Survivalist is the latest addition to the evergrowing NYHC discography. The project was started by multi-instrumentalist Darren Nanos, a talented musician who has played in such bands as Born Sinner, Hotheads, and Super Natural Psycho. For Survivalist, he invited his former Brain Slug band mate, Drew, into the fold to handle vocal duties. "Drew loves Count Me Out, and he knows knows I do too, and he wanted to do something like that," Darren tells No Echo.
"The whole '00s Youth Crew revival tip, lots of melodic, fast hardcore bands. I just kept telling him for years, 'I can't write that kinda stuff, I would if I could,'" laughs the New Yorker. How would Darren describe the Survivalist sound? "Easiest descriptor is Youth Crew meets D-beat, maybe late '90s NYC vs Cleveland? It's the worst trying to categorize it."
Well, good thing we can all just listen to the new project via the Bandcamp embed below:
The last time Darren appeared on No Echo, site contributor Mike Musilli was chatting with him about his YouTube channel where he posts really fun covers of bands like Straight Ahead, Misfits, and SSD. In those clips, he usually handles all of the instruments, so I ask him if that was also the case with the Survivalist material they just posted. "Yeah, all of the instrumentation on there is me. I just go through these waves where I get inspired to do the next thing and shit just starts coming to my head randomly. I grab my guitar (or my phone) and lay out the basic structure.
"I usually bang through the first three songs of a project in a day and then the rest sort of reveal themself overtime after I have them to listen back to. I would say the cover series is like just practice for making my own music. Trying different amps, tones, or techniques — the covers are great for that. Like I might affect a vocal in a way I never tried before, aiming to replicate a tone on the original song I covered, and that teaches me something I might use on my own projects. But overall it's just random waves of inspiration."
The entire Survivalist EP is up on Bandcamp. You can find Darren on Instagram.
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Tagged: born sinner, brain slug, survivalist
