Q&A: Komodos Emit Electrifying Energy in Debut Single “Narcisse”
MAKING YOUR MARK IN A METROPOLIS OF MILLIONS — how does one even start? For Brooklyn-based band Komodos, the answer lies in cultivating melodic chaos with their debut single, “Narcisse,” released on August 24. The five-man band involves vocalist Taran Dugal and his brother, drummer Kabir Dugal, guitarists Hunter Boivin and Gabriel Altopp, and bassist Ben Baumann. The group beams with unabashed authenticity, relishing in the space they’ve made for themselves in Brooklyn’s bustling DIY-garage rock scene.
Echoey vocals sing philosophical prose that weave into the gritty symphony of brash instrumentals — namely a funky bassline, driving drum beat, and gnarly guitars. The youthful energy of each band member shares a symbiotic relationship with the city at large, feeding into the kaleidoscopic distortion that begs for your attention. “Narcisse” digs at the listeners’ senses, the mind and body becoming a hotbed for a cathartic release that makes one want to groove.
With lyrics like “Fake your fun and save your crumbs for later,” and “You’re the only who’s living in your spaceship honey,” the track singles out the pompous kind of New Yorker whose self-importance leaves everything lifeless in their wake. Its ethos is humanistic above all else; it implores others to liberate themselves from the confines of inauthentic, digital performance and fuse with the true vivacity of their surroundings.
Read below to learn about Komodos’ bombastic inspirations, how their skillful malleability helps them create fresh material, and how they found their true calling in The City That Never Sleeps.
LUNA: Has everyone been doing music their whole lives, or was it more of a recent endeavor?
KABIR: I think we all used to play less cool instruments for sure. But we've been doing music our whole lives.
BEN: Yeah, I started out doing techno stuff mainly. The rhythm is everything for me. That's kind of like why I love playing bass. Eventually, I started playing in bands, and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is definitely the style I went with — slapping and popping.
LUNA: Did you start off playing more DIY garage type of genres, or did you start off with something else first?
KABIR: We've been forming our own sound just jammin’ in our apartment. We have a studio here where we get together most days of the week and just play through stuff and figure out what sounds cool. And then from that create a song, basically.
HUNTER: I would say I gravitated towards this kind of music — I just want to play guitar chords that sound cool. I grew up on classic rock. And then with the guitar, I started playing Green Day, like really basic power chords, and I felt like that kind of stuck. Obviously, it's evolved since I was like a little kid. But that's definitely been the center of it all. Loud, noisy guitar.
TARAN: I think our music is also definitely a product of our shows. When we play live, we need to be loud and like a wall of sound. So when we work on stuff here, we have to be sure that we can reproduce it live. We don't have very many studio effects in our songs and stuff like that. We play in our basement so that lends itself to the garage feel because it's literally the environment we're playing in all the time.
GABRIEL: Being artists in an expensive city, we're kind of strapped for cash. So the DIY aesthetic is one that just comes out of the fact that we don't have thousands of dollars to spend on limitless studio time and the nicest gear possible.
KABIR: New York has such a storied history of guitar bands. We are just another one of those bands, but doing it our own way.
LUNA: Do your experiences as a majority-POC band impact your music or perspective in this historically whitewashed genre?
TARAN: I don't want to sound facetious, but I don't think it's necessarily something that we think about a lot. It's something that I'm conscious of and do take pride in. But it's not something that is on my [mind] 24/7. I think our motivation is just to make the most gripping music possible. Lyrically, our identities come across in our works, but it's not something that we sit down to write like, “How are we going to showcase who we are as people,” you know? I think fundamentally, artists implicitly show who they are in their work. Since that's who we are, I think it translates to the music.
HUNTER: At least from my perspective, we all just wanted to play rock music and that's what we do. But it is cool that we're in New York and we're in an inclusive place. We don't have issues with that. We have pretty diverse crowds of people that come out to our shows, which is dope. But it's really not something that restricts me — it just feels normal.
LUNA: That makes sense to me — I feel like there can be a push and pull with identity-forming experiences, but also knowing it isn’t the sole reason for what you do. You exist and bring forth what you like to do, and it may or may not shape that.
