I’ve been exploring the nu-grunge wave coming out of the Midwest and the Northeast, and I’ve had a blast interviewing those bands - digging into their influences, their sound, and their stories. You can find these interviews on www.musicscenemedia.com. These guys are coming out of California and holding down the hard rock scene in the Bay Area.
I found Velvet Grave when they started following my mental health in the music industry-focused IG account. When I checked out their music, the first thing I heard was their HAUNTING cover of Gold Dust Woman. I listened to it like four times in a row. I’m a sucker for powerful vocals, wild guitar solos, and tight drums. They clearly have grunge rock influences, but that’s not their whole story. They all have some metal bands in their list of influences, as well as an eclectic mix of other genres, but they do a great job of blending the sounds of their influences into something uniquely theirs.
Joe Faria: “Our running joke is Velvet Grave is as metal as aluminum foil.” (laughs)
MSM: “Like, metal light?” (laughs)
I jumped right in and asked them how they started and how their sound evolved. Joe explained that he started with other band members doing a “four-piece grunge thing”. He worked (and still works) with Kyle (Mendes) and Jake (DeRieux), teaching music in a School of Rock franchise, and when he was looking to change the line-up, Kyle came on to replace the previous vocalist and the bassist. After about a year and a half, Jake replaced the previous drummer; they became a trio and began to evolve musically into Velvet Grave.
Faria: “Actually, our first gig with Jake was at The Viper Room in Hollywood. So just right out of the gate, we’re like, ‘You’re getting in a van, we’re driving six hours to LA, and you’re going to play at The Viper Room. Cool with that? And he was like, ‘Sure. ’” (laughs)
MSM: "So how did the sound evolve once you three got together?”
Faria: “Definitely, I’d say that we’ve evolved from just me ripping off a bunch of Alice in Chains riffs and trying to play them backward so they don’t sound the same. (laughs) But when Kyle joined, it really kind of flipped things. I think we were able to get a little bit more dynamic. He’s just got such a unique and powerful voice, a little bit more like- would Devin Townsend be the wrong person to say, Kyle?”
Kyle Mendes: “I would be very flattered!”
Faria: “Yeah, very Devin Townsend-ish.”
MSM: “Kyle, would you say your influences are more metal? Where do you come from musically?”
Mendes: “Yeah, I mean I really like melodic death metal and like outlaw country. So that's my bread and butter. But yeah, growing up I was in metal bands, and then I was in kind of like a prog bluegrass band for a long time, which is really fun. But yeah, I do. I've always kind of just liked In Flames and Lamb of God stuff.”
MSM: “Jake, what about you? Where do you come from musically?”
Jake DeRieux: “So growing up, I was a big Rush and Metallica guy. But with Velvet Grave, it's been a lot of fun for them to say, ' Here's grunge,’ and then having to go all in on that style. I like to be able to play a little bit of everything. So it's been a lot of fun trying to, you know, transform myself into a hard rock, grunge, drummer and see what parts I could come up with while trying to keep my own identity as a drummer at the same time.”
When talking about their music, we got into how quickly a label like nu-grunge now, or grunge in the 90s, can take off in media and create a platform for many bands to jump on. Of course, there are pros and cons to this process in all musical genres. This conversation led to the natural evolution of music over the years.
MSM: “How do you see the line between a revival or natural evolution in music versus a knock-off or copying?”
Mendes: “There’s emulation, but then also evolution, and I think we’d rather do the latter.”
DeRieux: "I just think we are inserting our own personalities into it rather than trying to emulate. Yes, we are all, you know, influenced by these various genres and bands, but at the end of the day, I think it's our personalities shining through into our music."
MSM: “Are there any songs that were hard for you guys to come together on? Are there any songs that are particularly meaningful for you?"
Mendes: “From the EP, 'Nowhere To Hyde' is really important to me. Our single, 'Take a Life,' that’s just about Moby Dick. It’s one of my favorite books ever.”
MSM: “What was special about 'Nowhere To Hyde' for you?”
Mendes: “I think that with Joe, he was gracious enough to lay all the riffs on the table; we modified them a little bit again to make it less metal, even though it is a pretty heavy track. And yeah, I just really love the harmonies. The chorus is so fun to sing. I’m just very pleased with how it turned out. A first, kind of, collaboration with a new band… I hadn't been in a band since college, so that one was really special to me.”
I'm four hours in and I've been like just screaming my head off for four hours. We'll do this one line and he's like, ‘Alright, double it, do your harmony, double it, okay, moving on’. All of a sudden, seven hours have gone by, and it's like, ‘I'm done, man. Literally, my head is buzzing from screaming so much. I gotta stop.’ "- Kyle Mendes on recording.
MSM: "Jake, are there any for you that stand out?"
