Perennial by M.D. Rogers
by Ben Bonadies
Perennial have made a name for themselves as one of the most electrifying bands out of New England. Their last album In The Midnight Hour won them fans and acclaim, including a spot on Allston Pudding’s Best of 2022 list, and their raucous stage presence cemented them as a group that needed to be seen, not just heard. As the band gears up for their show at Cambridge venue The Democracy Center, singer and guitarist Chad Jewett dishes on the band’s new album and the trio’s plans for performing in 2023.
Are you futurists or revisionists?
This is a great question. I would say that our goal, both on record and in the live setting, is to make something engaging and new. Live we want to be the band that’s a 20 minute burst of energy that no one saw coming. On record we’re always trying to play with what a “punk” song is, or what a “post-hardcore” song is. Sometimes that means drawing on stuff from the past that we love, but with the goal of making something exciting and unexpected. That was a lot of the focus of In The Midnight Hour: making a punk album that also brings in ambient music and post-bop jazz and electronic music and 60s soul. A loud distorted guitar is a lot more interesting when it’s followed up with vibraphone or drum machine or Hammond organ. The focus is on energy: what can make those 20 minutes next to your stereo as exciting as possible.
What did you learn from making your first album that you brought into making your second, and what did you learn from your second that you’re bringing into your third?
On our first record we were still figuring out the shape of what Perennial is, the way we’d approach the blank canvas of a song. With our second LP, In The Midnight Hour, we wanted all the sounds we love to work together within songs, so that a track might start off sounding like Fugazi, but by the time you get to the bridge there’s been a verse with programmed drums and cowbell and synth and a free jazz instrumental break, while also making sure that all those pieces would work together and make sense. We wanted each new move to be exciting, but also to work well as pop songs.
For the record we’re working on now, it’s really just sharpening that same approach, while playing with the studio as its own instrument even more. We’re making sure we’re never satisfied to just lean on guitars and drums; we’re spending lots of time looking for what might be a more interesting sonic experience for the listener. So for instance, we have moments on the new album that musically are more based on how say the organ and drums work together, a sort of Stax thing, but the vocals over that might be something we’d normally sing over a much louder, more distorted section. We’re bringing in electric piano and fuzz bass and wah wah pedals and more tambourines and drum machine. This new record is a headphone album you can dance to.
Perennial in the studio. Photos courtesy of Perennial
Any surprises on the new record?
The nice thing about playing as much live as we did this year (around 60 shows since the release of In The Midnight Hour) is you quickly figure out what you love most about the album you’re performing every week. So we found that the songs we gravitated towards were the ones with big dynamic moves, with lots of hooks, with stuff that we can move to live. So LP3 so far really feels like its centered on those ideas. Sonically, we were listening to a ton of early garage rock, Motown, mod bands like The Jam and Small Faces. All of these sounds were already central to Perennial, but I think that punchy, energetic thing that all those aesthetics have in common are very present for LP3. We’re also taking even more time with what the studio makes possible in terms of a sort of Technicolor listening experience. We get bored very easily with a two-minute punk song that’s all guitars and drums. So we rather quickly got the skeleton of each song recorded and then got down to the fun of figuring out how to make each of those 10 or 12 songs really interesting and surprising, and worth listening to again and again as active headphone experiences; that’s a huge part of LP3.
What role does volume play in your sound?
I think in a lot of ways it defines our sound: we’ve always been absolutely enamored with the effect of quiet/loud dynamics: making a moment as quiet as it can be, then following it up immediately with something as loud as we can make it. Both on record and in our live sets. There’s a very real sonic affect to that dynamic flexibility that is so thrilling to us. Again, it’s all about finding energy, making something kinetic and memorable. That feeling when you see a band live, and they’re loud enough that you can feel the air moving? That’s really important to us. That said, please wear earplugs.
Perennial by M.D. Rogers
What’s most exciting to you about playing live?
Perennial exists to play live. We absolutely love making records, and we do so with painstaking care, but honestly what makes us special is what we do on stage for 20 minutes. Chelsey and I have this ethos that the goal is to never ever stop moving. Any given second of our show should be exciting to watch. If we catch ourselves standing still it means we need to be even more in motion and even more dramatic to make up for it. We want to reward people for watching us play: the records are a wonderful way to hear the work we do sonically. The live show is where you’ll see why we’re so devoted to Perennial as a concept.
Perennial by M.D. Rogers
Plans for a tour?
We have a quick East Coast mini-tour coming up in late February, and hopefully some longer trips in the summer and autumn! We’re pretty much always within a couple weeks of a show in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, or New Jersey.
How did you decide to wear a uniform when you perform and how did you land on the striped shirt?
That goes back to the live show as the raison dêtre for Perennial. We love the idea of someone having never heard of us seeing the band set up and there’s this wall of guitar amps and an electric organ instead of a bass and all three members are matching: “What is this going to be?”. It’s also exciting for us: you look around and your whole band is matching and about to be so unbelievably loud. It puts a smile on my face very time. Plus so many of the bands we love matched: The Beatles matched, The Temptations matched, The Supremes matched, The Creation matched.
As for the striped shirts, it’s immediately recognizable. You can be at the very end of a big long room and see that we’re matching. Plus it makes shopping easy. Every year companies put out their summer lines and there’s inevitably a new batch of striped t-shirts for Perennial.
Catch Perennial with Gollylagging, Wally, and Tuxis Giant at Democracy Center January 21. A portion of proceeds benefit Broken Tail Rescue.