© Alia Reilly

Alex Walton makes inventive, exciting and emotionally faught music that mixes rock ‘n’ roll forms with noisy electronics. But you ask them, they might say they’re the same as all pop songwriters: a plagiarist who’s just playing the blues.

Their new single, featuring the A Side “The Postmodern Ennui Demoscene Plastic Inevitable” and B Side, “New Friends” catches Walton delving into lush, welcoming synth pop. The new sound reveals another dimension to the Allston musician’s performing and songwriting talents while maintaining the busy, anxious energy that defines their music. Initially intended to be part of an electronic album, the single — bearing the complete title “The Postmodern Ennui Demoscene Plastic Inevitable Makes a Play for Teri Toye’s Discreet Charms and Other Lies You can Tell Yourself” — is instead a brief but beautiful sonic detour as Walton plans to record a more rock oriented album with The Shame Music All Star Band in coming months.

Boston Hassle: You just put out a new single with an A Side and B Side. How does it feel to have them out?

Alex Walton: It feels good. It’s been a while since I put out a new single and I’ve been sitting on these songs for months. I think they’re really good. I think they’re two of the best songs I’ve ever written. When I was making them, I had a plan to make a whole record like that. I still might, but not now. It feels like they’ve been evacuated from my presence and I don’t have to think about them anymore.

HASSLE: With them being non-album singles, does that give them a different kind of significance?

Walton: I like non-album singles. {It creates room for} more variety. I am doing another record soon — very soon. But it’s a rock record. I wanted to release this, get it out of the way, to sort of clear the landing strip {for} doing more stuff. Because when I’m sitting on stuff, I can’t move on unless I get rid of it.

HASSLE: I feel like your music, and these singles too, are filled with contradictions. There’s irony in there and humor, but also a lot of earnestness. It’s abrasive but there are also a lot of pop elements. Do you think about that balance?

Walton: I don’t think I try to be ironic. I’m sort of plagued by an overdeveloped self-awareness to a certain degree where I want to say things that are simple and beautiful but those are the most difficult things to say. Then those get clouded by irony as a defense mechanism.

On the A Side, “The Postmodern Ennui Demoscene Plastic Inevitable” that’s something it is actively reckoning with.

The title in itself you can see that fucking happening. I don’t know if it’s as much contradictions as much as they’re all means to an end if you know what I mean.

HASSLE: I think so, but it’s also interesting that you want to say things that are simple and beautiful through a song called “The Postmodern Ennui Demoscene Plastic Inevitable”

Walton: You know, with that song, I was thinking about the Fukayama book The End of History and the Last Man and the idea that modernism has run its course because there’s nothing new under the sun and everything is a derivation of something else. And how do you say something true and beautiful while being conscious of that?

HASSLE: Does it feel kind of frustrating? There’s a lot of baggage to postmodernism but there isn’t really a way to react against it.

Walton: You can’t react against it because it’s the overarching condition. I think what I am trying to do is use that feeling of futility as means for emotional expression of some other thing. Some other more pure human emotion, because these things are all interlinked.

HASSLE: I hear a lot of rock influence in your music, especially the Velvet Underground. Are bands like the Velvet Underground still an influence on these more electronic singles?

Walton: The Velvets aren’t everything. Well… the Velvets are everything — but they’re not everything! If I was thinking of what’s combining to {my} influence, everything would make me feel like a plagiarist because I am. All pop musicians and rock musicians are plagiarists because that’s what it is, it just depends on how conscious you want to be of that.

On these singles I was thinking back to music that I remember in my youth that I loved, the way that sounded and the way that felt. I didn’t get into rock ‘n’ roll music until later. As a kid I was listening to new wave, post punk, synth pop, things like this. There’s a certain purity to these things. Even though they are still rock and pop forms — they’re just the fucking blues — there’s like a naïveté to them.

HASSLE: They’re easy to look back on nostalgically, they’re not jaded.

Walton: Exactly. There are some of those groups that are a bit sardonic or pointed maybe. It’s like Phil Spector records: something where there’s a universal beauty within them even though the words might not mean anything. The words don’t matter— they’re secondary.

Obviously, I’m preoccupied by words. I’m clouded by words and maybe that gets in the way of things, but the music is uncomplicated and beautiful. I was just thinking of all the music I grew up on, the first music I was consciously listening to when I was making these.

It was also just a different workflow from how I normally work. Working with synthesizers and samplers.

HASSLE: Do you feel like you got more comfortable with samplers and synths while you were recording them?

Walton: When I first started making music, I was using cheap Yamaha keyboards. I had analog synthesizers and I didn’t know how to use them very well. But the way these things are made to interlink with one another, they’re very easy to make music with — very simple music.

It was nice to step back from the guitar a little bit because I find myself relying on the guitar a lot just because it’s what I’m used to now. Fucking around with keyboards was like returning to being a little kid again.

HASSLE: How did that feel? It sounds like a really fun thing to do.

Walton: It is fun! I love programming drums. One of my favorite things in the entire world is programming drums. On the A Side it’s drum loops but on “New Friends” it’s all using LinnDrum samples and 808 samples and programming them and making them sound good and varied. I can’t play the drums very well, but I love programming them.

