Brat brings fun back to hardcore with April 29 stop at miniBar

Brat. // photo credit Vanessa Valadez

New Orleans barbiegrind band Brat is making hardcore fun again. Alongside bands like Drain, Brat embraces the sheer wholesale joy which is flinging yourself repeatedly into a group of like-minded friends while big ol’ riffs and breakdowns soundtrack the whole affair.

Brat’s stage show frequently sees their songs introduced by brief snippets of ’90s pop songs before the quartet breaks into one of their hard-as-nails compositions.

Brat’s latest, Social Grace, is out now from Prosthetic Records, and we hopped on Zoom with the band’s vocalist, Liz Selfish, and guitarist Brenner Moate (and their cat Romona) ahead of their stop at miniBar on Monday, April 29, to discuss the new record, live shows, and their approach to both.

The Pitch: Social Grace seems like a big step up from Mean Is What We Aim For. With both the album and the EP being recorded and mastered by the same person, what’s changed in the interim between the two? This sounds like a much bigger record than that EP did.

Brenner: Well, as far as the recording process the EPs were written before we were announced as a band–before anybody knew that we were a band or anything like that. I think as far as the production, I don’t know if he put quite as much into it. Not to say that like he was skimping on it, but I definitely think he took more time with the full length record as opposed to the EPs.

Has anything changed for you all as a band? The riffs just sound–I don’t want to say catchier cause they’re still heavy as shit, but “Rope Drag” sounds like something very different from you all.

Brenner: Well interestingly enough, the EPs were written pretty much entirely by me because it was before anybody else was in the band. It was just me and Elizabeth at that time, so I was writing all the music, but for the record, all those songs were written by all of us. It was a much more collaborative effort where I was still presenting most of the first drafts of the songs and still doing the bulk of the writing, but there’s definitely a lot more contribution from [Ian] Hennessy and Dustin [Eagan], our drummer and bassist.

I feel like a lot of people have come to you via live videos that have been posted online. For those who are used to the pop samples and stuff in your live shows, how do you keep that energy going on a recording?

I don’t really know. I just kind of trust in James Whitten, who records us, who knows what we sound like live, who has seen us live multiple times to just translate that energy as best as possible into the recordings. One thing we did on the album was a lot of the songs kind of blend into each other, which is something that I feel like just gives it a little bit more of a live feel as well.

Why do you think that bands like yourselves or Drain and so on and so forth are embracing fun in hardcore again? It seems like there was a period of time in the early 2000s when we had bands like Good Clean Fun who showed hardcore could be fun, but then it got serious, and now it’s getting fun again.

Liz: I, at least with Brat, always try to think about what I like when I go to a show and like, I’m going to a show to have fun. If I want to hear the band just stand there and play and sound perfect, I can just stay home and listen to the record. I want to go have an experience. That’s what we try to do with Brat and just try to try to keep it fun and entertaining.

Even your fellow New Orleanians, like Thou, as dark and brutal as they are, still manage to also have a sense of fun with their Nirvana covers. Is it coming out of New Orleans? Is that part of it for you all?

Brenner: Definitely think that’s a part of it. There are not really many musicians here who take themselves overly seriously. It’s not a very pretentious town.

Liz: Yeah. There’s a whole culture of fun for New Orleans. So maybe that is where part of that comes from.

How’d you all convince Morning Call to let you shoot a video there?

Liz: Well, that one was easy because our bass player, Hennessey, his family owns that restaurant. So yeah, we got the hook up there, and it’s actually his dad in the music video who’s firing us in the walk in freezer. He owns the restaurant.

Most of your videos have been done by John Colgan. Why do you like working with him so much and what does he lend to the visual aspect of Brad?

Brenner: Well, he’s a former co-worker of Dustin, our drummer. They worked together for a long time and Dustin knew that he was good at film and had experience doing music videos. His thing is, he knows how to make a music video look amazing and professional, but he’s very much just director of photography. We come up with the concepts for the music videos. He might have a fun idea here or there, but for the vast majority of it, we’re coming up with the concepts ourselves and he just kind of does what we want him to do.

To that end, like with the videos and with the amazing merch that Brat has, what makes like the visual aspects so appealing to you all as a band?

Liz: I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess. I mean, I definitely would say the visual aspect is certainly an important piece of Brat. I think it just goes back to like, we just want to keep it fun and keep everything like fun and bring that energy, so that’s kind of where that whole aesthetic came from. We just think it’s like fun to kind of juxtapose that with how heavy the music is.

How do you keep that energy going when you’re on tour and it’s the four of you in a van for a month, month and a half?

Liz: I mean, it’s hard, but you know, we love doing it. You definitely feed off the crowds energy every night, too. Getting up there if you’re tired and the crowd’s amped, then immediately you’re amped. That’s probably the biggest help for me at least.

Brenner: Yeah. I mean, playing our 25-minute set is the best part of every day when we’re on tour. It’s not hard to keep energy for that. It’s hard to have energy to drive nine hours and then load gear in and then be at the show for several hours and load out at 2 a.m. and get to our hotel at 3 a m. and do it all over again seven hours later. The set is the easy part.

Liz: Yeah, that’s definitely true. The logistics are much more of a drain than actually playing the set.

What led you all to be on Prosthetic? It seems like a really great fit, but how did that come to be?

Liz: Yeah, we’re we’re really lucky with Prosthetic. They reached out to us maybe within the first year of us being a band and we had done two tours at that point that we had just DIY booked. At that time we were really looking for a booking agent as step one, so we weren’t really even interested in working with labels yet. Once we got a booking agent and got some support tours under our belt, then we wrote the record and were ready to start shopping it to labels. We talked to Prosthetic again, and they just were the best fit for us and we’ve been really happy with them so far.

Being on a label has got to be a real help after DIYing it for so long.

Liz: Yeah, definitely with distribution. I mean, that was the main thing that we were interested in working with a record label for was just like having international distribution. You can get our record all over the world which is really cool, which we wouldn’t have been able to do as just DIY.

Brenner: Yeah. And they’ve, they’ve been really helpful with PR too.

Now that you have this full length out and you’re getting ready to go on a headlining tour in support of it, what does the rest of 2024 look like for Brat?

Brenner: A lot more tours.

Liz: A lot more tours. We’ve got some really cool fests that we can’t say because they haven’t been announced yet, but we definitely have some really cool things lined up for the rest of the year that we’re excited about.

Brat plays MiniBar on Monday, April 29 with Bonginator. Details on that show here.