FIDLAR

Everyone knows the pandemic fucked everything up for bands. In the time it takes to sneeze, the music industry ground to halt. Tours and shows were cancelled all around the world, and even though it seems strange to think about these days, nobody knew if that side of things would return. To some extent, FIDLAR — vocalist/guitarist/keyboard player Zac Carper, bassist Brandon Schwartzel and drummer Max Kuehn — were lucky. A few months before the whole thing went down, they'd finished the touring cycle for 2019's third album, Almost Free, and were in the process of winding down anyway.

"We were already in this mental headspace that we were going to take some time off," says Kuehn. "We were going to regroup, figure out what the next thing is and just be regular humans for a little bit. And then the pandemic happened and it was completely in question if people were ever going to get to play again. It took a long time for us to even wrap our heads around getting back in the saddle because it was so existential for so long."

That extended existential downtime came with more of a chance for self-reflection, but also brought with it the epiphany that the trio — who had, for good reason, been so often pegged as a party band — were no longer the young, hedonistic youths they'd been when they started out. It seems like an obvious point, but it's something they noticed profoundly when they did finally start playing live again. SURVIVING THE DREAM — the band's fourth album and first in over half a decade — captures that perfectly, and the odd discombobulation the band felt. Most often, a band's fans are a similar age to the band, meaning they grow up and older together. But what FIDLAR (whose name, after all, is an acronym for 'Fuck It Dawg, Life's A Risk') realized was that the crowds they were playing to were still young — adolescent and energized and full of reckless abandon. Once aware of that, getting back into the saddle was relatively easy.

"Once we actually started, it felt good," says Kuehn, "but getting started was hard. We're now all in our varying degrees of 30s, and we didn't know if people would still care. There's this whole new crop of artists who are really cool and who are making cool stuff – and they're all young . So you kind of look up and are like 'Oh, shit. We're not the young, fucking crazy band anymore."

"We're kind of the old guys now," adds Carper, "but instead of looking at that in a negative way, it made me go 'Oh shit! We can do whatever the fuck we want!' It made me realize that FIDLAR has zero rules when it comes to creating, and I just felt very lucky with that. I think that only comes with experience and age."

"I think that translates to our fans, too," says Schwartzel. "If we're stoked on it, they're going to be stoked on it, and if they're stoked on it, it stokes us out more, and it repeats that energy cycle of stokedness."

An energy cycle of stokedness is a perfect way to describe the songs on SURVIVING THE DREAM. FIDLAR absolutely leaned into the space that being the "old guys," so to speak, afforded them. The result is a record that brims with exuberance and freedom. Entirely self-produced and self-recorded, its 13 songs bubble with a refreshed and reinvigorated energy, one — rather ironically — that does actually recall the unfettered, debauched vitality of the band's early days. The band tested out a number of the new songs on the road, workshopping the ideas they'd come up with in front of crowds before finding their final form; a reminiscence of how the band had done things on 2013's self-titled debut.

Whether it's the brash rush of damaged nerves of rambunctious opener "FIX ME" or the almost-sweet existential angst of "ORANGE COUNTY" – a song that seems to repudiate Carper's former incarnations of himself — or the frenzied quasi-surf-punk of "GET OFF MY WAVE," these songs are pure FIDLAR — unhinged and unrestrained, restless and wild, emotions and existence held together by a thread. Elsewhere, the sun-kissed "SAD KIDS" – which combines happiness and melancholy with nonchalant perfection — and the downbeat quietude of "HURT" and "BREAK YOUR HEART," are three of the most overtly sad songs the band have ever committed to tape. Yet there's still plenty of FIDLAR's trademark effervescence here, too, not least on the wonderfully playful (yet angst-ridden) "I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS," the jaunty (albeit kind of depressing) "MAKING SHIT UP" and the quirky, playful and irreverent rush of "NUDGE."

And even though Carper's history with methamphetamines and heroin is very much a thing of the past, getting high is a big part of FIDLAR's identity. It's just that the band's attitude towards it has changed. Partly that's because they're older — if not necessarily wiser — now. It's also because Carper was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder a few months ago, something that has helped him make sense of how he acted and felt at certain times in the past, especially when making music. An illumination of what drove his behavior in the past fed into this record.

"When I'm working on music," he says, "I literally can't stop moving. I'll just be pacing around the studio and I'd only get two or three hours of sleep a night. So it was very nice to know what was happening to my body and my brain. I don't consider myself sober, because it doesn't work that way for me — it's more fluid, like a wave or the ocean, and it comes and goes. But I'm very conscious of whether or not I'm going too hard these days, and I have people who tell me that I need to chill out."

At the same time, Carper's creativity is only in full flow when he's in a hypomanic state, something that happens as a result of being bi-polar, especially when he's making music.
"I'm just hyper-fixated and hyper-focused on something and have to see it all the way out," he says, "then when I hit the point where I'm done, I just crash. I stopped taking the meds that they gave me during this process, because when I'm in these hypomanic states that's how I get things done."

That then, is the crux of SURVIVING THE DREAM. Recorded at Balboa Recording Studio — a facility owned by one-time FIDLAR drummer Danny Nogueiras — everything's the same and everything is different. FIDLAR have, in a way, come full circle. They are as they ever were, but they're also new people with a wealth of experience and time under their belts, and they're infusing that into their new songs. They're still fucked up and reckless and fun-loving and wild, but in a completely different way. They've grown up and got older, but — inspired by their audience — they sound and feel as youthful, free and vital as ever. Which bodes well for that energy cycle of stokedness that's been keeping them invigorated, both in the studio and on the road, and looks set to do so for a while yet.

"The breakdown of being in a band," says Kuehn, "is that you make music to promote your live shows to promote your T-shirt business. But there are two separate, gratifying aspects. One is the creative aspect, which is very fulfilling, but also very finite because it only exists for the period of time you're working on a record. And then the touring is this forever gratifying thing where we get to see different countries and different people, and that's a huge part of why being in a band is worth it, because there'll be someone in Canberra, Australia crying in the front row and screaming our lyrics. And that's just so cool."
"It's a big payment on the soul," says Carper. "We just want to play these songs live."
"Because seeing kids and their reactions at shows," says Schwartzel, "is something you can actually take home with you."