On your newest album, Latin, there seem to be a change in sound. Not necessarily polished, but it feels a little—

Matt S (laughing): It’s more Polish.

Have things changed from the last album to now?

Matt M: Yeah, absolutely. I think that last album was more of a mish-mash, in terms of the fact that we had different drummers playing on it. And then a different bass player. Two bass players played on that album.

Brian: Never at the same time.

Graham: Never at the same time!

Brian: Everyone thinks when we say that, we actually had two drummers, but we never had two drummers.

Matt M: Everybody meaning one publication.

Matt S: Pitchfork!

Brian: And everyone fact-checks off Pitchfork. I’ve seen it so many times, “they dropped the two drummers!”

Graham: We have to be clearer in press. And we recorded that record in a bunch of different places, not all at the same time, but different studios. But this one [Latin] was just the four of us, going into the same studio a bunch of times. It’s a little more focused in that regard.

Is that just a product of having been together as a band longer? Did you want to try something new?

Graham: No, I think it just happened.

Brian: It was kind of fun in the beginning to keep things kind of chaotic. I think we had a lot of fun working with the people we worked with. To change from one gig to the next had a certain excitement to it. For practical reasons you want to be a band that stays busy, gets to follow through with every opportunity that comes its way, stays on the road, makes records and does all the things that bands do. You can’t keep that weird, whispy, eerie, vague premonition kind of thing going on, you have to be like, ‘Okay we need to be a solid mass.’ And that’s what we became, four guys working together consistently. Matt brought something equally rewarding, if not more so. It was out of necessity.

Out of necessity? What do you mean?

Brian: We’re too busy to keep the random thing going, someone might not be available right when you need them. It’s like, ‘Oh shit, my other band’s playing some fucking donut shop opening.’ You’re screwed, you end up not having a drummer. So we’re like, ‘Ah, we can’t do that.’

Matt S (laughing): Yeah.

There was a whole thing about how you guys used to never rehearse. Is there any truth to that?

Graham: Yeah, just from the fact that we live in separate cities. I think it started because we didn’t have to. We would just go on stage with a bunch of stuff and just play, improvize. We started really touring hard at the beginning and that kind of honed our set. We’d have a week off between tours. Did we sit home and practice? No. We honed our skills on stage, we worked on new songs on stage and in sound checks.

Matt S: It’s changed a little. We still don’t really practice. There have been times when we have a day off, or a couple days off between gigs, where we’ll go jam. We did that a couple weeks ago in Toronto. It was kind of fun because we never really do that. We were in Montreal in a super hot, sweaty room, the four of us – it was more like being in a band back in the day. More so now out of necessity. The four of us have been playing together about three years, and the songs have really started developing instead of being so chaotic. We started figuring out this and this and this. But it’s not like we go out and run through a set, it’s more like we just get together and play music, not on stage. Working shit out and not in front of an audience. But we haven’t gotten into an actual practice thing, I don’t know if that will ever happen. If it does, I’m not against it. I live here so it’s kind of hard to do that.

Brian (laughing): You need all the time you can get for painting miniature birdhouses.

Are there benefits to living away from each other?

Brian (laughing): More time for painting miniature birdhouses. Definitely there are drawbacks. I don’t know what the advantages would be. There’s definitely times when you want everyone there, when you need a shoulder to cry on, or you want to go for a beer with somebody, or you want to work out a song, or somebody wants to do a remix. We’re not a typical band that gets together and programs things, it’s more about us just getting together. Sometimes we have to say no to a thing we want to do because we live in different places. The only advantage is when we come here we have a place to stay; when we play in Toronto we have a place to stay.

Matt S: And if we play in Orangeville we have a place to stay.

Brian: As soon as we run out of places to stay we should get someone else—

Matt S: Somebody in St. Louis.

Brian (laughing): Yeah, a marimba player.

Does it make it harder to plan things?

Graham: Not for a tour. When we get going, when we’re all together, we usually plan big chunks of stuff. I don’t think it’s been too bad.

Matt M: I actually don’t know too many bands where all the members live in the same place.

Matt S: Yeah, I’m finding as I’m getting older, people do live everywhere. I think it’s like, maybe as bands mature or whatever, as people get older they just think, ‘Man, this fucking awesome bass player lives there and we’ve got to have him.’ You just got to get over it. It would be great to be able to spend hours jamming but I think even if we all lived together… [pauses]. We’re not 20 or 18 years old any more. I’ve got responsibilities.

Brian (laughing): I can’t just fly this guy all the way to Toronto for a battle of the bands. We’re just not entering it this year.

Matt S (laughing): It was a money-loser too many times. We never won.

It’s nice that as you guys have gotten older, you can still hold onto being a band.

Matt S: It’s still the focus of course. Especially for me, I don’t give a shit about doing anything else really. You just try to make everything balance out and work.

