by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
It’s odd to think about but Xiu Xiu has now existed for over twenty years. That’s over twenty years of heartbreaking outsider pop, spine-bending post-industrial, and soaring guitars. It's over twenty years of aching vocals accompanying oblique lyrics, of fans tattooing twin swords on their arms. To call Xiu Xiu a cult band this far into the game seems reductive because it suggests an almost enclosed nature to them. Yes, they’ve been doing what they've been doing for a while and yes, they have a passionate fanbase and no I don’t see them cracking the top 40 soon but Xiu Xiu are about as open of a book as a band can get. A group that makes art that’s direct in its emotions, wide-ranging in its influences, that while not always easy listening is rarely obtuse.
There’s no better evidence for why the band has stayed so relevant than their mind-altering new album 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, an astounding slice of psychedelia-tinged noise-pop. The album shows just how much the band is still very capable of, it charts new ground whilst also serving as one of their finest suites of pop so far. But if you really want to see why Xiu Xiu hasn’t merely stayed relevant but also endured so long then you just need to see them live. The band's complex arrangements may seem initially intimidating but it's clear from the passion in the crowds they draw, who sing and chant as the band plays song after song from their oeuvre that despite everything Xiu Xiu may be more popular than ever.
It's easy to see why that relationship between artist and audience is so strong after having a conversation with the band's frontperson Jamie Stewart. They’re the founder and often viewed as the core creative force behind Xiu Xiu but they are eager to acknowledge the rest of the band's importance and make clear that Xiu Xiu is far from a solo act. They’re also incredibly generous in their time, patience, and earnestness. It's clear that the music Stewart makes as part of Xiu Xiu is not designed for them but rather for their audience, no matter how nightmarish the sounds turn out. Across our conversation, it becomes rapidly clear that music is more than mere purpose to them, but intrinsic to their life just as it is to the listeners. It also becomes clear just how never-ending of a well the eclecticism of both Stewart and the band is.
photo credit: Eva Luise Hoppe
Devin Birse: When I first found your guy's music, it was back in 2021. At that time I was really into Bjork and Nick Cave, and Apple Music had these little playlists like Bjork influences and Nick Cave influencers. One track was in both playlists, and that was “I Luv the Valley OH!”. So I want to ask, do you think that's a decent description of your music, influenced by both Björk and Nick Cave?
Jamie Stewart: Nick Cave, definitely. I think maybe when we first started a little bit, Bjork, not so much sonically, but in that she has a wide palate. Sound is as much of her compositional process as harmonics and melody I think that that particular song, “I Luv the Valley” Isn't necessarily so influenced by both of them. I think that's an unusual choice, but we have definitely been influenced by both of them for sure.
DB: Speaking about influences, your new album, 13-inch Frank Bellatrami stilettos with bison horn grips. Did I remember all that correctly?
JS: Close enough (laughs).
DB: Close enough, for that one, you said in interviews that David Kendrick, your drummer, really wanted to do a psych rock album and that's a genre you guys were very unfamiliar with. Going into the record what psych rock albums did you listen to that then informed the record?
JS: Really not that many. I mean, to somebody who's really deep into psych rock we're going to sound like incredible amateurs. David knows a lot about psych rock. That's basically his favorite genre. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of it. I mean, we listened to the first Nuggets compilation, the first Love record, 13th Floor Elevators. Just essentially all the obvious classics. But I had never really listened to that music at all. So for me the classics seem very fresh.
DB: Do you think the record has ultimately come across as particularly psychedelic in your eyes?
JS: I don't really know or care. It doesn't really matter. I mean, it doesn't really matter how it comes across in my eyes because the record's not for me. It's for other people to listen to. And it's not important to me that people think of it as being a psychedelic record, it's important to me that people get from it whatever is meaningful for them. If somebody listens to it and you know some, there's some psychedelic aspects of it which are meaningful to them. That's great if they listen to it and they have a completely different take on it as long as it's meaningful for them. That's what's important.
DB: Would you say that's your approach across your records? Like you never really start out with the mindset we're going to do this genre for this record?
