Singapore is no stranger to emo music. Since the genre’s underground revival around 2015, the city-state has been full of its champions: just ask Terrible People, Xingfoo&Roy or Forests, who have all rode the genre’s fanaticism to cult success.
CURB – guitarist Lucas Tee, bassist Sam Venditti and drummer Farizi Noorfauzi – began no differently. Meeting as diploma students at Lasalle College of the Arts, the band initially bonded over math rock and emo’s signature technicality; when NME meets CURB for coffee near the college, however, the three immediately share how quickly they fell out of love with the idea.
“What we found out after a while is that playing ‘emo’ is dumb”
“It was two of us writing super-stupid double-time tapping shit, but it never got around to becoming anything.” Tee says of CURB’s initial incarnation. “It feels like the world has moved past that sound, stuck in 2015,” Venditti notes. “Everyone has access to YouTube now. It’s not special… people are probably just horny for riffs,” Noorfauzi adds.
But as Singapore descended into COVID-induced lockdown in 2020, the trio were motivated to write again for the project, having never lost their love for the genre’s passionate confessionalism. Soon, they began circulating hundreds of Telegram voice notes, which eventually coalesced into the urgent eight tracks that form ‘Hope You’re Doing Well, Michaela’.
Speaking to the band’s emphasis on concision, many of these songs side-step the genre’s archetypal showmanship. Instead, CURB channel their energy into lean muscular hooks, preferring to let their songcraft’s visceral energy do the work. Sludgy centerpiece ‘Become Again’, for example, exemplifies a democratic ethos, featuring all three members trading cathartic, shout-along verses, while locked in agile, call-and-response grooves.
CURB’s collective instrumental aptitude further fueled the band’s collaborative streak. “We all play guitar, so anyone can write a song,” Venditti shares. Every member can play bass, drums and guitar, and their mutual understanding of their respective instruments helped them glue their parts together. The band are not shy to admit their collective influences in their songwriting: the heartfelt post-hardcore of Fiddlehead, for example, informed hard-hitting closer ‘Bellboy’, while other touchstones included British outfits Tangled Hair and Delta Sleep.
In particular, the trio mentions their long-running love affair with Pennsylvania outfit Title Fight. CURB, however, are quick to note these influences run much deeper than pure homage. “We keep revisiting ‘Shed’ and ‘Floral Green’ not because we want to sound like Title Fight, but because there’s always a novel thing to discover with each listen,” Noorfauzi explains.
“At some point, we started asking: ‘how can we inject ourselves with something different?’”
“What we found out after a while is that playing ‘emo’ is dumb,” Tee jokingly notes, sharing how the band were quick to find the label and the genre’s hallmarks self-limiting. “Western music is very easy to copy. This is not me being flippant and whatever, but I can also alternate tune my guitar, I can also tap… but what makes a difference is making an intentional, conscious decision to not fucking do that.”
“It’s not that the music is not good. Rather, it’s so good that it became so popular here – that’s why it’s easy to copy,” Noorfauzi continues. “I think we can agree that it’s not enough to just be a band and make music in Singapore.” The band have the reputations in the city’s scene to back that statement – Tee, for example, drums for indie rock quintet Subsonic Eye and shares session duties with Venditti for the producer Fauxe, while Noorfauzi frequently produces for experimental rapper Mary Sue.
Venditti credits the sentiment to CURB’s naturally growing ambition as musicians. “There’s layers to it being ‘easy’,” he notes. “But if you go back five years ago when any of us would write a song, we were like – ‘dope, it sounds like TTNG!’. At some point, we started asking: ‘how can we inject ourselves with something different?’”
Here, the three emphasise the importance of deliberately subverting sounds and lyrical themes from their influences. “If the western narrative is talking about how fucking sad and depressed they are in their town, then I think we can also put effort into figuring out what that is for us, instead of also saying we’re sad and depressed,” Noorfauzi says.
“If the western narrative is talking about how fucking sad and depressed they are in their town, then I think we can also put an effort into figuring out what that is for us, instead of also saying we’re sad and depressed”
Searching for a different narrative, the trio drew inspiration from their own Singaporean lives. The names of local expressways, for example, kickstarted a memorable draft – “SLE… KJE…” Tee jokingly sings – before CURB ultimately distilled the concept into ‘Last Bus’, a rallying cry celebrating Dhoby Green and 1A Short Street, locations where the trio often shared late nights.
Of course, the band deal with classic coming-of-age material (no points for guessing what ‘Afraid of Getting Old’ is about) – but much of ‘Michaela’ also draws on personal obsessions. Highlight ‘Dragging String’, for example, was informed by Tee’s frequent fishing adventures, while ‘Begin Again’ originally featured lyrics about the McDonalds ice cream machine. Eventually, the band settled on another indulgence for its emotional pay-off: “Fuck it I’ll just play some PUBG!”, the three scream.
“We can’t say ‘oh I wanna get out of this town’… cos like fuck! We’re here! So being present and making it make sense for Singapore makes more sense than trying to make sense of midwestern ideology,” Tee concludes. Conscious of existing sounds within the scene, CURB argue that their specific lyrical focus and writing methods allowed them to not just become more intentional as musicians, but also stop merely “pandering”.
Looking towards the future, CURB are already excited to move beyond their debut – here, they joke about their long-gestating idea of eventually making an R&B record (CURB’s live sets usually open with a sensual take on D’Angelo’s classic ‘How Does It Feel?’). Ultimately, no matter the genre, the band are adamant about staying grounded in personal truths.
And what do they hope to see in Singapore music? “It’s about being able to listen to how honest [someone] is being with themselves,” Noorfauzi says. To that point, Venditti paraphrases a Rick Rubin quote for good measure. “When you’re doing music, it should be what the heart presents. Only after, do you go back to see what the heart presented – and you fix it from there.”
CURB’s ‘Hope You’re Doing Well, Michaela’ is out now