Brian: Music is kind of the only thing I want to do now, at this point of my life. Anything I can do to facilitate continuing that. It’s nice to know we have freedom within the band. I think if you felt compliant to the band, on the highway, always living and breathing off each other, it’s kind of nice to know that you can go somewhere remote and the whole thing is not going to fall apart. I want to build my country retreat and live off the land and still be able to catch up with the guys somewhere, and recommence where we left off. It’s good to know that that’s a possible future.

Does that just tie in with the entire concept of the band since the beginning, of working with chaos to bring something together?

Brian: The idea that you can try to manipulate every detail: A) you’re not always that proud of the result; and B) you may look at it later in life and feel that it’s dated. You did everything in your power to influence every little last detail of it, and maybe that’s not what the joy of music is about, and just living, is. Maybe it’s sometimes about rolling with the chaos. I have a feeling that even if we don’t understand what this record means to us now, three years later we’ll still be perplexed by it, still be intrigued by it and maybe there’s something kind of innocent and fun when you can’t will everything. And that’s from the very sound but it’s also to living in the same town, practicing and doing all the conventional stuff. I don’t think you need to do all that.

Does it help that there isn’t a predictability to everything? Does it keep things fresh?

Graham (laughing): Sure.

Not a case of doing the same thing every Saturday night?

Brian (laughing): I never know when his bass solo is going to end, but I like it.

Matt S: You fucking go for a ride with it.

When you look back at earlier iterations of the band, well, Holy Fuck has been around for six or seven years now—

Brian: I don’t know. On paper it might have, but in the beginning we were in other bands. It was an idea, a loose thing that did this or that from time to time. It’s been five years. I think we really started to get out and tour in 2005.

Looking back on five years – for a band that’s a pretty long time – what’s it like looking back on the earlier stages? Do you find yourself avoiding that?

Brian: We were bringing up all these old shows and emailing about them. Like, ‘Hey, we got all these [recordings of] old shows, should we do something, some kind of archive or database of them?’ And we thought about it, but it’s actually too big of a project to take on. We’ve rolled with so much stride into everything we’ve done. Looking back, there are some ridiculous things that were happening, in terms of people we played with. So many people coming and going. And these weird situations, kind of like driving all the way to California and back to Toronto—

Graham: I think it’s part of not having any expectations with this project from the get go. You can’t look back and not be regretful about something you wanted to happen that didn’t happen. You can look back and think, ‘Wow I got to do this, and we did this and this and this.’

It also seems like there’s something a lot more free about this. There’s this whole sexiness to being a rock ‘n’ roll star, and even though some of that’s disappeared, there’s something nice about not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next. You talked about not knowing when the bass solo is going to end, there’s something nice about that.

Brian (laughing): Yeah, that was a joke. Put a little italics on that one. Yeah, definitely, it sure is. We’re like four hungry wolves out on the road. Look out ladies. Ah, whatever. Put that one in italics.

Matt S: I think freedom, in general, is just a good thing to have. There are too many other bullshit things that you have to agree to play music, and to play venues, and doing all these things. I’m glad that it’s kind of loose. We sort of created our own model then broke it. And it’s kind of changing more. And maybe over time it all just seems like the same thing. But like you said the sound of the band has changed a little bit, and it’s a fun thing to explore and see where that goes.

Since you’ve been touring, what’s the reaction been to the new stuff?

Matt S: Not good. No, it’s been good. We’re lucky people seem to have fun at our gigs. I think when you see a band on stage laughing, doing shit, fucking up,  it helps. People tend to have a good time anyway. The reaction has been pretty good so far.

Graham: We’re lucky that way.

Matt M: I mean there were songs we weren’t sure how they would even sound when we played them. Let alone how people would react to them.

Matt S: There’s still one, I don’t even know what’s up with it.

Matt M: But it’s been great. I’ve been really happy.

What’s the one you’re not happy with?

Matt S (laughing): I’m not going to say. If you hear it, you tell us.

Brian (laughing): “Free Bird” cover.

Alright, I’ll look out for that. Another thing I wanted to talk about is that some people are as familiar with your remixes as they are your regular work.

Brian: I find that interesting, given the fact we really don’t know what we’re doing with remixes. To the point I don’t even know if you can call them remixes. But I think there’s something kind of fun about the naïvety of it all. Just the whole idea that we’ve been thrust into this electronic genre, which I think is funny because I don’t think any of us know a particular lot about it. Or how to program it or refade it or—

Graham: I do.

Brian: But we don’t let him do it. The ironic thing is, he does know it. So the remix thing, we kind of do it in our own weird way. I guess you can call it collaboration, sometimes even covering. I still wonder if they’re even good. In fact a lot of the remixes we do, people are disappointed when they get them and they never even make it on the record. They never get on the B-side of that single that they’re supposed to be on. Very few of them see the light. But I don’t see that as discouraging, I see it as quite the opposite. I think we keep trying to do something different and if we can, to be unexpected.

