Nude Beach Talk Punk Roots In Their Roots Music, and Stream a Song "For You"

The first time I saw

it smelled like total shit. In June of 2012, the Brooklyn trio crammed into the back of local dive Tommy's Tavern in Greenpoint to support a fledgling Vancouver band called White Lung (

), along with future labelmates California X in the tiny, fifty capacity space. Despite the considerable (olfactory) obstacles, Nude Beach perservered and played a solid set that showed shades of the Replacements and Tom Petty through and through. Later that night I met them at the merch table and scooped up their second LP. It didn't leave my turntable for a while.

Soon therafter, things started picking up for the trio, including a reissue of II via Other Music Recording Co and supporting slots for bands ranging from Terrible Feelings to Roky Erickson to Reigning Sound at shiny new venues, ones with attached bowling alleys and bathroom attendants. The audiences never stopped growing, which leads them to today and

the band's forthcoming eighteen-song LP due via Don Giovanni on October 21. The release is the first for the band on the esteemed label, and has spawned a pair of singles including "For You" available for the first time today. Stream both singles below and preorder yours

or

.

With all of these exciting things happening for the Brooklyn trio, we figured we would check in with drummer Ryan Naideau about the band, it's roots in punk, and why they felt the need for a double album. The results of our conversation are below.

Yeah! (laughs) Well there’s eighteen songs on it and it sort of just, the way that Chuck writes songs, he just churns them out. He’s constantly writing music, whether or not we’re all getting together and playing these songs, he’s always demo-ing stuff. So, we toured a lot after Nude Beach II and didn’t take too much time to record new songs, like we recorded a seven inch that came out on another music label, two exclusive songs as kind of a one off thing. But then we’d sort of been conceptualizing this next record as this grandiose kind of statement. It’s all these songs that we’ve been playing on tour for a couple years that have been snowballed onto this bigger record and we didn’t want to leave any of it off because we thought it flowed pretty good. Even though it’s long and people have a shorter attention span or whatever (laughs), I don’t think we wanted to compromise that.

Yeah, we toyed with the idea of cutting it down to a single LP or whatever, but we could never come up with a tracklist that made sense without leaving off a couple of our favorite songs. We really like everything on the record, and we were all racking our brains to come up with a shorter version. It wasn’t working. We recorded these songs kind of the in the way they were laid out on the album, and then Chuck sort of mixed them and sent them to us in a certain order, and then we all got used to this order of the record. And we’re just like “actually it’s cool the way it is,” all the pieces fell into place and we didn’t want to mess with it too much.

It is funny, yeah. The three of us all listen to a lot of different music. Like I don’t just listen to The Replacements and Springsteen and the stuff we get compared to and Jimmy listens to a lot of Jazz…. we like a lot of different stuff. So it is sort of funny that the music that we play is so straightforward in a sense. But I do feel like this record it sort of breaks out a little bit. There are some songs on it I feel like are showing off our broader range of influence in the spectrum of shit we like. For example, this song “Changes” on the album towards the end of the record has a weird-psych thing to it, and a psychedelic outro/ending. There’s more baroque pop moments with piano and organ on the record. I feel like it is a little less straightforward than Nude Beach II, which was cut and dry ten songs in the same style. And the record does definitely echo the same influences and sort of sound similar, but I feel like we’re taking more time to explore some of our other influences. But yeah, I never thought of it as a response to new sounding music, but people have always said that. I think it’s a thing that comes the most naturally to us, what the three of us are good at.

Yeah, White Lung, California X.

I think there are definitely bands who’s discography we admire, and that’s super old school like The Rolling Stones who’d put out album after album after album every couple of years, and they were doing a similar thing and with each album it became more of their own thing. They sort of turned into the band you now reference and that you immediately think of. It’s something a few albums in developed a theme in that way. I think bands like that, Zeppelin and the Stones, and even a contemporary band like Wilco, and I’m not speaking for everyone on that one. And another contemporary band we definitely admire is Reigning Sound. Greg Cartwright is such a good songwriter, he just pumps these records out under various names and projects and things like that. And they’re not flashy, and not pretentious and they’re coming from a real place, not like a deadline for a record he’s obliged to put out. So that’s sort of a model we all like.

We never sat down to talk about what the next step was. The dream, however simple it might sound, is you can release records when you feel like you’re done with them. That feels old-fashioned almost, because that’s the way the record business works where you have to pump stuff out to stay in the spotlight. I think there are bands that have proven themselves by chugging along at their own pace and touring a decent amount. We’re not too obsessed with road-dogging it, like all year long. We wanna go on a couple tours and make it to Europe and Japan and stuff, but first and foremost, as cliche as it sounds, it’s all about the record. We want the record to be like these cool representations of the sound or whatever.