HASSLE: I’ve heard you talk about how much you love your band —

Walton: — I love my band.

HASSLE: You call them the Shame Music All Star Band, you sing about them very lovingly on “New Friends.” Can you tell me a little bit about why you love your band so much?

Walton: I can’t speak for myself but, other than me, the band is composed of, I think, some of the best instrumentalists in our scene. They’re all incredible and they’re all so tight. They understand the music. I’m not saying I’m hard to understand — the music is simple — but they understand from a very primal standpoint what to do and they all know exactly how to excavate these recordings for a live setting.

© Adam Barlyn

HASSLE: Like an intuitive understanding

Walton: Yes, absolutely. The rhythm section, Brendan Dunphy (drums) and Jaden Cruz (bass) are very instinctual players. They play simple lines, but they know exactly what to do and how to do it. And the newest member, the guitarist, Alexei {Petrov} is a much greater guitarist than I could ever be in my entire life. Alexei is a genius at restraining and holding that back to create the best part for the live performance. And we just sound really fucking good if I’m being totally honest.

HASSLE: The full title of the singles as a pair is “The Postmodern Ennui Demoscene Plastic Inevitable Makes a Play for Teri Toye’s Discreet Charms and Other Lies You Can Tell Yourself.” There’s so much there. Teri Toye —

Walton:— She’s someone who’s very important to me. Models are incredible because they’re pure image. It is something unattainable, you know? Especially Teri Toye because there’s not very much known about her, really. She existed and modeled for and was the muse for Stephen Sprouse and then sort of vanished. She had these years of radiant beauty that just came out of nowhere.

To be pure image is just something I could never be. I think of people like Candy Darling in the same way. It’s something I’m attracted to, the sort of Warhol idea — like what he would do with his Factory stars. They weren’t really actors at all, they couldn’t act for shit. But he was able to take people like Candy Darling and Edie Sedgwick create icons out of them in pure image. I think about if that’s a good thing or a bad thing and I don’t have an answer for that, but I think any amount of beauty that is added to the world is good.

HASSLE: Is there any separating music and image for you?

Walton: They’re intrinsically linked. I mean, we’re not living in the age of 78s. Even back then, image was inescapable because we want to see who we’re listening to. We want to see their faces, we want to see them as human beings. I think about Robert Johnson. There’s one photo that exists of Robert Johnson and either the photo or a painting of that photo is on every single collection of his blues music.

There’s also the image you’re directly attaching the music to, which is album covers. I never really learned how to do graphic design or anything but I create all the covers for everything I’ve ever done. It’s a very thereputing thing for me. Sometimes I’ll have the cover done before I’m done with the music and it helps me finish it because I know this image is what’s going to be attached to it. I’m trying to evoke in some way, with an image, what is inside the record.

I try pretty hard with the covers, and a lot of the time my stupid face is on the cover because we want to see who is singing these words to us.

HASSLE: You mentioned you’re working on a rock album. How is that going so far?

Walton: We’ve worked out most of the songs. We’re going in in the next few weeks and doing two or three sessions and recording the whole thing. The songs are sounding good. We’re playing some of them live already.

We are being recorded by Harmony Pulaski. She’s going to come with us in the studio and engineer for us. She’s fantastic, a genius. And I’m very excited about that.

I play rhythm guitar in Harmony’s Cuddle Party. I don’t have anything to do with the songwriting, I just play guitar. The songs are so good, Harmony is an absolute genius, it blows my mind.

HASSLE: What are some artists that you work with and admire?

Walton: I love all the people on Youth Against Satan. I’m the biggest Winkler! fan on planet earth. I think Justin {Schaefers} always puts on a very tight and beautiful show.

This is sort of biased but Alexei is in my band and Little Waters is fantastic. Everybody should go listen to “Bug” by Little Waters. Incredible single. I think it will go down as one of the great rock singles of the 2020s. I also have some rock and roll truth crusader friends in New York doing wonderful things, Matthew Danger Lippman and John V. Variety.

I love listening to my friends’ music, I love seeing them perform.

HASSLE: Is there anything else you want people to know about your music or songwriting?

Walton: …You want to be seen, you want to be understood more than anything. That’s the most fundamental human emotional trait: wanting to be represented in some way. I always think about how I try to make music for when I was a teenager and I was so lost and confused and not really understanding what was happening to me. I was on autopilot and I wasn’t doing very good. [I’m] making music for that kid to look on, resonate with and feel understood. I know there are people like me out there in the world who are like I was.

HASSLE: What do you mean by, “people like you?”

Walton: In any way. Lost. Confused. Obviously I can get as vague or specific with that as I wanted, but it doesn’t matter. They don’t need to have all the things that I have. Music universalizes these things and that’s the most important thing: being felt like you’re not a fucking freak, that you’re being understood.

Alex Walton and the Shame Music All Star Band play frequently in the Boston area, and you don’t want to miss them! You can keep up with their upcoming show announcements on Instagram.

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