One van, six musicians, and an 18-hour drive later, alternative rock band Knifeplay steps deep into the heart of Austin, Texas, to begin their spring tour. While bandleader TJ Strohmer is no stranger to confining oneself periodically to van life, it’s a new era for the Philadelphia sextet. A recent lineup change sweeps guitarist Dennis Martinelli along for his first tour as the once-shoegaze band introduces a new, instrumentally stripped-back approach.
Before their set at Hotel Vegas on April 8th, Strohmer wrangled up the posse mid-exploration of East 6th street to begin our interview. Sitting linearly on the curb across the venue’s entrance, I spoke with the band about their experience touring, their new lineup and sonic direction, and hinted at what’s to come.
Tonight is the first stop on your tour! Are you all excited?
TJ Strohmer (Vocals & Guitar): Yeah, we drove 18 hours yesterday, and now we finally get to play a show.
You’re playing with Trauma Ray and Glixen – did you know them personally before the tour?
Strohmer: We met Glixen a couple of times, and I’ve met Uriel from Trauma Ray and a couple of the other guy’s numerous times. Basically, we just chatted online, and then I went to see them in Philly. He told me he wanted to take us on the tour, and so we know each other through playing music.
Did you know fawn?
Strohmer: I’ve never met any of them, but we’ve followed each other for a bit. I think they’re great and seem like a perfect band for us to play with tonight.
You [Dennis & Nora] both mentioned being new to the band – is this your first tour with Knifeplay?
Nora Maupin (Drums): This is my second. It’s Dennis’s first.
Are you excited?
Dennis Martinelli (Guitar): Yes, I’m very excited. This is my second tour in general. I’m getting to go to a lot of places that I’ve never been to, so it’s a really cool opportunity.
Do you attempt to write on tour at all, or are you busy focusing on performing?
Strohmer: No. I start the writing process on my own, usually. I feel like we need time, space and calm to develop what we do. When we’re on the road, it’s just executing what we’ve been rehearsing. It’s a totally different headspace for me.
Max Black (piano, synth): TJ writes the songs mostly, but being on tour together, we talk about music and creativity a lot, and I feel like it brings us closer as a band and helps us facilitate songwriting when we’re back home.
Strohmer: I approach it from a pretty conceptual place nowadays. It helps to have these sometimes ridiculous, but heady conversations about stuff. I like them to know where I’m at, where I’m coming from and why I want to do this, and hopefully we can align more often than not. touring.
Has touring brought you closer as a band?
Strohmer: Nora and I didn’t know each other that well, and we’re still getting to know each other, but touring has accelerated that. Dennis is a new friend, relatively speaking.
Martinelli: Known each other for a while, but never closely.
Strohmer: Max and I got tight through the band. I’ve known Stack forever. Stack is the one who I was more so friends with before, and Johanna joined through Max. Max, Joanna, Stack and I have been a unit for a while. We’re all pretty tight, and when we go on tour, we have this experience together that only we fully know about. We share something that we can only share with each other.
Any other revelations about touring?
Black: It’s a lot of downtime to think about stuff and be bored. We were talking about this yesterday, where it’s a lot of time that you can’t do other things and are forced to be bored sitting in the van.
Martinelli: The boredom on tour is more generative than it is negative. I get a lot out of it, and it’s been a really good time so far, even though it’s just been driving for the most part.
Do you get time to explore all the cities that you go to?
Johanna Baumann (guitar & vocals): We went to a cool lake today with a bunch of dead trees; it was awesome. We didn’t really explore Austin, but we have been here before for South by Southwest. But, yeah, we had a fun nature exploring day today.
Strohmer: It really just depends on so many things. There’s so many times where we just get to the venue, sound check, play the show, leave and drive hours away immediately. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been to that city, but I can’t tell you anything about it.’
Now that you’ve escaped the title of a shoegaze band-
Strohmer: You think we’ve escaped it?!
I would say so!
Strohmer: I think of it more as a cell where I’ve been whittling the cell bars with a homemade tool.
I think shoegaze is the new indie rock, where everybody just labels everything shoegaze now.
Do you think being labeled as a shoegaze band helped you find your audience in the beginning?
Strohmer:Yes, and I definitely identified with it in the beginning. I think shoegaze is awesome. It led me to where I am, and it led me to so many things. There was a time where that music was how life felt, but my life is different now, and my taste, interests and my passions are different now. That’s led us to make different kinds of music. We’re finally at a point where our new record’s done and we have like a tentative release date. I’m really eager to show that evolution. If people need shoegaze to connect with us, then that’s fine. If they’re not into what we’re doing now, that’s fine. Hopefully there will be some people who maybe haven’t been interested before and are now interested. We play a couple of old songs, but on our next record, there’s no shoegaze at all.
