Artist Feature: Or Does It Explode?
words By Ian Hoffman, Photos by bailey krause
Madison locals Or Does It Explode? plan to release their third album titled Tales to Needed Outcomes on February 1st, 2025. In anticipation of this new professionally recorded album EMMIE asked them a few questions:
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
How was the transition from self production to using a professional recording studio?
Katya Pierce (vocals): Fun. Different. Probably the biggest difference for Shawn.
Shawn Bass (guitar/vocals): In the past I've done the recording so I wanted the experience of having somebody else do it, without me having to think about everything. Getting to sort of just be the musician and not the producer was fun and interesting.
Do you think that recording in that professional studio changed your sound at all?
Erik Rasmuson (drums): I think, to a certain extent. I mean, they have way better equipment like they have ten $20,000 microphones and stuff like that. And, you know, as a home recorder, you just can't afford that sort of stuff. And a $10,000 mic does sound better than a $1,000 mic. Both me and Brandon didn't actually play on our own amps. We use amps that were there, so just certain things like that. That was really nice.
SB: Yeah, I think you both got to use sort of vintage, famous amps that we couldn't get our hands on. So, I think that it changed the sound, because it was literally a different amp than what we typically play.
There are a lot of guest features on the album, how was it collaborating with so many artists?
SB: That was awesome... The first one I recorded was the violin player Rin (Rin Ribble of The Five Points Jazz Collective), and she killed it, and it sounded so amazing. I was like, I actually just got that sound on tape. Like, that's, that's crazy. It sounds so good. So that was a really neat experience.
ER: Yeah. They were all really good, yeah, like all of them. I was like, Oh, wow…
SB: And they're actually all going to come join us at the album release show!
The album was originally going to be a solo project, how has adjusting your sound from your post-hardcore roots to a more midwest emo sound been?
Brandon Boggess (guitar): It was nice to not fall back on feedback and singular sounds as a crutch. You know, find different ways to express myself.
ER: We grew to love the songs a lot as we as we did it, and they took shape in studio, adding layers, adding more instruments, even against my will, but I really like the finished product. It sounds incredible.
KP: Yeah. The funny thing is my partner, and also Shawn’s partner, both of them, I think, don't really listen to so much of, like, the loud kind of discordant music and stuff. They both are like, “Oh, this is some of my favorite stuff” But for me, my background is not in any kind of rock. This is the first band I've ever been a part of. I grew up doing folk music and classical so as a vocalist, I was like, oh, I kind of get to revisit some vocal techniques that I don't get to touch so often when we're doing the louder, heavier, noisier stuff.
Do you want to continue this kind of sound, or do you think this was just a one off thing?
SB: To be determined? I think one of the things that I love about this band, and I think one of our strengths, other people might say it's a limitation, is that we don't set ourselves to have to stay within the genre. We can play with whatever fits. So I think the songs that we've been writing that will be our next album will definitely be a little bit noisier, more angular, a little more leaning into the mathy sides of things. But we had some softer songs before this, and I can't imagine us not having one or two there.
EB: A lot of us come from very different backgrounds musically and also culturally so it can go in many directions. In recent years, I've been playing more of the softer type of music and this is me going back more to the heavy stuff, going back to what I did when I was younger. To me, a lot of these songs just fell right into what I had been doing or close to that style. I would see it going in all sorts of different directions.
What does the title Tales to Needed Outcomes mean to you?
SB: It's a little bit of a joke. I wrote it during COVID, and we were just like, blacked out at home, right? Nothing to do. And I was like, I'm just gonna learn a This Town Needs Guns song. That TTNG song was in a tuning I've never used before and I spent like 30 seconds trying to learn this song, and then I was just like, this tuning is really cool. So I just started writing things and so forever, we just called these the TTNO songs, as in This Town Needs oDiE. When I needed to come up with a name for the album I wanted something that still used those letters. After playing with lots of different words, I was like, okay, that makes sense. So the name I ended up on Tales To Nedeed Outcomes, which I think fits the material that's on there. There's a lot of vignettes, stories, tales on there, right? So we literally had songs talking about things that I think we need to reflect on and change so there is real meaning to it.
KP: One thing is that the wording and the phrasing of it does tie it back into some of the earlier material. It reminds me of a line in Chrysalis. That's like “whispered tail brings rebirth” So I think it's cool that it's still attached to the material, even though people would probably think of it as a pretty different sound from that album.
Having played at many venues across the Madison region, how has Madison's music scene influenced your journey and sound as a band?
SB: I’ve been playing in the Madison scene for quite a while, and I've seen it be a really rich environment, and I've seen it be really in the lows, where there's not much happening, but in the last four or five years, the scene has just been amazing.
KP: I've noticed just a really surprising degree of openness to musicians who are maybe trying something new. I think it's really important for musicians to be able to express a new idea and not worry that people are gonna get it.
Is there anything you want to see changed in the Madison music scene?
SB: More venues. More people coming out to shows.
KP: That’s literally the only thing I was thinking.