JS: I mean, since 2014, that's mostly what we have been doing. I mean, we have before, we start fucking around and sort of seeing which doors the muse seems to be opening for us. With each record at one point we decide, okay, the parameters for this record are going to be this. We didn't really do it in maybe the first half of the life of the band and the second half of the life of the band we have. But it's not important to me that anybody realizes what those are or takes anything away from that where they listen to it within those contexts. It's just a guide for us to make it. But once it's done. It's entirely for the listener to experience it in their own way.
DB: Yeah, it's not like you're like trying to present the mechanisms going into the record. You just want it as a complete piece when it's done.
JS: Yeah.
DB: There's this belief in the fan base that you alternate between harsher and more poppy records. For example you did Forget and then Girl with Basket of Fruit and then Oh No. Last year. we had Ignore Grief and in contrast the new record is well-
JS: It's songs. I mean, Ignore Grief is all kind of pieces, and the new one is songs.
DB: Is that switch between the more harsher and avant-garde to the more traditionally songy something you go in planning to do like record to record?
JS: It's not something that we have, I mean, obviously we have done it, but it wasn't a conscious choice to do it. I think the thing that we're working on for the next record probably won't follow that pattern again. But who the fuck knows? I mean, it's very early days. So, I agree that that is what has happened, but it was never our appointed attempt, or we didn't plan to make a song based record in response to having made one that was more experimental and vice versa. It's just the process sometimes works out like that. It’s just what doors the universe opened.
DB: Speaking about that divide between noise and traditional songwriting, that's always been key to Xiu Xiu’s music. For example, on Knife Play, a lot of those tracks really remind me of like New Order tracks but kind of twisted or distorted. Do you find that it's hard to balance those proclivities towards pop and noise or rather do the two come together naturally when you write songs.
JS: No, no, it's not hard for us at all. I mean, that's what we like. I like Merzbow as much as I like New Order.
DB: Going back to the new record, there was a quote in the press release that I really liked, which is from Blixa Bargeld's time with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which is ‘I didn't join a rock and roll band to make rock and roll music’. I have my own reading of that quote, but I want to ask, how do you think it applies to the record and Xiu Xiu in general?
JS: Well, it applied to the record for me. When David suggested we make a psych rock record initially, it seemed like an interesting idea. And then about halfway through, I realised I don't want Xiu Xiu to be a fucking rock and roll band. But y’know, we were halfway through the record, and I was happy with what the results were so…
It was a very confusing record for us to make. We were being led down a path which we normally did not want to, which we consciously wouldn't go down, but we were happy with what was coming out of it. So, we didn't want to dismiss the results. So, I didn't join Xiu Xiu to turn it into a rock and roll band. That's essentially why we chose that Blixa Bargeld quote.
DB: I think it's quite interesting, the idea of Xiu Xiu as a rock and roll band, because I did notice that when you play live with David involved, it does feel more like a rock three piece in a way which was quite enjoyable.
JS: Oh, yeah, lately it has. I think we're going to finish out the year, finish out the next section of tours following this particular approach. Then I think after this, we're going to try something different.
DB: So, in the past, you've had lots of different percussionists, but have you ever had like a full-time drummer like David in the band before?
JS: Oh, yeah, for sure. A couple times.
DB: Do you find that having a full-time drummer, going back to the idea of becoming a rock and roll band, does having a drummer cause that approach to come into the band more?
JS: Not really. I mean, David is by his own description a rock drummer and that's what he's interested in. That's what he plays so as of late has really been bringing that out, especially live. But other drummers we played with, Chess Smith, for instance, not a rock drummer at all, so, you know, apples and oranges as far as drummers go.
DB: Going back to your live performances, what I found interesting when you play live is you draw upon a lot of your catalogue, like a lot of different stuff from a lot of different albums. How do you go about organizing that live set list?
JS: The first thing we do is, I mean, generally we'll do a tour when we have a new record, so you know we want to have several new several songs from a new record, and we'll do five or six or something. We'll see how long those are and then we can go, okay, do we have enough time for eight more songs? Eleven more songs? That's the hard part because you know we have like 50,000 records.