What direction are you leaning towards with the new record?
Strohmer: Dennis is the one person here who didn’t play on the record…
Martinelli: Yeah, so maybe I should answer it then. It has a large feeling to it, as a lot of shoegaze does. But I feel like the large elements of it come from a very emotional place that’s quite a bit different. The highs on this record are more epic than they are heavy, and I’m very excited to be playing this material. I think it’s really, really great. I loved the record when I first heard it, so I think people broadly will like it, even though it’s different.
Black: Sonically, it’s a little bit more stripped back. There’s not a thousand layers on every song.
Strohmer: Yeah, we can all play almost every song, everything you hear on the record.
Black: Which leaves more room for each element to take up more space and make more of a statement. Thematically, it’s pretty similar to before.
Strohmer: I think it’s just evolved. My ideas about things haven’t really changed that much, but I’ve gotten better at expressing myself and having a more focused mission, lyrically speaking. There’s nothing on there that I just flubbed out and was like, ‘I’ll just run with that.’ I chipped away at it until every single thing was in the correct place, and I thought, ‘I’m accomplishing what I’m trying to say.’ We wrote our arrangements to facilitate that a bit more.
Was there a certain catalyst that made you want to strip back and be more lyrical, or just time?
Strohmer:I feel like having Max, Johanna, now Nora- getting the lineup to a really strong place where I feel like I’m playing with people who understand what I want to do. We’re creating something together, and I don’t necessarily have to hold everyone’s hand all the time about what we should be doing with the instrumentals. It’s a lot more organic than it was in the beginning, and it gave me the space to focus on the songwriting aspect. On the first two records, and especially the first record, I was in my room doing everything from the ground all the way up. Now we get in the room together, and I bring my element, and it’s a much more collaborative thing. Everyone has a role, and now my role is a little more singular than it once was.
Do you find it more vulnerable now?
Strohmer: I don’t, because my confidence has grown. Especially when we play the new songs, I feel so much stronger about what the songs are and what I’m saying. If anything, I felt more vulnerable before because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
What material are you playing tonight?
Baumann: Tonight, since we are headlining, we’re playing a pretty long set. It’s mostly songs off the new record. There’s one off of each of the old records. So a lot of new stuff that people will be hearing or might have heard on our live record.
I really like the B-side album. What made now the time to put that out?
Strohmer: Originally, I put that out in 2020 during lockdown because I finally had the time to compile it. I thought at the time a lot of that was my best stuff, but they didn’t really feel right on any of our records. I thought it was a little premature, so I took it down everywhere. But then I recompiled it. I dropped a couple songs, added a couple songs, got them all mastered together again and fixed the album cover to look better. That music is not really something I identify with right now, but I really like the idea of having everything out and kind of cleaning house. I think there will be people who are interested enough to want to know what the demos sound like. There’s some weird, really isolated-sounding stuff that’s really raw. My favorite bands have that stuff available, and it brings me deeper into their music, so I wanted to provide that. People would ask me for it also. There was a bit of a demand for whatever reason, so I figured, why not? And I’m glad to be done with it now. We’ll never play a single one of those songs live.
On ‘Happy Birthday,’ whose voice is sampled?
Strohmer: That’s a bunch of different voices. They’re all voicemails from my phone when I was 20 years old. Some friends, bosses and parents. Sometimes I think about that song and I just hope that no one who’s on that ever hears it, because I don’t think any of them know about it, and I don’t know if they would want to be on it.
What’s the plan for the new record?
Strohmer: Can’t really reveal too much at the moment, but more will be known. It’s completely done, there’s a plan.
What are you hoping the rest of the year looks like for Knifeplay?
Stackhouse: We want to get more tours going for later in the year and for the beginning of next year. We’re really excited to get back and start relearning all these songs for the album with Dennis because he’s pretty new. Also working on new stuff with Dennis, because we think he has a lot to contribute, and we haven’t really gotten a chance to explore that yet, because we’ve been busy getting ready for the tour. I would include Nora in that as well. It’s cool to put this behind us and cap that era off and start working on the next thing.
Strohmer: Stack, Max and Johanna have been with me for a long time. People have always come and gone from the band, but with them, I get the sense that- well, we all like different types of music, and from what it seems so far, they’re kind of down to follow me in different directions that I might want to bring to the table. We’re starting to work on another new record now, and with Nora and Dennis being so new, I feel like it’s a good chance to again explore something new because it’s almost a new band again.