DeRieux: "We have a song coming up called 'The Loop' on our album, which Kyle described as a very interesting dream that he has, and he was telling me all the details of this bizarre experience he had in a dream. I was thinking to myself, how are we going to trim this down to fit it into a song lyrically? It was really interesting to see the process of, you know, cutting all the fat and getting it really concise to convey all the things that he saw in his dream. It was extraordinarily creative to see that part of it, and it was a really fun collaboration."
MSM: “Have you guys been playing any of the songs live from the record that's not out yet?”
Faria: “We've been playing ‘Death,’ the single that's coming out a little bit, just to get some reactions, see how it's gonna go. We played it down in Monterey for the first time back in April. They really liked it down there. Everywhere we played it, we've got compliments on it. So we think it's gonna do pretty well. We've played The Loop twice. A song called 'Sunrise' we've played before, and then we got rid of it, and we're bringing it back before this album comes out. Other than that, nothing else has been played or shown to anybody."
MSM: "How do you guys feel about recording versus playing live? Do you have a preference?"
Faria: “I love playing live. I mean, that's kind of why we do the whole thing, right? You know, being able to play live, show people your stuff. The studio's great. It's very meticulous. And I am so like old rock and roll guy. I love the seventies, eighties, you know, Aerosmith, AC/DC, where they just got in a room, there were microphones, and you just played- just being able to take that moment in time and put it on tape, or now a computer, and just have it be like, ‘this is who we are’, and then just polishing it up and putting it out. That's more of my mindset."
MSM: “I suspect that we're going to get much more attuned to what sounds human and what doesn't. I think people are going to start to want mistakes again. I think people are going to start to want to hear a human voice that sometimes isn't quite hitting the note or a guitar riff that sounds different than it did on the album, you know?”
Faria: “I mean, you know, a lot of bands now, too, play with tracks to get the whole studio experience. And you know, that's their thing, though. That's kind of what they've been known to do, they don't want things to sound as unpolished. I feel like, like you said, it's going to start coming back to people wanting the real live experience in any genre of music, pop, country, rock, whatever.”
DeRieux: “At least when it comes to the studio, I like that when I was doing my drum recordings, we did three days of that, which was brutal and very tiring, but I liked how for me, how it pushed me musically. It was just like, alright, these are going to be long days, you're going to need to be on it for each one of these takes.”
Mendes: “Yeah, I think performing live, typically you're playing for 45, 50 minutes, right? Go all out and then just leave it there. And the three of us definitely have like a really good on-stage rapport where we communicate really nicely musically, which just makes it all the more enjoyable. And while I do think the studio is really fun, kind of like Jake was saying with drum days, on vocal days, I mean, I'm four hours in and I've been like just screaming my head off for four hours. We'll do this one line, and he's like, ‘Alright, double it, do your harmony, double it, okay, moving on’. All of a sudden, seven hours have gone by, and it's like, ‘I'm done, man. Literally, my head is buzzing from screaming so much. I gotta stop.’ It is really fun, and of course the end result is just incredible.”
Faria: “It's just we're a trio. We don't even have a rhythm guitar player. It's just myself, Kyle, and Jake, and we fill a room pretty well with what we've got. We get up there, we plug in, and we play. I'm glad to see that there are still a lot of bands that do that. We don’t want to sound like a fake band. We don’t want to sound digital. We don’t want to fall into the AI trap.”
MSM: "What inspires you guys? What are you writing about?"
Mendes: "I think we can all agree we're in a very interesting time. I don't know, I don't consider myself left or right, but I consider myself a historical contextualist. I've just probably read a little bit too much history and philosophy. So a lot my really deep-seated existential despair goes into lyrics. I'm just trying to make it, not poetic, but as expressive as possible. I don't know, it's therapeutic. Once words are on the page, then they are just kind of there, and they can be there. Then I get to yell them at the top of my lungs whenever we play live or if we practice. So that feels nice."
MSM: "Okay. What are your plans? Do you guys have anything coming up?"
Faria: "So our debut full-length record is coming out early next year. We don't have a date yet. We're very excited about that. It's been about a year in the making. Our engineer, who is amazing, Olav Tabatabai, lives down in Santa Cruz. He does the front-of-house engineering for Machine Head, the big metal band from Oakland. Our next single 'Death' comes out October 27th."
MSM: “Are you gonna tour at all?”
Faria: "I think next year we want to try to do a West Coast tour at least. You know, again, it's a big money thing. It costs a lot to do that, so hopefully we can. If we could hop on with anyone doing a national tour, if it would be beneficial, that'd be great too. We're good with doing a multi-genre line-up; we're used to that."
I'm feeling pretty good about the future rock these days thanks to bands like Velvet Grave screaming as if they could take our very souls. Listen, I'm not fighting it. They can have mine.
Check out the band's website and socials to see what's coming up! You can find their singles, including the newest one, "Death", out October 27th on Spotify and other streaming platforms!
Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.
