The frontman for garage slime reprobates Draggs admits that the notoriously hard-to-beat video game had a big influence on his band’s single, The Gutter, a tune off an EP titled Demo they released towards the end of last year. “The main riff was ripped from an unused song that I whipped together a year before we started the band and the lyrics wrote themselves after grinding through a trash Dark Souls level,” he says.
Draggs are part of Australia’s emerging lo-fi garage rock scene, a collection of similarly-minded, similarly-slimy bands including Drunk Mums and Hobo Magic. Indeed, all three of those bands are set to perform together at a Halloween bash going down in Brisbane later this month, and they frequently schedule tours together.
“Adam [Ritchie] from Drunk Mums hit me up on the net asking about doing a cassette on his label Pissfart Records,” Mason says. “That led to us playing the Byron Bay and Brisbane shows of their tour. They put on a flaming show, easily [one of the] best gigs we’ve played. Plus, those guys are super rad dudes.”
Given the international exposure Oz grot rock is receiving, it’s perhaps understandable that Mason feels a deep sense of attachment to his scene: his friends are becoming stars, and the sound they have forged together is already being emulated. “Heaps of good bands are coming out of Australia at the moment,” he says. “It’s sweet to see bands you really like getting recognized for what they like doing.”
What Draggs like doing is clear: the band write fast and fucked-up tunes, and then they play them loud. Given the ad hoc nature of their live sets, and the audible grain present on their EPs, it’s perhaps unsurprising that their songwriting method is similarly stripped back. “[It’s] not much of a writing process,” Mason says. “I record the demos of songs myself by recording drums first then squeezing out some power chords over the top. Then, if the dudes are digging a demo, at the next jam we’ll jack the song out and everyone adds their own stuff to it.”
The group rehearse “once a week in a tool shed”, a setting that one can imagine helps prepare them for the intimate, DIY shows they frequently play. It’s par for the course then when Mason admits that his favourite kind of gig to play is a house show. “We played some full-throttle Brisbane house party when we first started,” he says. “There were 40-plus loose units squeezed into a shoebox size room. It was mental.”
The band’s raucous live sets span their discography, and they pay equal mind to both the songs the fans know and love and their newer tunes, chief amongst them songs off their freshest record, Slime Street. That EP was released this year, back in August, and is crammed full of that oh-so Draggs-esque grit and gristle, featuring great slabs of ugly guitar work with titles like Goblin Hot Rod and Ghost Pit.
“Slime Street, the song itself, was a pretty old song that we wrote before Demo came out,” Mason says. “We reworked it for the release but the rest of the tracks were all pretty recent. The writing process of the tracks isn’t very complicated: all our songs are just power chords, plus the lyrics are mostly sci-fi and fantasy-themed dribble, so songs get made pretty fast.”
Lovers of physical media have a reason to rejoice too: the band are putting out Slime Street on cassette, so you have good cause to whip out that Walkman. “People are into cassettes because they’re cheaper to buy,” Mason says. “Like how vinyl is back: it’s nice to get a big physical piece of artwork, plus the inserts as well. People like collecting different stuff. Whatever works for them, just collect stuff that makes you happy.”
By Joseph Earp