We'll try to pick some that we haven't played for a long time. Because we've been around for a long time. You know, some people have seen us play 20 times. So we want to try to give them something that they may never have seen before. But at the same time, some people may have never seen us before, so we don't want to do all incredibly obscure things.
So we try to balance it between more maybe dark horse songs and then maybe some that you know over time we've come to realize that people maybe are more familiar with or are particularly fond of.
Generally, if we have maybe two or three left, we'll do a post on Instagram and say, you know, do you want to hear this? Do you want to hear this? Do you want to hear this? And we did that on this tour and there were a couple of songs which I did not expect so many people to be interested in that we did not initially have on the set list, that we put on the set list because we were like, oh, you know, we got like 200 people asking for this song, you know, which we weren't planning on playing. We should probably play that one.
DB: Which songs in particular were the ones you didn’t expect people to ask for?
JS: “Suha” we didn’t plan on playing.
DB: Really? I love “Suha”. That's like everyone I knows favourite of yours.
JS: I didn't know (laughs). Now I know.
DB: Any others you weren't expecting?
JS: ‘Get Up’. ‘Suha’ and ‘Get Up’ were the two that we added to the set, we cut a couple other things to make room for those.
DB: Wow, those are two of my favourites of yours.
JS: I mean, it seemed like ones that people we're particularly happy to hear and we're particularly happy to play them.
DB: Are there any songs from your older catalogue that you particularly want to play live or look forward to playing live?
JS: I don't really think about it in those terms. This is just me. I mean, I'm not speaking for Angela or David. I just try to think about which songs complement the other songs in the set, and also which songs I feel like I currently have an emotional attachment to and can sing in an honest way.
And that's just changes over time too like this year we played ‘Blacks’ and we haven't played ‘Blacks’ in 20 years. It's a song from the second record of Promise. It was about something that I just didn't want to think about or deal with anymore, but I don't know, I’ve been seeing a new therapist. And it made me realize some things that it might be a good time to see that song in a different way.
DB: A lot of the material you guys deal with is quite traumatic stuff, do you ever find that particularly difficult to navigate especially when it comes to playing older tracks?
JS: By the time we're playing them live, we've rehearsed them so much that I have generally come to terms with the difficulties of them. But just to mention “Blacks” again, and this is going to sound very melodramatic. So, my dad killed himself and it's a song about him before he killed himself. Most of the lyrics are quotes from him telling me that he wanted to kill himself. So, I wrote the song before he did it.
I hadn't played that song in a long time. I didn't know how it went anymore. I had to learn it again. So, I was learning it again and not having listened to it in an incredibly long time I was just sort of like talking the lyrics just to help me remember what they were. Forgive this again it's very melodramatic, I was alone in our studio, and I just started like shrieking basically and it started shaking really hard. Just to be in that place again, a place I hadn't been as directly in in two decades. I was shocked. I didn't expect it. It just happened like that. It wasn't like, oh, I suddenly started slowly feeling upset. Very, very, very quickly, this sort of physical thing that was inside of me just exploded and because I was alone, I realized there was nobody there that I could sort of count on to help talk me down. I realized that it was getting pretty out of control. So, I just started slowly walking around the studios trying to breathe and kind of come back onto earth you know it probably took about 10 minutes before I felt like a normal person and then it felt like that was gone. Like there was this little thing inside that needed to blow up and be expressed.
Once or twice when we played it live, I was afraid I was going to start crying and to me like crying while you're playing a show is one of the most ridiculous things you could do even for our band (laughs). So I was just like, oh, fuck, don't let this happen. But luckily, I sweat a lot. But it doesn't happen often. It happens more when the song is being worked on. It's not like those feelings go away, but really the more sort of physical part of the emotionality I don't know how else to say this, is wrangled essentially. You know it certainly still comes out. I mean, I was surprised I had this short-term breakdown, it came out of nowhere. So, I'm not saying it's never going to happen, but I would be very, very surprised if it happened live.