TARAN: I feel like our motivation is to make music that people can dance to and not to showcase identities in any kind of way, even though that does subconsciously and implicitly happen. You know, it's not an explicit motivation of ours, for sure.
KABIR: I think in terms of how it comes across in our creative expression, expression is a product of our influences and our experiences. So as a person of color, you do have a set of experiences that a lot of people who aren't might not have. It's not like it explicitly drives the creative process but it's some sort of factor.
LUNA: What was the creative process for “Narcisse,” particularly with the songwriting?
HUNTER: A lot of our songwriting process kind of just happens. We’ll just be playing and we stumble upon something, and I'm like, “Oh, that's good. We should record that.” For this one, “Narcisse” specifically, I think it was actually Taran who came up with the first chords of the verse. We were like, “Damn, that sounds really cool.” So we just went back to it and worked on it, and made it more complete, rather than just a couple chord hits, and then it continued to take on a life of its own.
I don't even know what the timeline was. Maybe a few days a week or something. Then we were like, “Okay, now we're gonna play that at the next show.” I can speak for the rhythm part. That's kind of how it started, and then we built the other parts from there.
GABE: We're all responsible for our own parts. But once we start playing together, people will add comments saying, “What if we played this part slightly differently?” or “Maybe you could change this to better fit the harmonies that I'm playing here.” It's definitely a team effort. But at the start of it, we're all creating our own parts, and then we open it up to the group.
TARAN: It's all ideas to benefit the band. If I think of something cool when I'm jamming in my room, I'm gonna share it with everyone else.
BEN: There's five of us — it really feels like we all have an equal hand in the pot. It's all different contributions but it's all very much our own. We'll tweak our parts to accommodate other people's parts and stuff like that. The give and take of it just flows really well. I think that’s one of our strengths, for sure.
KABIR: I think that's also somewhat unique in that it's not like one or two people sitting down and writing everything. I will find a cool idea, jam on it for a while, but then after a point, it's like, “Oh, what do you have for this part?” And then we'll all kind of listen in and make tweaks if necessary.
LUNA: So you're all open to each other's criticism?
GABE: Yeah, and we've gotten better at that, too. I think that's been something that's been part of the learning process of being in a band — being able to take criticism and realize this person is not trying to shred me right now. They're just trying to make the song sound better. So being receptive to those comments and that feedback, it makes our songs better for sure.
KABIR: We're all very close.
TARAN: And we spend so much time in that one room, it's just a natural product of what happens.
LUNA: What people can expect from your debut EP?
KABIR: It’s a four-track EP, it's coming out in early November — on November 3.
HUNTER: They should expect… Like, if you took our favorite half of the live set that we've been playing and refining, they should just expect that.
GABE: Expect it to sound like we're playing on stage. The songs have a raw feel, but with some really nice touches added by Max Harwood — former drummer of Lewis Del Mar and producer in LA — he did some really good work on all four tracks. We recorded these songs live, and he preserved the quality of that sound beautifully.
TARAN: It was a really interesting setup. We had a super bare-bones audio interface with eight inputs here. Five of those were mics on the drums. The rest was everyone else in different parts of the apartment, playing together at the same time and trying to stay together, which is super cool. That raw feel comes across in the music. There are little fluctuations here and there, but it adds to the character of the songs.
BEN: We've put a whole ton of hours playing these songs in the basement, practicing for shows and stuff. It's our comfortable spot. Going into the studio is awesome, and maybe in the future we'll do that. But I think that you get some of the homemade feel of that real garage rock sound, doing it in a place where you're comfortable and not worried about all the extra stuff.
TARAN: I would say people should expect an in-your-face sound. That's what we strive for at our shows, you know? That's what comes across in our music because it is a product of us wanting to make music that people can just dance to live.
LUNA: What are everyone’s artistic inspirations? Do you all collectively like the same types of music?
HUNTER: We all like rock music. That's pretty crucial to us being in a rock band together. There's definitely a lot of variation within that. I feel like we all dip into extra stuff that we know about that maybe others wouldn't listen to, which I think is really cool. I think that's important as well because it kind of brings variety. Otherwise, we would just sound like some band who we all like. I think it's cool that we're all centered around this one genre but have some diversity within that.
