INTERVIEW: CHASER (PUNK ROCK HOLIDAY 2.2)

September 19, 2022

INTERVIEW: CHASER (PUNK ROCK HOLIDAY 2.2)

I had a privilege of talking to CHASER this summer at Punk Rock Holiday. They are a band I first saw a few years ago in Tolmin, and fell in love with than and there! This was their second time playing PRH, so here is what they had to say...

Hi, can you please introduce yourself?

Hi! My name is Bill from the band Chaser and I play a guitar.

You've been here in 2018. and you were playing beach stage?

Yeah we were, we did...it was fun...

I said to my friends then that you deserve to be on the main stage and here you are!!!

Oh...that's nice...thank you

Can you tell me what is new with you guys in the last few years?

well...We've released our current album Dreamers in 2021.

It was delayed, right, the release?

Yes, it was delayed. We finished recording it in spring 2020., just before the pandemic hit, literally a week before we finished tracking and everything shut down and so we were hoping to release it in the summer of 2020., but it didn't make much sense giving the fact everything that was happening and not being able to tour, so we just put it on hold for a year and started releasing singles. It just made sense for us to delay the release and when we did release it in April 2021. we were actually able to play a release show in July.

Once you finally did release it, I must say, that record hit hard, as for me it was and still is one of the best records in the last few years. Who did the writing?

Well...this one was very much a collaborative effort, much more then a Sound the Sirens. Most of the song writing were Jesse and Mike, than Davey and I joined in and worked on arrangements, but this one was really like a labour of love, something we all came together to create and we are very, very proud of it.

It's like a love child?

Yeah...something like that. You know...you never write music for someone else, but you're always excited when it resonates with the people the same way...when it makes them feel the same way you did when creating it. So it was very validating for us and it felt so great that people responded to it in such a positive way.

Speaking of „love child“, I remember reading somewhere that you were described as a love child between Pennywise and Strung Out...

Yeah, well those two bends, they are legendary and we do look up to them – we were very much influenced by them, as we were by many 90's bands, the melodic punk rock. But we don't necessarily try to recreate that sound. It is the sound we all really feel connected to, but you try to do your own thing.

But you do have your own sound!

Well yeah, thank you...for us it is really important, we really do try to sound like Chaser, what ever that might be, as you know – we are all under the same melodic punk umbrella and so we don't try to reinvent the wheel by any means, but we try to sound like Chaser. Mike has a certain way of doing vocals, Jesse has his way of playing bass, I have my way of playing guitar. All those bands have their little differences...

On your last album DREAMERS the energy is super high. What is the background story for this album?

Well, we wanted to take it to another level, make it a little bit more diverse, more dynamic than some of the stuff we did earlier and just like you said amp up the energy. We really felt good about the songs, but the production we really wanted to be on a higher level, that when people hit the play or put the needle on that vinyl, that it really hits them hard, to have that kind of power over them.

Is there also a story behind the cover of the album and it's art?

Well...the concept of DREAMERS...it took us a while to come around, we tried a couple of different things, different album titles. The art was very important to us, and not just the songs. We wanted everything to be perfect.

You wanted the whole story...

Yeah, this was the creation we were looking for, visually, because, you know, vinyl is such a big deal and we wanted it to look really perfect on a 12-inch artwork. It was really important to us, the whole package and the message of the record. Jesse has written the song Dreamers way back. That song has been around for a while, even as early as 2016, 2017, not completed by the time for Sound the Sirens and not ready to be recorded at that point, but we really liked that song and the title and the message to it. And when it finally came down to it, it just seemed like a perfect fit. The where we were in the world, starting to feel a sense of hope as it was a dark time for the world. It was kind of a new hope. Becuse we all dream, we are a daydreamers, thinking what is possible, the way we look at the world...it just felt like the perfect album title and the message we were trying to convey.

I can tell you that the message is out there! And how do you feel about punk nowadays and back in the 90's? I know you started around 2000, but it is almost 90's...

Well yeah, I think in the 90's it was a big thing, a lot of the bands broke through the mainstream and that lead to a lot of underground bands getting the recognition they deserved. Back then everybody was discovering new bands, it was like a thing back in that time. The difference between now and then I think is that it's not new, but people are rediscovering it. And I hope that we can be a part of reinvention, a new spin, as back then, especially '92-'96, '98 it was a heyday, and as we started in the 2000s, we came just at the back end of that heyday. And looking at those bands still out there crushing it and that is awesome, but there are new bands out there to and I think people are starting to discover them like they did back in the 90's and that is the similarity. We get it all the time, we get messages like „hey, I never knew about you guys“ and I feel like there is still a lot of people that don't know CHASER and we are hoping that we can continue to introduce ourselves to punk fans.