DB: I do get what you mean, especially about being in the creative process. I write poetry myself and I find that when you're trying to articulate particular experiences or emotions, it's so much harder to deal with them until piece is finished. It’s almost like the emotions are crystallized by that point if that makes sense. But talking about that further, and I think especially lyrics, I remember reading in a pitchfork interview from the 2000s that you said that all your lyrics were about real things that had occurred to you or around you. Is that still true of your lyric writing now?
JS: That is true, but it's not the only thing we write about. No, I think the purview has expanded over time. That's still a very big part of our process, but we also allow for maybe writing about things that are more a feeling, essentially. It's very difficult to articulate exactly what it is. I know what the feeling is, and I can write about it in some kind of elliptical way, but it's not necessarily a direct narrative about facts, which a lot of the earlier songs were or for a long time. Now I also write about psychedelic experiences or write about supernatural experiences or write about something that's you know kind of dream based Over time, the purview has expanded, but we still very definitely do write about real things
DB: What is the lyric writing process like for you, especially within the context of the band?
JS: I do something that a lot of people do. I have a notebook with me all the time. And if a line pops into my head or i see something I hear a lot in a movie. I read something in a book, I write it down. I don't think about whether or not it's good or bad, just if something strikes me. As the record is becoming more and more cohesive, getting closer and closer to be done, I start going through those notebooks and pretty savagely crossing out the stuff that I realized is trash. Then I start going through them and basically then transferring the first set of edits into one notebook. It's usually four sets of notebooks. They get smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more focused. Sometimes ahead of time I have a list of things that I know I want to write about. And because I had known before what I wanted to write about, I started finding which lines seem to apply to those topics. Because the collecting the lines and deciding what the songs are going to be about happens at the same time. Although, you know, they're happening in two different directions.
Occasionally, and this is always a very lucky day, the lyrics will just be there all at once. I'll just write it down top to bottom. It's happened only a handful of times in the life of the band. Those tend to be songs that I think people consider better songs of ours. You know, the ones where the universe just goes here is a song.
DB: Like inspiration strikes fully formed.
JS: Yeah. That's a rare event but I think being open to it and always having a notebook around allows essentially the granting of a wish.
DB: And it kind of allows the outside to seep into the interior a bit more as well.
JS: Exactly. So anyway, I think that's how most people do it. They just got to keep their ears open.
DB: Yeah. I mean, it's how I try and go about it as well, personally. Stuff coming fully formed is very rare. Talking about lyrics and influences beyond the musical a lot of the time various authors and like filmmakers are connected to your work like Dennis Cooper. Yukio Mishima, David Lynch especially with the Twin Peaks album and everything. And while I definitely see this in your work, I was wondering if there's any other non-musical influences that you think factor in, especially more recently, because those are often like tied to previous albums or previous works?
JS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, visual art is a huge influence on us, and being in nature is also one in ways that are difficult to quantify, drugs more and more have been an influence. And then, you know walking down the street and observing human behaviour different relationships, politics obviously. Across the street from where I live, unfortunately, is an extraordinarily depressing drugs park. I have to navigate people in tremendous states of distress every day. I think I'll probably end up writing something about that. I mean, it's very corny, but there's not a lot that is not an influence.
DB: I can definitely see that in your, there's quite a panoramic perspective to it. Because we've been talking about lyrics and influencers, do you think there's any particular lyrical focus to the new album?
JS: To me, it's more on a song by song basis. There are some records, particularly girl with basket of fruit where a lot of the songs are about related subjects. But this one for me, each song is about an individualized subject. I don't know that the record to me has a single overarching theme. I think, again, because this record was a little bit confusing for me Even though I mean, I'm very i'm i'm very happy with how it turned out but I'm just sort of baffled that it happened the way it happened. I'm still digesting what the overall meaning of the record is. I mean, everything happened at the same time, the songs were all written at the same time. So they're all related in some way. But I'm still kind of figuring out what that is. for me.
DB: So you guys recently moved to Berlin and a lot of your previous records, especially Angel Guts Red Classroom, are heavily situated in Los Angeles as a landscape.
JS: In a particular neighborhood as well.
DB: Oh yeah, so this doesn’t necessarily apply to 13 inch, I think you guys were working on the album a bit before you moved to Berlin.
