FIDLAR's Zac Carper talks growing up but staying young ahead of fourth album 'Surviving The Dream' • Interview • DIY Magazine

FIDLAR’s Zac Carper has been trying some new tricks. In a concerted effort to be more consistent with his songwriting practice while penning the tracks that would make up the LA trio’s incoming fourth studio album ‘Surviving The Dream’, the frontman invented a new technique that he would like to christen: ‘micro-festing’. “Everybody manifests things but they do it in such a big way like, ‘I want a million dollars! I want to buy a house! I’m gonna manifest my partner!’,” he says, sitting in his car and puffing on a roll-up. “But I just took that concept and went in the micro with it. Like, ‘I’m gonna micro-fest a burrito’, and then somehow, during the day, I go get a burrito and I’m like, ‘Woah wait? That happened?! That worked?!’ Then I started doing that with my songs. Maybe I just need to write the verse, so I’ll do that. I’ll just do it in chunks.”

Micro-festing might not be making its way into the dictionary any time soon (its definition essentially being, ‘having a thought and then doing it’), but the idea does nod towards some bigger changes that have been going on in Carper’s life since the band’s last album, 2019’s ‘Almost Free’. In the interim period, the frontman was diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder that presents as “hypomanic states”. “Basically whenever I’m working on something creative – even drawing or painting or producing another band – my brain just cannot stop,” he explains. “I’ll get into a hyper – focused state, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop doing it, so I’d just go and go and go for days and then crash like crazy.”

In some ways, these times would be perversely productive; “When I’m in those manic states, I get so much music done,” he admits. But the toll it was taking on him mentally and beyond was far from worth the sacrifice. “Oh, definitely not!” he splutters at the thought. “So learning how to manage it is the newest adventure I’m on and, for me, it just requires a lot of strict routine and surfing and exercising and meditating. I’m learning how to take breaks and put a timer on. Every two hours I’ll stop working for a bit and then go back in. I’ve just become a crazy routine guy.”

“Playing shows it the gnarliest drug in the world.” — Zac Carper

The idea of Carper’s new healthy regime is a far cry from the image of FIDLAR that first skateboarded up a decade ago in a cloud of weed smoke. The posterboys of reckless punk hedonism, their self-titled debut was full of young and purposefully dumb odes to taking drugs and swilling tinnies, literally called things like ‘Cocaine’ and ‘Cheap Beer’. Last year, the band – completed by drummer Max Kuehn and bassist Brandon Schwartzel – celebrated the record’s tenth anniversary, a milestone that Carper explains made him feel not nostalgic but just “fucking old”.

“That was just a crazy time of life, just chaos. I was so broke, and so hungry – physically – all the time,” he recalls. “But when I look back, those were some of the funnest times I’ve ever had in my entire life. When you get bigger and start growing, the business becomes real and you follow it and grow it and do your best. But in the beginning, it was just a complete drive that I had to make this thing work.” He pauses. “I guess it worked!”

However, beneath the group’s wild exterior has always laid this sense of ambition; a perhaps more professional side to FIDLAR than the average onlooker may have expected. On tour, Carper says that they’ve long been a band who’ve focused on staying match fit. “Neil Young has that line: ‘The road keeps you clean’. When I’m on tour, that’s the most routine [we have], and playing shows is the pay off at the end of the day,” he says. “I don’t drink on tour. I try to keep crazy healthy on tour. The hotels we go to have gyms and every day I’m in the gym. I try to go to bed pretty early. It’s always been the case.”

There have been well-documented struggles with substances along the way, and Carper isn’t totally sober – “Not really,” he shrugs. “I’m sober but… you got any blow? That’s my joke.” Yet really, what’s always made FIDLAR who they are – a raucous celebration of wild energy and unhinged communion – isn’t whether they’re clean-living or total carnage, it’s about the hour or so of complete freedom that they present when they’re on stage. “I write music to play shows, and I really do always have the thought in my head of ‘Is this gonna go off live?’” he grins. “I like ballads and we have a slow song on this new record, but ballads are just so fucking boring to play…”

“FIDLAR fans are a very specific breed of people.” — Zac Carper

Surviving The Dream’, then, is a missive not from the other side but from a band still in the thick of it all. Full of the push-and-pull of life, its songs are troubled howls from the depths. Seven out of 13 tracks have a lyric about either getting or being “fucked up”; the other six aren’t any less bleak. Though Carper might be trying to manage his life and his mind in healthier ways, his songs are still direct and unadorned – a particularly primal form of therapy. “FIDLAR fans are FIDIOTS, that’s what we call them. They’re a very specific breed of people, and I think with the lyrics they can relate to the struggle of addiction, of being a crazy person,” he says.

For their new record, not only did writing become therapy but therapy also became writing. For the past two years, Carper has been trying all sorts of techniques, from the EMDR light therapy that inspired ‘Low’’s central message (“You gotta let it go / So you can start to grow”) to more traditional talking therapies. One pivotal thing has been journaling. Every morning, he’ll purge his thoughts in a stream of consciousness onto the page; returning to them, some of the sentiments became lyrics on the record. “I never go into it with the intention that there’s gonna be a song in there,” he says, “but my brain is chaos all the time.”

When the band first broke through, the idea that FIDLAR might still be going a decade later seemed an unlikely one. “I had no idea that I was gonna be able to make money off of making music,” says the frontman before chuckling: “But now I’m never gonna stop. I’m gonna be a fucking 60-year-old screaming, ‘I drink cheap beer / So what / Fuck you’.” And in many ways, that dichotomy is exactly the point. Carper is, in his own words, “a different person – I’m better”, but he still gets his biggest kicks from letting his demons all out on the stage. “That adrenaline for an hour and half – it’s crazy. I’m just really stoked to be able to be in a position to keep doing it,” he says. “Playing shows is the gnarliest drug in the world.” Maybe FIDLAR never needed anything stronger, after all.

‘Surviving The Dream’ is out 20th September.

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