When it comes to their go-to hobbies, the aptly-named Special Interest are fairly unanimous; aside from the band’s resident savoury food fan Ruth Mascelli, they’re all The Great British Bake Off “fanatics”. Though they’ll always be purists in some senses, with the original iteration of the show – starring classic line-up Mel, Sue, Mary Berry, and the ever-present Paul Hollywood – forever stealing their hearts, the four-piece have stuck with the show through every last binned Baked Alaska and dodgy Tom DeLonge caricature cake. “I’m accepting, even though there’s way too many double entendres,” says Maria Elena. “But Mexican week was an abomination,” the guitarist adds, more gravely.
“It’s a reason why we ended up on Rough Trade,” she points out, pondering how the punk band – originally formed in New Orleans – ended up signing to a classic UK indie label for the release of their third album, last year’s ferocious breakthrough record ‘Endure’. “We do like a lot of British stuff.”
Today, the band – sans bassist Nathan Cassiani, who still lives in New Orleans – are all beaming in from different locations. While Mascelli has also stayed in the band’s home city, Maria Elena has recently relocated to Oakland, California for the first time, while vocalist Alli Logout now lives in LA. Is adjusting to the distance working out alright for the band so far? “I don’t know about that…” Logout deadpans, faux-glumly. “It was really convenient when we were all in the same city,” Maria Elena laughs. “It’ll be interesting figuring it out,” adds Mascelli.
Originally, though, Special Interest were drawn to New Orleans and its “queer, weird DIY scene” from different places: Mascelli grew up in Scranton, in northeastern Pennsylvania – a former mining city with plenty of “abandoned industrial buildings” to explore – while Maria Elena grew up in Dallas, Texas. Logout is from a small town “near the border” and counts Belton, in Central Texas, as their hometown.
“In my small town, there is a music scene, which is really wild,” they say. “Punk was introduced to me in a really special, community-oriented way. We used to rent out this one-room schoolhouse in an even smaller town, and have these DIY shows, and people came from all over. It was near a military base called Fort Hood. Punk was for everybody who was weird,” they say. “It was this inclusive space with very vast arrays of different people that came together for a common purpose.
“Was there a Christian punk scene there?” Maria Elena asks. “Dude, Flyleaf came from Belton! It was like, the thing,” Logout says. “The first show I ever went to was a Christian rock show. The person who literally got me into punk was like, ‘Do you really like this?’ I was like, ‘Wow, I like the screaming and the head banging, but I’m sad there’s no Black people.’” In reply, he suggested that they listen to pioneers Bad Brains, who arguably spearheaded hardcore punk – and a switch was flicked.
“Anyway, it was really cool and special in Belton,” Logout picks up. “When I moved to cities, I was just vastly disappointed with how pretentious and stuck-up people were within the punk scene. I thought this was for all the losers and weirdos…”
It’s fair to say that into the present, Special Interest continue to reject all things po-faced or solemn, embracing weirdness in all its forms. Instead, they’re heavily influenced by the most raucous, playful strains of punk-rock: alongside the glam-infused T-Rex, the surrealist leanings of art-punks The B-52s, and genre-blurring The Slits, Mascelli pinpoints the anarchic, kazoo-enlisting Swiss trio LiLiPUT (formerly called Kleenex, until lawyers from the tissue company came knocking) as another huge early influence.
The heavy pulse of dance music also courses through their records like a cavernous heartbeat – many of Logout’s lyrics unfold in hidden basements after dark. “Disco, disco, disco, we want disco!” they demand, early on the band’s 2018 debut record ‘Spiralling’. On its successor – 2020’s ‘The Passion Of’ – Special Interest focus even more keenly on their flaming cocktail of desolation and ecstasy, pulling from industrial techno, glam rock, art pop and pulsing four-to-the-floor dance beats. Hitting somewhere between a techno banger and a strange, distorted ripper from an early Kitsuné Music compilation, ‘A Depravity Such As This’ is one such moment that finds its home firmly on the dancefloor.
On ‘Endure’ meanwhile, these increasingly well-honed influences collide with the claustrophobia of the times in which the record was written. “[The pandemic shuttering live music] meant we couldn’t test songs for an audience,” Maria Elena says, “which is what we usually do. It was directly influenced by our emotional state at that moment.”
Despite the backdrop behind creation of ‘Endure’ – the isolation of the pandemic, coupled with Black Lives Matter protests, and the dystopian horrors of the Capitol riots – Logout reckons it’s a record that would’ve resonated whenever it was released. “I feel like this album could have come out at any time,” they say, although “it feels a little different than when we released ‘The Passion Of’, offers Mascelli. “In June 2020, during all the uprisings happening across the US… that album was born out of so many things before, but it really hit at a moment that struck a chord, in a way that feels different. Like Alli was saying, [‘Endure’] could have come out at any time, and resonated.”
Despite its bleakness and darkness, ‘Endure’ still clings onto hope. On its epic, eight-minute closer ‘LA Blues’ Logout sets forth Special Interest’s central mantra: “If we get by, day to day / Taking it slowly and feeling all of the pain / Do we really get stronger? Or just stay the same / Oh, I have to believe, I have to believe that things will change.”
“Hope is kind of inescapable,” Maria Elena says. “I think it’s easy to say that everything’s hopeless, but actually it’s kind of inescapable to hope that things will be different.” Mascelli adds: “It’s also really hard to hang on,” Mascelli adds, “which I think a lot of these lyrics convey, in a way that’s really powerful.”
By this point, Special Interest have been “proud of ‘Endure’ for two years,” describing the journey to its release as a “long slog”. Rather than looking back, they’re now focused on the prospect they find most exciting – taking the record out on the road again. “I’m really praying that we’ll actually get to tour on it more, as people are starting to listen to it,” Mascelli says.
“To me,” he continues, “it’s the record that we’ve always had the potential to make, or always had in us, we just weren’t able to actualise it. I feel like we all really pushed ourselves to go outside of our comfort zones. We made this thing that we couldn’t have made if it wasn’t for the energy of the four of us, kind of helping each other along through it all.” And it’s true – in Special Interest’s music, togetherness is where hope lives.
Special Interest’s third album ‘Endure’ is out now via Rough Trade Records
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