Sap: Pie Shop, Nov. 4

Walking into Pie Shop in the early evening of November 4, I caught the tail end of a soundcheck made up of piercing, distorted guitar and crashing drums that made it clear I was about to meet a band that takes “loud” seriously. That band was Sap, an alt-rock group from Austin, Texas, currently two weeks into a tour with bands Sludge Mother and easterlin that will carry them across the country. Together for nearly five years, their sound blends the heavy, riff-driven rock of the 90s with a more modern edge. Before they took over Pie Shop’s stage on their D.C. stop, I sat down with the band to talk about how they found each other, how their sound took shape, and why they don’t feel the need to play the industry game.

Sasha: Tell me about your band. What should the readers know? 

Hank Barna, Sap’s bassist: We’re Sap. We’re an alternative rock band.

Evan Fundora, Sap’s guitarist and vocalist: Yeah, we play rock music. We're on tour right now; We just started. It's like our second week. We're gonna be playing around the country for a while, so. 

How long have you guys been playing? 

Hank: Five years, yeah. 

Evan: I think it's gonna be five years in November. 

Oh, nice! And where are you guys coming from? Because you're not local to DC. 

Hank: We are from Austin. 

Jared Cox, Sap’s drummer: I am not from Austin. 

Evan: I grew up in Houston. 

Jared: Yeah, I'm from Pennsylvania originally, and then I came to Austin and met them. 

Would you say that, you know, your environment inspired your sound at all, being in Texas? 

Jared: Yeah, our environment? I would definitely say it inspires our sound. Yeah. I think the way that we do it [make music] and in the place that we do it definitely inspires our sound. 

Hank: Because we would record in a storage unit. And that storage unit could be 100 degrees. So, depending on the weather, it would either be like freezing cold in there for like a month during the winter, or it would be like 100 degrees the rest of the year, and you know, that would change your mood. 

Evan: Yeah, we’re pretty bummy in that storage space. Yeah, it was just terrible. It’s a concrete box.

How'd you guys come together since you were from different parts of the country? 

Jared: We met on Craigslist, yeah. 

Evan: I was in Houston and trying to move to Austin after high school… I put up an ad and then Hank messaged me, and we started playing. Then Jared messaged us about that we were looking for a drummer, and then we started playing around November. 

Jared: It was really crazy. We were like a block away from each other, you know?

Looking back, now that you’re at almost five years as a band, what inspired you to start making music? How'd you guys meet or how’d the sound come about? 

Jared: We all just wanted to make music, I feel like forever for the most part. You know, Evan was in a bunch of bands in Houston prior to this. And then I was trying to find a band in Pennsylvania. I couldn't find anything. And then, you know, Hank was probably, I don't know. 

Evan: I was really into drums. Yeah. I don't really know what got me started. My dad played drums. It was just so fun, you know, I’d go home and play.. 

Hank: Yeah, I think we all liked the same bands. And at the start, we all liked rock music. 

Jared: Not even necessarily, like the same bands, like, we knew all the bands that each of us liked, but we had different favorites, you know? So we weren't going for any certain sound or anything necessarily, just loud. 

Evan: Yeah, we just like loud. 

What were your favorite bands? 

Jared: That's a good question. Back in the day, it was a bunch of just 90’s stuff. Yeah, tons of 90’s stuff. 

Evan: We came back into a lot of 90’s stuff. 

Jared: Yeah. I mean that never really went away. 

Hank: We kind of came full circle with it.

How would you say that the band's vibe has kind of changed throughout your time? You took a step away from the 90s, do you think that was reflected in your music at all? 

Hank: I think that shift was reflected in our last album. 

Jared: It was a little bit more modern. 

Evan: We were getting into like, Fleshwater. Just more modern stuff. It was still like rock, heavy, loud style, but we tried to put that energy with the riffs into our sound. 

How did the songs come about, would you say? Is it kind of a group process? 

Jared: Evan usually comes in with the riffs and lyrics and everything, and then we kind of just build right off of that. Then, you know, we lay down drums over, and then sometimes they'll [the songs] just carry on and figure themselves out. Usually we do a bare bones run through first, listen to a voice memo and then be like, oh, this would be fun here, this would be cool here. 

Evan: A lot of the stuff we do now is that we jam a lot. We'll play a riff jamming, and then I'll listen back, and try to put it together. We’ll try to play this again. and then we build the song out. Actually, I've really been bringing a lot from just playing acoustic. I used to write a lot on acoustic, but now we’ve been jamming together and getting a lot of ideas from that. 

What are what's your ideal show like? You guys have been playing for like two weeks now around the country. What did you say you look for in a show? 

Hank: People. Energy. 

Jared: That’s the best, cause we feed off of that, too, you know? If the crowd's going crazy, we're gonna go crazy. 

Evan: A lot of people are really shy… A lot of the fun ones are where the stage is really small. You're basically on the ground, you know, you’re in the crowd. 

Jared: They're [the shows are] super intimate and they [the audience] go crazy bumping into your stuff… that shit’s awesome. 

Evan: I think people are just a lot more comfortable when you're not at their head and they're looking up. 

What's the experience been like doing this tour so far, working with these other bands?

Evan: It’s been great. We've been so far with Sludge Mother and Easterlin, and it's been really fun. They're all really good, which is super inspiring. They have great sets. 

Have you guys worked with Sludge Mother or Easterlin before this tour? 

Evan: No, but I had heard both of them a while ago. Sludge Mother, I'd just seen on Instagram and stuff, because we were in a similar grungy scene. And then Easterlin, I caught them in my Discover Weekly [Spotify playlist] once. I think it was “gaussian blur.” But I really liked it, because we were getting into more avant-garde sounds. 

Jared: Yeah, like minor issue and at first, at first. That kind of more modern sound. 

Evan: So, when we were setting it [the tour] up, and we were thinking about who we wanna have, they were one of my first thoughts. It worked out, and it's been really good. 

You guys are more of an underground band. What's it like being an underground band in today's music industry, would you say? 

Evan: Really normal. 

Jared: There’s not a lot of pressure or anything. You know, you hear about all the pressure from the industry level, or about people pulling strings for you and trying to get you to do certain things and whatnot. We don't want to deal with any of that. We can be us, but can just do whatever we want. 

Evan: I mean we just live in Austin and go out, see friends, go to work, go to practice. Shit’s really normal, like, literally nothing different than anybody else’s life. 

What's coming next for you guys? Anything to look out for? 

Hank: We’re working on new music. We have more songs that we recorded with Erasure, and we're trying to get those finished. We're also writing new music. 

Evan: Yeah, we're gonna do a bunch of writing when we get back [from tour] and hopefully get some EPs and singles out this next year. We want to release a lot of music, so I'm gonna write a bunch of stuff. 

Any parting words of wisdom for the readers? 

Evan: You paid $20 to go to a show, make it worth it. Don’t use your money to stand there. Have fun and enjoy yourself, do what you want.

Somewhere in the middle of the Erasure tour, in a city thousands of miles away, I’m sure Sap will probably be crammed onto a tiny stage with the crowd close enough to knock over their gear. By their own account, that’s exactly where they want to be. In a music world that increasingly measures success in terms of streams and surface-level image, it’s a refreshing change of pace to become one with a band and crowd whose goal is to lose themselves in the music. With new EPs and singles planned for next year, Sap is only getting started. Until then, take their parting advice: make your ticket worth it. Maybe even show up early; you might catch the sound check.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Sasha Jayne is the current Creative Director of the INDY. Their true loves and passions are metal and punk music, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and wearing excessive amounts of black clothing.