It was inevitable sooner or later that the super-punk kids coming to Nude Beach shows wouldn’t like the kind of songs we were writing. In my opinion. But that didn’t mean I wanted to stop playing those kinds of shows, and I didn’t start Warthog to be in the punk scene, it was for a genuine love of that style of music I grew up on and have always been apart of. I think it’s cool, and we realized that trying to do those things, because Nude Beach is part of that scene in that we go to the shows and parties and know all the people and have all the same friends and stuff, but the hardcore thing is sort of like a hardcore thing sometimes. And we don’t always fit on those bills, which is awesome because we found other audiences and people who like our music, so we’re down to be open to play some festival or weird venue and open for some band. I think there’s merits to both, and I’m happy to be apart of both scenes, I’m thankful. It’s fun, they’re both fun for different reasons. The DIY stuff we grew up on. I don’t know, everyone always said sooner or later we’d grow up and break out of that scene, but we never tried to do it. Sometimes when you’re trying to play stuff that sounds like classic rock radio stuff, or a Beatles-y song not everyone will want to jump around for that. You’re better off playing for a different audience with a different set of bands.

People always say Nude Beach should play with Ryan Adams. And I think we’d be open to doing something like that. Ryan Adams has songs I love and so does Shit and Una Bestia Incontrolable. I feel like I’m a multifaceted sort of music person, and we all love stuff for different things. I don’t know, you’re selling yourself short ultimately if you stay close-minded to stuff like that. I feel like punk is a shining example where people who are like, no I only like punk or hardcore. It’s like I love just as much of that hardcore stuff as free jazz or whatever band put out an album last week that none of the punk kids will listen to. I feel like it’s become easier for us to play shows because the three of us have gotten more open-minded about stuff like that, and we realized not all of our fans at this point are hanging out at 538. Some of them are looking at Mercury Lounge concert listings. There’s a whole world of people who now, thanks to record labels and videos, know about or music and stuff, that if we just wanted to “stick it to the man” and only play $5 DIY shows with hardcore bands, we’d be selling ourselves short to the people buying our music.

At the same time anytime the opportunity that arises and makes sense, it’s really fucking fun. We played a house show the other night at Thompkins and we played at Lulu’s in Greenpoint that was closing down and that was a total free for all, people just going nuts. We still play those shows, it’s just we’re not closely tied to that community as we once were musically. And it is kind of weird. We’ve seen it coming. All of my friends from Warthog, when we played the tour with Roky Erickson they all came to that show. So there was crossover there. We’re gonna play this hardcore fest in Toronto called “Not Dead Yet” this year, and that’s a bunch of bands that sound nothing like us but then again so are the Marked Men. So that circle will be represented. It’s trial and error some of that stuff.

Yeah. I feel like as long as you approach it with an open mind, people will be receptive whether or not their band is exactly like yours.

We’ve just started to write more stuff. The next thing is a pressing of the demo tape, which was mastered by our friend and pressed on a seven inch, so that people who didn’t get the demo tape can get it. We also had a tour cassette that had some weird covers. Otherwise we’re gonna write new stuff and put out another seven inch. If we can’t get it together to put out a new seven inch, we’ll just do another batch of songs.

We did a West coast tour this summer, and I don’t know when the next one will be, but hopefully sometime early next year. We’re all super scattered since we’re all in so many other projects, and also our guitarist Mike is going to school. So the summer time is when we do shows, but it might be just recording stuff and a show here and there for the next few months.

Some of the songs on the record have been around for two or three years at this point, and that’s one of the newest songs that we've been playing live. Chuck was working on it and we all played it and we were into it because it had a weird glammy vibe. It’s been a fun song to play live and people have been really receptive to it. But in terms of it being a Nude Beach staple, it’s a relatively new song we’ve started to play. Not too rife with memories.

Oh man. I feel I had an answer for this earlier. I wanted to say The Men, but I feel like that’s such a copout because we always say The Men. Probably The Men or Amen Dunes.

