Something to Burn

2019 | Metal

— track 5 “The Witch in the Walls”

Taylor Machado: When I was a little, tiny kid I loved the band Evanescence. I had the Fallen album burnt for me on a little purple CD and I would just play that thing for hours and hours. So as I got older I was still really into the rock music, and I just kept up with it until, I think it was my junior prom when I met the guitarist of a band called Deadfield. They were looking for a bassist, and I was like, “Hey, I don’t know any other bands, ever, like, I’ve never met any other bands from South Dakota. I haven’t met any cool rock bands.” And they were like, “Well, if you’re willing to drive to Aberdeen.” That’s kind of a long ways away from where I lived, the Selby/Java area, but I was like, “Yeah, I can do that at least once a month and see if we can just have some fun playing music together.” After a couple months I finally joined the band, that was the last two years of high school. We just played local shows, mostly in Aberdeen at The Red Rooster. So that was a really fun introduction to the South Dakota music scene that I had never seen before, or even thought that there was a music scene here.

And then our drummer for Deadfield was also a drummer for another band called Terror We Fall. Deadfield was a little more hardcore punk, inspired by Anti-Flag and stuff like that. Terror We Fall was more like pop punk, like teen pop punk [laughs], just lighter. I felt like they were more appropriate for children for some reason. We played tons of shows in the tri-state area together, because it was just easier for us to play together all the time since we shared a drummer. After about two years of me being in the band we ended up all graduating high school, and then moving into a house together in Redfield, South Dakota, we called it Bandhouse. That’s when Terror We Fall ended up breaking up, and then a couple months after that Deadfield was disbanded. So we were working on weird side projects all together, and it kind of just burst into an actual album. Then we were like, “Well, I guess we all have to be a band now.”

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There’s kind of layers of stories in the album. In a couple songs it talks about a hundred years ago a witch released a demon onto the town, and she spends a hundred years searching for the lost souls of the town. They don’t fit in and they have an inkling that something isn’t right here. She’s leading them back to where something went down, to her home, and she is begging for them to know that there’s so much more than this, that you don’t have to let the troubles of this town wear you down, you don’t have to let it consume you. So she makes this call to action to fight this demon, and the kids have to come to terms with, in order to move on from something you have to make sacrifices, and understand that although this is the place that created you, you have to say your farewells in order for things to continue on.

All of the lore of the album is inspired from happenings that the rest of the band [Brandon Bruce on guitar, Jake Hardie on bass, Christopher Shine on drums] experienced throughout their lifetime growing up in Redfield. Like the song “Work of Art” is inspired by our guitarist’s haunted house in which he discovered that there was a man named Art that lived in his house who killed his wife with an axe. In our story his wife ended up being the witch, Art was possessed by the Top Hat Cat, murdered his wife, shoved her in the walls for a hundred years, and that’s where she festered. The Top Hat Cat is another entity that the kids in Redfield always swore they saw walking around at the park, or when they were out for drives they would see some kind of spooky shadow man with a top hat.

We mostly just consider ourselves “theatrical,” that is the biggest thing we identify as, because Jake, he was a theater kid, we were all pretty much theater kids, but he was in show choir, and he always brings this show choir aspect to the band. So we’re hoping we can start choreographing some stuff for live performance. But mostly, we like acting, and we like telling a story, so that’s the biggest goal of the band: not only wanting to make good music, but have fun doing it. The music videos are the most theatrical we’ve gotten so far. We always say they’re just B-movies. We want to do more theatrical stuff live, but we haven’t had as much time, especially with the pandemic now, to really establish our live shows as much as we had planned to before, but Jake especially is really into creating a whole light show. And we’re really spooky [laughs], we put on our zombie makeup. We all dress up, like, we’re trying to do the classic, “If we were in the 1920s” aesthetic, because that’s when the curse got put on the streets of Redfield, in our story. But yeah the makeup, the makeup was the biggest thing. The guys would put on a bunch of black makeup all over their eyes and on their arms and necks and stuff. We would show up to play gigs with punk bands and other metal bands who were dressed pretty casually, and then we step on stage and it’s just like you get zoiped to a different dimension. That’s kind of what we’re going for, we want to put you in an alternate state of reality.

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We have the previous bands that we were in to thank for being able to put our first tour together [from St. Louis, MO to Colorado Springs, CO]. We had started writing in 2018, spent that whole year writing, and then recording, and producing Something to Burn. We pushed ourselves way too hard, like, looking back on it we should have taken another year for that, but we had it recorded in January of 2019, and then we spent until May trying to prepare for the album release, the tour, and all the stuff that goes along with that. But luckily we had a lot of connections previously through our other bands, so we were just messaging a ton of people, sending our music to a ton of people, mostly sending our music to promoters, being like, “Hey, if you look at our Facebook, we don’t have anything, but we’re about to!” and everyone was pretty excited. Sometimes we would have connections through bands we had played with previously. But those tours were so establishing for us. We met countless, I can’t even think of all of them, because there’s so many great people we met during those tours that are some of our great friends now. And it’s super sad because we’ve had multiple Scared of the Dark tours that haven’t worked out, obviously. Because it was right after that second Scared of the Dark tour in 2019 when the pandemic hit. We had plans for four tours and we could only do two of them.

We put a little bit of money into Facebook advertisements for a lot of our outreach, and I think that helped a ton. We’re pretty lost in the YouTube rabbit hole when you look up our name, but I feel like through Facebook links, that helped us pop off. For Spotify, I’m still surprised by our Spotify numbers. We did spend six months emailing playlist curators and did get our stuff on to some pretty nice playlists. We got in two playlists, I think, before the album was out, but honestly we spent most of the time after the album was out just emailing and being like, “Hey! We got these singles!” We were on the playlist Aggressive Midwest, that’s probably the main one. That’s run by the singer of Earth Groans, they’re a South Dakota band as well, one of our favorites. Spotify pays out every six months, and we just wait a long time to cash out, and then we’re like, “Hey, we can pay our merch off with that.”

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The next chapter: We hadn’t planned on writing another album quite so soon. We wanted to do the two tours in 2020, and then while we were on those tours we wanted to start conceptualizing stuff for new music. Then the pandemic hit and we all just kind of sat there for two months like, “What do we do?” We had thrown around the idea of doing a fairytale album, but then we were like, “No, we have to continue this story.” So then we spent a lot of time writing, and we’re definitely still deep in that process, but we have some new songs established now, and we’re going to spend this Fall recording and trying to get some singles out by early 2022.

We have a Halloween show coming up in Baltic. I guess it’s going to be in an old barn, I’m not sure what to expect at all, but they put it on every year. I love Halloween, it’s my favorite holiday.