A Chat with Cocaine Piss (29.03.19)
Hailing from Belgium
OSR: Firstly, how did you come up with the name ‘Cocaine Piss’? It sounds quite nasty.
CP: We have a stupid sense of humour, I guess. We started the band for fun and we found the name ‘Cocaine Piss’ to be really fun.
OSR: How did the band form?
CP: It was in the beautiful summer of 2013. We were organising a show in a bar and needed an opening band. We decided to create a band for the occasion, and had so much fun playing that show that we continued playing. Having fun playing is still our main motivation. We would quit the second it gets boring, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
OSR: You are about to release your second full-length album, Passionate & Tragic. What is the meaning behind the album?
CP: I honestly don’t know if there’s a meaning behind the album. We meant to make a good album, something that we love and that expresses what we wanted to at that specific moment.
OSR: Your albums are really short with Passionate & Tragic being only 20 minutes long! Is this just because of the typical punk style, or is it a Cocaine Piss-style?
CP: We never focus on the length of the songs or the number of songs we put it the album. When we feel like what we had to say has been said, we’re happy. We don’t want to repeat ourselves.
OSR: What was the recording process like for this new album?
CP: It was beautiful! Coming back for the second time at Electrical Audio to work again with Steve Albini was fantastic. We took three days total, two to record, one to do the mix. It’s all recorded live and analogic, so our sound is really raw, very close to the one we have live. We love it.
OSR: I don’t deal with many punk bands, so what is your songwriting process?
CP: We like to have a short writing process. For Passionate and Tragic, I think we took a bit more than three months to compose the whole thing. We do the writing all together: Mathias comes with some riffs, we work on them together, adding the bass and drums, and then I (Aurelie) come back home and start writing the lyrics. We really like to keep it simple and spontaneous.
OSR: Cocaine Piss focuses greatly on the issue of gender equality. I read an article recently on the problems with the term ‘female-fronted bands’. It said that using ‘female-fronted’ is more bad than good, that it focuses on the gender of the band members than the actual music. Sort of, making the music more about a girl being able to sing than the band playing good music. What are your thoughts?
CP: Well, female-fronted is not a music genre. We are everywhere, we do all kinds of music, and we don’t really use our genitalia in doing so. So yeah, sometimes it’s a bit exhausting to be remembered all the time that you are a girl. You are not especially a girl when you’re eating a sandwich, so why would you be 200% a girl when you’re playing music?
OSR: You’ve been compared to Bikini Kill and The Dead Kennedys. If you had to compare yourself to other bands, who would you say you sound like? Rather, who would you say sounds like Cocaine Piss?
CP: *laughs* That’s a tough question. We don’t even really what music genre we’re supposed to be playing, so I have no idea about that.
OSR: Describe a typical day in the life of Cocaine Piss.
CP: We wake up in a city that we don’t know. Grab coffee before we reach the highway. Sleep a bit in the van or talk nonsense for hours. We stop at the gas station and check on everyone’s transit. It’s important to know if your band mates have or haven’t pooped today. Grab shitty highway food. Drive more. Arrive at the venue. Load out, soundcheck, we play the show and feel so fucking alive. We party, we sleep, and do it again. We’ll do that everyday, if we can. We just want to tour and play as many shows as we can.
OSR: You recently released a music video for ‘My Cake’. What was that like? Can you explain the concept of the music video and who came up with it? If you could make any changes to the video, what would they be and why?
CP: We love our video for ‘My Cake’. It was directed by Laetitia Bica, who also directed ‘Eat The Rich’. Both videos are the product of a mutual deep understanding with Laetitia. We love working with visual artists and see our music turned into images. It also feels fantastic to include other artists
in our work, we really feel like we’re part of a big family of artists, and it’s great and super inspiring.
OSR: So, we always try to lighten the mood with some silly questions: First, what is your favourite food?
CP: Burrito.
OSR: Who is your favourite musician – and it can be absolutely anyone!
CP: I really don’t have one. The universe is too big to only have one favourite artist.
OSR: What are you freakishly bad at?
CP: Apparently, I can’t tie my shoes like a grownup.
OSR: Finally, what do you have planned for the rest of the year?
CP: Touring as much as we can
Thanks to Aurelie from Cocaine Piss for chatting with us! To listen to more of their music and check out where they’ll be next, follow their Facebook and Bandcamp!