JS: Yeah, we did about about half of it in LA, half of it in Berlin.
DB: Do you find with your current creative work that Berlin as an environment is seeping into it more?
JS: It’s almost the opposite of that. I think right now I'm realizing more what a big influence Los Angeles had on our last several records and what an insane and inspiring and bizarre and shocking place it can be. Now that I'm there infrequently, I'm wrestling more with trying to find what the environmental influence will be or if there will even continue to be an environmental influence on the band.
Obviously, I live in Berlin. And as I said. you know, there's not a lot that's not an influence for us. And I just said you know the cemetery slash drug park across the street from where I live. That's going to affect at least one song that sort of emotionality and the politics of that But that's not, I mean, that happens everywhere in the entire world. That's not endemic to erlin. I'm certain that it will, but it's something that I'm still wrapping my head around and it may be a slower. Berlin is berlin and LA are apples and oranges. They're totally, totally different places, so it doesn't make sense that one would affect us in the same kind of way that the other would. We've only been here for two years. And we've been on tour for half of that. So I'm still getting to know the place.
DB: And especially like after like spending most of your life in California, you get like quite adjusted to landscapes year-round.
JS: Oh, yeah, yeah.
DB: You guys have been going for twenty years. With a lot of older bands I like, there will often come a point where they'll release a record and I'm like, oh, you know, it's just like they're doing their standard thing. I've never really found that with Xiu Xiu. Do you think there's anything in particular that's kept you guys so fresh over the course of all these years?
JS: Well, I mean, we were never really famous enough that there was any pressure to repeat something. I mean, I can completely understand if you were a band and you had a sound or two records 41 you know and you sold like, you know, 10 million copies of those records, there's a lot of people depending on you to continue to do that. And I can understand why a band would continue to approach things that way. We're under no pressure to do anything other than whatever we feel like doing.
Also everybody who's ever been in the band is a massive fan of music with really wide tastes and broad interest in music. And that's how the band has been since we started. I think because our palate, similarly to Björk’s, not that we sound anything like Björk and vice versa.
But her approach to having a wide palate was, as I mentioned earlier, has remained very influential to us. I mean, I characterize music like this a lot of times in interviews, but it's, I mean, it's an infinite puzzle. and getting to explore all of the pieces of the puzzles, for me, is the point of being alive.
DB: A lot of the time I feel like the two axis of your music that are talked about are contemporary experimental works and a lot of 80s 4AD related stuff. Are there any like on a maybe modern or non-modern bands that you think people don't really necessarily talk about that factor into your music?
JS: American folk music is really influential to us. American 50s rock and roll, clearly of this last record 60s psych rock. American 60 soul music is also super influential on us, not necessarily in how we sound but more in feel and arrangements. I mean, it's come up a lot, but a lot of different percussion music’s are hugely influential on us. Dub and reggae are incredibly influential on us, especially for bass parts and for production. Not that we sound anything like that but it’s similar to soul music it’s a lot of the feel of that music or how the bass works in those genres we steal from all the time.
DB: You guys released your first record in 2002 and that was a year before I was born. You have, while also maintaining a fan base, seem to constantly gain a fan base of people in their late teens, early 20s. Do you think there's any particular reason why people of that age continue to connect with your music and not just your older music, but your new albums as well?
JS: I am probably the worst person in the world to ask that question of. I try to do everything I can not to be analytical about anything we're doing and just try to keep myself down and focus on trying to do the best job that we can do. I feel astonishingly fortunate that that has been the case. But as to why that is the case. I don't want to think about it. I just want to try to do the best job I can do.
DB: As you're someone with quite a wide ranging music taste, are there any artists you're listening to at the moment that you're really enjoying?
JS: I've been listening to a lot of top 40 hip-hop lately, which I haven't done in an incredibly long time, like in ten years. I’d listen to it if it came on, but I've been actively listening to a lot of top 40 hip-hop lately. Other than that, I've been listening to a ton of old favourite’s but as for something that's newer for me to be listening to that mainly top 40 hip-hop then.