-----

NUDE BEACH on TOUR

8/31: Chicago, IL @ Remix Chicago Festival

9/20: New Brunswick, NJ @ Boyd Park

10/3: Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool w/ Juniper Rising

10/21-25: New York, NY @ CMJ Festival

10/26: Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups

10/27: Chicago, IL @ Subterranean

10/28: Minneapolis, MN @ Hexagon

11/5: New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge

11/22: Toronto, ON @ Not Dead Yet Fest

The first time I saw

it smelled like total shit. In June of 2012, the Brooklyn trio crammed into the back of local dive Tommy's Tavern in Greenpoint to support a fledgling Vancouver band called White Lung (

), along with future labelmates California X in the tiny, fifty capacity space. Despite the considerable (olfactory) obstacles, Nude Beach perservered and played a solid set that showed shades of the Replacements and Tom Petty through and through. Later that night I met them at the merch table and scooped up their second LP. It didn't leave my turntable for a while.

Soon therafter, things started picking up for the trio, including a reissue of II via Other Music Recording Co and supporting slots for bands ranging from Terrible Feelings to Roky Erickson to Reigning Sound at shiny new venues, ones with attached bowling alleys and bathroom attendants. The audiences never stopped growing, which leads them to today and

the band's forthcoming eighteen-song LP due via Don Giovanni on October 21. The release is the first for the band on the esteemed label, and has spawned a pair of singles including "For You" available for the first time today. Stream both singles below and preorder yours

or

.

With all of these exciting things happening for the Brooklyn trio, we figured we would check in with drummer Ryan Naideau about the band, it's roots in punk, and why they felt the need for a double album. The results of our conversation are below.

Yeah! (laughs) Well there’s eighteen songs on it and it sort of just, the way that Chuck writes songs, he just churns them out. He’s constantly writing music, whether or not we’re all getting together and playing these songs, he’s always demo-ing stuff. So, we toured a lot after Nude Beach II and didn’t take too much time to record new songs, like we recorded a seven inch that came out on another music label, two exclusive songs as kind of a one off thing. But then we’d sort of been conceptualizing this next record as this grandiose kind of statement. It’s all these songs that we’ve been playing on tour for a couple years that have been snowballed onto this bigger record and we didn’t want to leave any of it off because we thought it flowed pretty good. Even though it’s long and people have a shorter attention span or whatever (laughs), I don’t think we wanted to compromise that.

Yeah, we toyed with the idea of cutting it down to a single LP or whatever, but we could never come up with a tracklist that made sense without leaving off a couple of our favorite songs. We really like everything on the record, and we were all racking our brains to come up with a shorter version. It wasn’t working. We recorded these songs kind of the in the way they were laid out on the album, and then Chuck sort of mixed them and sent them to us in a certain order, and then we all got used to this order of the record. And we’re just like “actually it’s cool the way it is,” all the pieces fell into place and we didn’t want to mess with it too much.

It is funny, yeah. The three of us all listen to a lot of different music. Like I don’t just listen to The Replacements and Springsteen and the stuff we get compared to and Jimmy listens to a lot of Jazz…. we like a lot of different stuff. So it is sort of funny that the music that we play is so straightforward in a sense. But I do feel like this record it sort of breaks out a little bit. There are some songs on it I feel like are showing off our broader range of influence in the spectrum of shit we like. For example, this song “Changes” on the album towards the end of the record has a weird-psych thing to it, and a psychedelic outro/ending. There’s more baroque pop moments with piano and organ on the record. I feel like it is a little less straightforward than Nude Beach II, which was cut and dry ten songs in the same style. And the record does definitely echo the same influences and sort of sound similar, but I feel like we’re taking more time to explore some of our other influences. But yeah, I never thought of it as a response to new sounding music, but people have always said that. I think it’s a thing that comes the most naturally to us, what the three of us are good at.

Yeah, White Lung, California X.

I think there are definitely bands who’s discography we admire, and that’s super old school like The Rolling Stones who’d put out album after album after album every couple of years, and they were doing a similar thing and with each album it became more of their own thing. They sort of turned into the band you now reference and that you immediately think of. It’s something a few albums in developed a theme in that way. I think bands like that, Zeppelin and the Stones, and even a contemporary band like Wilco, and I’m not speaking for everyone on that one. And another contemporary band we definitely admire is Reigning Sound. Greg Cartwright is such a good songwriter, he just pumps these records out under various names and projects and things like that. And they’re not flashy, and not pretentious and they’re coming from a real place, not like a deadline for a record he’s obliged to put out. So that’s sort of a model we all like.

We never sat down to talk about what the next step was. The dream, however simple it might sound, is you can release records when you feel like you’re done with them. That feels old-fashioned almost, because that’s the way the record business works where you have to pump stuff out to stay in the spotlight. I think there are bands that have proven themselves by chugging along at their own pace and touring a decent amount. We’re not too obsessed with road-dogging it, like all year long. We wanna go on a couple tours and make it to Europe and Japan and stuff, but first and foremost, as cliche as it sounds, it’s all about the record. We want the record to be like these cool representations of the sound or whatever.

