Formed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic-forced lockdowns, punk and post-hardcore band L.S. Dunes is ready to share its new music with fans in-person.
The band — consisting of Circa Survive and Saosin vocalist Anthony Green, My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever and Thursday’s Tim Payne on bass and Tucker Rule on drums — wrote and recorded virtually during that time, keeping the project under wraps up until its band name appeared on the poster as part of the lineup for the annual Riot Fest in Chicago in September.
Since then, L.S. Dunes has been out performing at festivals in support of its singles, “Permanent Rebellion,” “2022” and “Bombsquad.” As the band drops its debut album, “Past Lives,” on Fantasy Records on Friday, Nov. 11, it plans to celebrate its labor of love during a pair of Southern California shows at Garden Amp in Garden Grove on Nov. 12 and The Troubadour in West Hollywood on Nov. 14.
“I don’t think that any of us thought that this (band) was going to be for anything other than fun at first,” drummer Rule said during a recent phone interview. “We didn’t even know if music was going to come back or when it was going to come back, so we were just all people that were hungry to write music. If anything, this was an exercise in keeping our brains sharp and to challenge ourselves with writing.”
Before things shut down, Thursday had just rekindled and committed to playing a series of shows following an opening set for an also recently reunited My Chemical Romance at The Shrine in Los Angeles on Dec. 20, 2019. With the sudden stop in momentum, Rule said he didn’t quite know what to do with himself, but he didn’t have idle hands for long.
“I bought a bunch of recording equipment over the pandemic because I thought live music might not be coming back and if people were wanting to put out records or write songs, I could remotely put drums to them,” he said.
Rule spent weeks watching videos on YouTube to learn how to properly set up an in-home studio and how to mic his drum kit. One day, Stever sent him a guitar riff to play over and the idea to actually start a new project began to germinate after rehearsals for Thursday’s 2020 Christmas livestream event. Rule and Stever virtually got together with Iero for additional guitars and tapped Payne to play bass. The quartet began writing various parts to songs and shared them via the cloud, but they still didn’t have a singer.
“We just decided Anthony was going to be our singer,” Rule said following the band finishing the song “Antibodies,” which he noted he could just imagine Green’s vocals on as they were working on the song. “He didn’t know that yet, but we decided it for him. We didn’t just want to send him one song and say ‘Hey, sing over this,’ so we waited and wrote a batch of songs.”
“I didn’t even tell him who else was in the band,” he said. “He thought they were like my neighborhood friends. But the first song he ended up signing on was ‘Antibodies,’ and he chose that one out of blue, so then we knew we had ammunition to say ‘Hey, now you’re definitely signing for this band!’ Little did he know, he didn’t have an option and we had no second choice, so it was either him or this whole ship sinks.”
Once pandemic restrictions had lifted and the guys were more comfortable, they got together in-person in a studio in New Jersey, which led to writing two new tracks last minute. Iero shared a guitar riff he’d been working on with the guys and they decided to flesh it out on the spot and came up with the single “Permanent Rebellion.”
“I’m glad we did that and a lot of the time, those last-minute songs end up being my favorites,” Rule said. “Right after we did that one, Frank had another riff and it was like this little doo-wop-y, ’50s-sounding, dangly riff and that ended up being ‘Sleep Cult.’ Those are like my top two songs, but they’re all my favorites on the album. I can’t pick a favorite child on this one.”
The band ended up recording the final versions of the songs with producer Will Yip — who has worked with bands like Turnstile and Quicksand — in his Philadelphia-based Studio 4. While not the conventional way of doing things, Rule said the virtual route L.S. Dunes took in 2020 and 2021 that rapidly had them sharing music with one another gave each of its players something to look forward to during an otherwise dark time. He compared it to when Thursday wrote its second album, “Full Collapse,” more than 20 years prior.
“This album captured that youthful spirit that we had back then, that youthful energy,” he said. “I think because of the immediacy of everything that we were doing and the quickness with which we were trying to share and craft these songs with each other just because we were so excited about them. I think that process made me kinda fall in love with writing and making music all over again.”
While each member is busy with their other bands, Rule said L.S. Dunes is a full-time project and they’ll continue to treat it as such. Some of the guys will pull double duty as a few of their other bands may also be billed at certain festivals, but they’re all up for the challenge. L.S. Dunes currently has shows booked in the U.K. in early 2023.
“We’ll make it work,” he said. “We’re all people that are willing to work hard. Our first show, at Riot Fest, Frank opened the show with us and closed it with My Chemical Romance and I played two sets at the Aftershock Festival, so that will happen every now and again, but that’s what we do. We’re (expletive) musicians. A lot of people have left this industry because touring is hard and music is hard, but we’re the cockroaches of this (expletive). You can’t kill us.”
L.S. Dunes
When: 6 p.m. Nov. 12
Where: Garden Amp, 12762 Main Street, Garden Grove
Tickets: $35 at Ticketweb.com
Also: 7 p.m. Nov. 14 Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Sold out, however some tickets were still available via secondary sellers.
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