Interview Solids: ‘We’re Excited And We’re Confused’

’ drummer Louis Guillemette reckons the best thing about being in a two-piece band is the easy transport. He’s joking of course - he’s a naturally funny guy. His witty charm is immediate, and chatting to him conjures up the urge to ask whether he’d rather just grab a few beers and party. For Guillemette though, the party is right around the corner, as the Montreal duo are currently preparing to widen the release of their debut record ‘Blame Confusion’ via Fat Possum. This is a record soaked in the sweat of two metalheads who just kind of accidentally fell into a punk rock band, and while it’s easy to compare the fuzz-laden album to that of early Japandroids or No Age, Guillemette insists that talking about influences is almost a completely irrelevant subject in regards to Solids.

“It’s weird because… I don’t want to say we come from a strictly metal background, but certainly a hardcore background,” he elaborates. As 90s kids, he and guitarist Xavier Germain-Poitras grew up surrounded by playground chatter about Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth (“it’s kind of in our veins,” he explains), but their real interests couldn’t be further apart. “Hardcore is pretty much the base of everything we do. This band really came out of the blue, so talking about influences or anything like that is kind of weird because honestly, we don’t know how it came together.”

With that in mind, ‘Blame Confusion’ immediately becomes a much louder and far more abrasive album. It’s a record that ricochets from one song to the next, providing moments of utter chaos in which you can just imagine people swinging from the rafters to. It’s not strictly heavy per say - there are faint nods to shoegaze and stoner rock throughout - but the way it throws itself around your eardrums and shatters them when the volume’s turned up ultimately blurs the lines between hardcore, punk and pop. “The thing with Solids is that it wasn’t meant to be a duo, it was supposed to be… I guess you could call it a power trio?” Guillemette laughs. “[Germain-Poitras and I] just started jamming one day, and I had this little footswitch that we plugged into one of the bass cabs that I had and it sounded really good. We continued jamming that way and the bass got left out of the context.”



Their roots may be firmly planted in Montreal’s hardcore scene, but there’s another major part of Guillemette’s history that fuels the Solids sound. “I love Michael Jackson and still listen to all the old school pop bands that I was into when I was younger,” he says, his grin pretty much palpable down the phone line by this point. “So you’ve got the loudness of what we used to play in the past in the past plus the pop elements of everything we still like now.” Is he saying that Solids are sort of like Michael Jackson fronting a hardcore band then? “Maybe not Michael Jackson,” he chuckles. “But maybe Phil Collins!”

Guillemette’s on the phone while at his job in Montreal. A job he’s about to quit in fact, a ballsy move that’s necessary in order to take Solids on a North American tour. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he says, the ambitious naivety tangible in his words. “Sure, I’ve been on tour for a couple of weeks at a time, but never as a full-time musician.” His excitement is wide-eyed - this is a guy who genuinely did not expect to be putting out a full-length record, let alone heading out to play the thing live. “We recorded the record ourselves and we got it out there ourselves. We’re excited, and we’re confused.”

The confusion doesn’t end there. “I was asking myself that the other day,” he nonchalantly responds, to a question about whether he believes Solids’ songs could be considered as strictly party music. “Like, how do people react to our music live? I would expect people to go wild and party, but sometimes people just don’t!” He seems genuinely puzzled as to how the band is perceived, going on to say that he’s unsure whether they’re “part head banging music, stoner music or shoe gazing music.” It’s almost as if what the band has created has ran ahead in front of him, not allowing him even a second to take it all in. His conclusion? “I guess it just depends what city we’re in at the time!”



All signs point to a duo that are so wrapped up in enjoying the music themselves, that even they’re not sure how they’ve come up with the end result. Solids are a band dedicated to bringing the party to venues across the globe, and their sound is definitely big enough and bold enough to be deserving of huge halls everywhere. “We’re not lyricists or writers or anything,” Guillemette humbly states. “We just go in to a jam space, smoke weed and jam until we get something good. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like, and hopefully it does sound like that!”

Solids’ new album ‘Blame Confusion’ is out now via Fat Possum.

Taken from the new, free DIY Weekly, available to read online or to download on iPad now.