It was inevitable sooner or later that the super-punk kids coming to Nude Beach shows wouldn’t like the kind of songs we were writing. In my opinion. But that didn’t mean I wanted to stop playing those kinds of shows, and I didn’t start Warthog to be in the punk scene, it was for a genuine love of that style of music I grew up on and have always been apart of. I think it’s cool, and we realized that trying to do those things, because Nude Beach is part of that scene in that we go to the shows and parties and know all the people and have all the same friends and stuff, but the hardcore thing is sort of like a hardcore thing sometimes. And we don’t always fit on those bills, which is awesome because we found other audiences and people who like our music, so we’re down to be open to play some festival or weird venue and open for some band. I think there’s merits to both, and I’m happy to be apart of both scenes, I’m thankful. It’s fun, they’re both fun for different reasons. The DIY stuff we grew up on. I don’t know, everyone always said sooner or later we’d grow up and break out of that scene, but we never tried to do it. Sometimes when you’re trying to play stuff that sounds like classic rock radio stuff, or a Beatles-y song not everyone will want to jump around for that. You’re better off playing for a different audience with a different set of bands.

People always say Nude Beach should play with Ryan Adams. And I think we’d be open to doing something like that. Ryan Adams has songs I love and so does Shit and Una Bestia Incontrolable. I feel like I’m a multifaceted sort of music person, and we all love stuff for different things. I don’t know, you’re selling yourself short ultimately if you stay close-minded to stuff like that. I feel like punk is a shining example where people who are like, no I only like punk or hardcore. It’s like I love just as much of that hardcore stuff as free jazz or whatever band put out an album last week that none of the punk kids will listen to. I feel like it’s become easier for us to play shows because the three of us have gotten more open-minded about stuff like that, and we realized not all of our fans at this point are hanging out at 538. Some of them are looking at Mercury Lounge concert listings. There’s a whole world of people who now, thanks to record labels and videos, know about or music and stuff, that if we just wanted to “stick it to the man” and only play $5 DIY shows with hardcore bands, we’d be selling ourselves short to the people buying our music.

At the same time anytime the opportunity that arises and makes sense, it’s really fucking fun. We played a house show the other night at Thompkins and we played at Lulu’s in Greenpoint that was closing down and that was a total free for all, people just going nuts. We still play those shows, it’s just we’re not closely tied to that community as we once were musically. And it is kind of weird. We’ve seen it coming. All of my friends from Warthog, when we played the tour with Roky Erickson they all came to that show. So there was crossover there. We’re gonna play this hardcore fest in Toronto called “Not Dead Yet” this year, and that’s a bunch of bands that sound nothing like us but then again so are the Marked Men. So that circle will be represented. It’s trial and error some of that stuff.

Yeah. I feel like as long as you approach it with an open mind, people will be receptive whether or not their band is exactly like yours.

We’ve just started to write more stuff. The next thing is a pressing of the demo tape, which was mastered by our friend and pressed on a seven inch, so that people who didn’t get the demo tape can get it. We also had a tour cassette that had some weird covers. Otherwise we’re gonna write new stuff and put out another seven inch. If we can’t get it together to put out a new seven inch, we’ll just do another batch of songs.

We did a West coast tour this summer, and I don’t know when the next one will be, but hopefully sometime early next year. We’re all super scattered since we’re all in so many other projects, and also our guitarist Mike is going to school. So the summer time is when we do shows, but it might be just recording stuff and a show here and there for the next few months.

Some of the songs on the record have been around for two or three years at this point, and that’s one of the newest songs that we've been playing live. Chuck was working on it and we all played it and we were into it because it had a weird glammy vibe. It’s been a fun song to play live and people have been really receptive to it. But in terms of it being a Nude Beach staple, it’s a relatively new song we’ve started to play. Not too rife with memories.

Oh man. I feel I had an answer for this earlier. I wanted to say The Men, but I feel like that’s such a copout because we always say The Men. Probably The Men or Amen Dunes.

-----

NUDE BEACH on TOUR

8/31: Chicago, IL @ Remix Chicago Festival

9/20: New Brunswick, NJ @ Boyd Park

10/3: Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool w/ Juniper Rising

10/21-25: New York, NY @ CMJ Festival

10/26: Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups

10/27: Chicago, IL @ Subterranean

10/28: Minneapolis, MN @ Hexagon

11/5: New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge

11/22: Toronto, ON @ Not Dead Yet Fest