, in the last 10 years or so, a part of the population and political sphere has been very active claiming an emancipation referendum to leave Spain and become an independent nation. This has been used as throwing weapon for both Spanish right wing and Catalan, especially right wing and center parties to keep the debate going and fix nothing that really needs a fixture as soon as possible. We think it was Herbert Marcuse that mentioned this ‘fear of the other’ in one of his books and, absolutely, politics these days tend to work within these dynamics. This does not mean that we do or don’t support independence movements. We have always been pro-referendum because democracy is what it is: fucking deciding in a communal forum. However, our decision would be based in two scenarios: Right Wing Spain vs. Left Wing Catalunya or Left Wing Spain vs. Right Wing Catalunya. When in doubt, always remember: screws oppress when turned right and liberate when turned left. And we openly repudiate any traces of Franco’s Dictatorship which include: the monarchy, the big economic lobbies and energetic companies established in the country at that time, and any political party, or person for that matter, who does not understand that in the 21st Century should be a time of liberation for all. They are all liberals in economic terms but extremely conservative with the rest of the things, right?
Connected with that, populism has gained such an incredible ground that is, we think, very dangerous. The fact that certain discourses are being accepted as some legitimate, hegemonized opinion, is just insane for us. Like, certain things should not be even discussed these days because they should be part of any society that thrives for what all political parties fill their mouths with but then few of them work towards it: the welfare state for all social strata. In a world where feminism, racism, LGTBQ+ rights or climate change are being put as something that can be approached from subjectivity, and is discussed in the public spheres by well-established, white, accommodated people (usually men over their 50s), something is terribly wrong. They are issues that should already be accepted as part of any democratic country in the 21st Century. Like, who the hell are Santiago Abascal or Donald Trump to have a fucking opinion against abortion AND be able to legislate on it? Do you have a vagina? No. Do you have social underlying privileges for being a white, well-established, male? Yes. Can you be raped and left aside by a system with a trauma and a child that you didn’t decide to have? No, because, referring to the first question, you don’t have a feminine reproductive system. And, obviously, who the hell are humans in general to determine who people decide to love, their sexual identity or whatever they decide as long as there is consent when the LGTBQ+ community are literally harming no one. It is so stupid that we are discussing things like this in 2023.
What many people don’t see is that we should be very critical with this, and very wary, because at the end of the day, all of these dynamics of oppression are, in a more superficial or deep sense, historically intertwined with the history of colonialism, extraction and capitalism. Racism is the fear of the other, but these days, we don’t see many people being openly racist with the investors that come from Saudi Arabia to the so-called global north. But the public conservative discourse, here and everywhere, is quite harsh with refugees. For instance, the Mediterranean is having a huge issue with this, as many people are dying every day trying to cross it from Africa to Europe. Shout out to Open Arms for their work on the matter, though. These people are amazing. But, going back to the source, if capitalism is this human-made entity that now operates on its own as “market regulated” and everyone in a powerful position that says “hey, maybe the way we are living in a global matter makes no sense anymore” because the mass-media and lobbies will tag this person as a “crazy radical anti-system Bolshevik son of Stalin”, well, we are fucked. Most of us are way closer to being homeless than becoming millionaires and, in a system that does not work for most of the people, is profoundly unequal, and through extraction (just like Communism in this matter, remember that USSR was very extractive and unequal as well), everyone should be anti-system and proud if we want to work towards the welfare, justice, solidarity of all human and non-human beings. We believe that we are at a point where despair is everywhere but, if closely analyzed, there are dimming lights of hope here and there. Escaping from capitalism is almost impossible, even more difficult if you live in a city and have a regular job, but policies can be done to fight it back because, well, it has been proven inconsistent and unsustainable in so many ways.
We are a super small band that barely no one knows or cares about, but we have never hidden ourselves in this regard. And, in this sense, Biopsy has a similar message: we are in a cage (physical and cultural) that, if you want to escape from, or make bigger, no matter how much you repudiate it, it can be almost impossible. And obviously, the privileges we have here and the way we can thrive in capitalism and have a “better life” are strictly connected to the exploitation of other entities, human and non-human.
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?
Besides all the bands we have mentioned all around, let us make a list of 20 bands that we think they are top-tier shit (plus their instagrams!):
1. Wud (Math Rock, Torelló): @wud_band
2. Headache (Screamo/Shoegaze, Barcelona): @headachebanda
3. Efiura (Screamo, Torelló): @efiuraband
4. Day Oof (Skate Punk, Athens): @dayoofskatepunk
5. PMX (Skate Punk, Perth): @pmxrock
6. Treehouse Kids (Pop Punk, Barcelona): @treehouse_kids
7. Pawn Gang (Trap, Barcelona): @pawngang_ufisial
8. Figa Flawas (Reggaeton, Valls): @figaflawas
9. Wyres (Melodic Punk, Leeds): @wearewyres
10. All Wrong (Pop Punk, Barcelona): @allwrongmusic
11. Vereda (Emo/Spoken Word, Barcelona/Canary Islands): @vereda.bcn
12. Rojuu (Hyperpop, Barcelona): @rojuu
13. Youth Fountain (Pop Punk, Vancouver): @youthfountainmusic
14. Malaka (Rap / Mestizaje, Barcelona): @malaka.phunk [Àlex’s side project]
15. Flora (Electronic Pop / New Wave Pop Punk, Barcelona): @floramp3 [Uri’s side project]
16. Hoi-poi (Emo Punk, Thessaloniki/Copenhagen): @hoipoifw
17. We Exist Even Dead (Metalcore/Djent, Terrassa): @weexistevendead
18. Viva Belgrado (Emo, Córdoba): @viva.belgrado
19. Biela (Power Pop, Madrid): @bielagrupo
20. Los Manises (Strange, Elche): @losmanises
The other lesser-known bands that we have mentioned throughout the interview are: @batesmotelvlc ; @adrenalized_band ; @main_line_10 ; @thefox196 ; @darko_band ; @fastloudband ; @daylightbcn ; @killthepresidentband
What’s next for Acid Snot?
For now, we have just released our two singles “BIOPSY” and “AMSTERDAM,” and we are trying to book as many shows as possible for next season so, if anyone wants us to be playing around them, they can drop us a line through our social media and see what we can do. Also, some more music will be coming out. The first thing is a collab in the new Hike the Peak EP which is pretty rad. It drops in mid-July. And maybe, just maybe, another single before the summer is over. What about a song in our mother-tongue for the very first time? Stay tuned with Lockjaw Records and Thousand Islands Records for more on this! Oh, and of course even more music from summer onwards!
What do you wish I asked about or that you had more of an opportunity to speak about during this interview?
Actually, we think we have not left any more stuff to be said at the moment. We have enjoyed this so much and hopefully, you the readers will, too! Make sure you follow us on your favorite streaming platforms and social media sites (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube). We are everywhere, peeps! Thank you so so so so much <3. Hopefully we will speak again in a year or so 🙂 .
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.
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/