Graham: It seems like remixing has become quite popular, and if we get them it’s like, ‘How can we not do this in a typical way that everyone’s doing.’ Taking a vocal track, putting a dance beat over top of it or something. I mean it might end up being a sort of a thing like that, but I like to think that we take a completely other angle with it.

Matt S: I think people expect something of us. They think that we’re going to do something else. So that’s why we send them something and they’re like, ‘Oh.’

Brian: Yeah, we did a remix recently where we took the drums out and put in an acoustic guitar and a violin  because we thought the vocals were really sad and beautiful. And they did not like it, so they oddly took our remix and gave it to someone else who put a kraut-y dance beat under it. It made it like a collaborative remix, so it was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ I won’t mention names, I don’t think anyone should feel humiliated about it. It’s a classic example of us doing something that we thought brought something cool and new to a song and it just wasn’t what people were expecting.

Matt S: That can happen. It’s not like we were intentionally going, ‘We’re going to do something that they aren’t expecting.’ We hear something and we’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do that.’ They were thinking it was going to sound like a Holy Fuck song or something. I don’t know.

Brian: We also do them live. Not every one of them, we got a handful of them live. I don’t know how many of them we’ve done live. (Laughs) That’s cool, right?

What happens? Do bands approach you about them? Do you ever have to turn people down?

Graham: Mostly we’ve turned stuff down because of time. We just don’t have time to do a lot stuff.

Brian (laughing): Unfortunately we don’t even turn people down, we just let them down. We actually say yes, and then don’t do it. We try, or it sucks, or we just didn’t get around to it. That happens so much and I just feel so terrible about it. Sometimes it’s like a really dear friend. We’re pretty irresponsible.

Matt S (laughing): Hey man, we’re fucking busy.

Brian: They knew what they were getting when they came to us.

Do you guys want to come up with something that people aren’t expecting?

Brian: I think we want to make something really good.

Graham: We don’t want to be shit disturbers in any way.

Matt S: We’re not agitators.

Brian: We’re not trying to take the piss out of anybody’s song. I think if that was the case we wouldn’t say yes to it. I was going to say something awkward there, try and make something into a joke, but honestly I’m not afraid to say we’re learning as we go. And sometimes it’s not as good as we want it to be, but that’s just part of the creative process. We tried making a lot of songs that never saw the light of day because when we listened back to them, they were stupid. And so when someone asks you to do a remix, there’s like a paper trail that proved you tried to do something. Believe me, there’s been a lot of secret failures. There’s all these remixes that people don’t know about.

It seems like you guys aren’t afraid of messing up, of failure. Do you think that’s one of the band’s best traits?

Brian (laughing): Screwing up is our best trait. No, I like that. It’ll be our Myspace quote.

Graham: You get some magical moments when stuff falls apart and you have to build it back up again. Especially early days when we’d just go up and have no preconceived notion of what we were going to play, and songs would disintegrate into nothing, we wouldn’t know where it was going to go, and then suddenly the clouds would part, and it would come back into something very, very cool. It’s important to embrace that I think.

Brian: If you try to make music your only mistress, it’ll only going to break your heart. You got to play the field.

Matt S: A lot of music peers of mine, that’s their whole thing, so I learned to embrace that a long time ago. Sometimes I’ll really go for it and end up fucking up a lot during a show. The audience may not know, but maybe something new will be born or maybe it’s awful, dreadful.

Matt M: I would have stopped playing music 10 years ago if fuck-ups bothered me. You know what I mean? I don’t know if there’s any other way to play music.

Matt S: I wouldn’t even call it a fuck-up. What are you judging it against? Especially if there’s nothing, like Graham said. When I first started playing with Holy Fuck, it was really like, let’s go up there and find out what happens. And we may talk, ‘Oh shit, we didn’t do it like that last time.’ But nobody knows, there are no criteria.

Brian: Sometimes you’ll walk off stage and be, ‘That was the worst show,’ but your friends will come back, ‘That was the best show I’ve ever seen you guys do.’

Matt S: So who knows?

Brian: It’s not just about talking about a bum note or a missing part or a change, it’s also about the whole thing. What is our career, what the band is even. You kind of have to leave that open to the fates a little bit. You never ultimately know how other people are going to react to it, so you have to be kind of open about it. So if you’re letting go of that, what else is there to let go of? It’s just freedom at that point. We might end up getting thrown in this pile, treated like that. Everything has been working out really well.

Matt S: Whatever the mistakes were, it’s okay I guess.

Brian: Exactly, here we are. We’re going to play a gig, ride a couple Ferris wheels. Coney Island. Everything worked out.