GABE: I mean, I only started playing guitar in my third year of college when I was living alone in France and I had nothing else to do but listen to Nirvana. So I just listened to the discography every single day and decided I want to make music because I thought, “This is fucking sick.”
When I came back home, I picked up my dad's guitar and just started ripping some chords, and then that's about the same time that I started jamming with Taran and Kabir because we are from the same town. So I'd say some of that, punk, grunge sensibility rubbed off on me. I don't know if I would describe my guitar playing as sounding like Kurt Cobain's, but he’s definitely my main influence.
TARAN: I think lyrically… I read a lot. I studied philosophy, so I like reading about ethics and how people view the world or how people decide to behave and stuff like that. I'm really interested in Patti Smith and her lyrics, and I think she's a god. That's something I aspire to.
I wouldn't say I come even close to anything like that. She just tells crazy stories, like on her song Birdland, of a child seeing his dead dad flying a UFO that turns into a flock of ravens. I’m also a big fan of Lou Reed and the way he cuts to the bone in his songs, sometimes in a very lyrically indirect way. I do live in poetic sensibilities, and that's something that I try to strive for when I'm writing. In terms of melodies, I really don't know. I just try shit that’s catchy.
HUNTER: My 9th birthday… Just like them, I want to play some rock music. So in terms of my original inspirations, I think I learned most of Green Day's “American Idiot.” I printed tabs and learned most of those songs. Then I was like, “Okay, I can play chords now.” This was probably like 2012 to 2015. So big shout out to Foo Fighters, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think they're quite different from our genre, but John Frusciante is sick. It's all definitely evolved a lot along the way, but that’s where I started.
KABIR: The first band I really started trying to imitate on the drums — I basically learned the entire Strokes discography and then I moved on to Interpol, and I guess recently I've been more into post-punk bands like Fontaines D.C. I like drum grooves that are very driving but also idiosyncratic at the same time.
BEN: Definitely the Chili Peppers. I started playing and I just learned all of the songs on their albums. It's an interesting way to learn because it’s a very specific style to start. I also love Motown baselines, Interpol too — really driving stuff. I like hybrid style. Sort of like between Flea into Interpol.
LUNA: What do you guys like the most about New York?
KABIR: My favorite thing about New York is the energy here and the fact that when you're here, it feels like you can do anything because you see other people doing it. You're like, “Damn, that's possible.” Take being an artist in Brooklyn. It's something that your parents tell you, “This is not a thing you should be doing because you'll never make any money.” But then you come here and you see so many people doing so many incredible things. You literally see them go from your being homies to being successful artists.
BEN: I like the sheer amount of people I see every day. I feel like it keeps me grounded in a weird way. Which I also love. I definitely miss nature when I'm here, but there's nowhere else. It's a feeling of connectedness that you get from being part of the whole big picture. I feel like that definitely inspires me. I feel invigorated.
HUNTER: My favorite thing about New York is that… I mean, I've lived here for just over a year now, and it's super easy to just get lost in some place. There's all these little enclaves you can go to where you're like, “Okay, I've been, like, 10 blocks from here. But this place over here has a totally different vibe.” I love that aspect about it.
That also has to do with the people. There's so many different kinds of people — anything you want to find a little piece of, there's a little piece of that somewhere in New York. There are people doing basically anything that they can do, which I love. I never thought I would live here, but after moving here I feel like I've been here forever.
TARAN: This might not reflect well on me, but I'm a relatively impulsive person. So I love that New York allows me to carry through on any and all inclinations that I have. I can meditate by the East River at 2 p.m., then at 4 p.m. I'll be a few beers in at A-Bar, you know. The city really allows you to do whatever you want.
GABE: Yeah, I feel like everyone is doing everything in the city. So that makes it very unpredictable. You get the sense walking around, like you really are… I don't want this to sound wrong. But you might get the sense that you are insignificant because you're one of eight million people in the city. So it's on you to figure out like, what's my thing? What am I doing here? How can I make a name for myself in whatever small way that's possible? We’re trying to answer that together, as a band.
It's just the five of us living in this apartment, in a little neighborhood in Brooklyn, but we're finding a way to get shows and put ourselves out there and have people listen to what we've been working on. It feels rewarding to be able to do that and for one or two nights a month, not be so insignificant and anonymous. You know, just be fucking Komodos.
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