Words and Photos by Ellen Arden
A few minutes into our interview, the record arrives. There’s a handoff across the table, setting off a brief round of chatter, and within seconds all four members of Psychic Death are gathered around the first pressing. It’s the first physical copy of The Garden / The Grave, the band’s debut full-length. And after years of relentless touring and being too busy to make an LP, Psychic Death finally has something to show for it – and it’s been a long time coming too.
Psychic Death began as a lockdown byproduct. Members Blake Lumry (guitar, vocals), Ryan Stark (keys, synthesizers), and Zach Estess (bass) had been playing in the psych-punk band Rude Dude and the Creek Freaks when COVID wiped out their tours. “Pretty much our tours and stuff got canceled because of COVID, and then we’re stuck in the house,” Lumry says. “That became the inception of this. We just started writing darker stuff and going more towards this kind of sound.” The shift was less calculated reinvention than a matter of following the songs somewhere new. What emerged was a different kind of band, one less focused on the psychedelic sprawl of their previous project than in the tension between mechanical rhythms, shadowy electronics, and the physicality of a live drummer.
Enter drummer James Cramer, who had already found himself in Psychic Death’s orbit before ever joining the lineup. During the pandemic, Cramer started a cassette label called Funeral Hum, and through it he put out Psychic Death’s 2023 EP, Ghostface Cowboy, on tape. Then when the band went looking for a drummer, he jumped at the chance to join the project, despite being in “six or seven bands” at the time.
Together the band makes delightfully dark synth-driven music that sits somewhere in the shadows of industrial post-punk and darkwave but driven by analog synths, live drums, and with a noisy streak that pushes through all the doom and gloom. It’s something the band has coined, death wave, a collision of darkwave and deathrock with more noise, anger, and movement.
Ahead of their new release, Frequency ATL sat down with Psychic Death to talk about their origin, the sound they’ve dubbed death wave, and the years of work that brought The Garden / The Grave to life.
Death Wave in Motion : Too Upbeat For Goth
Ask Psychic Death to describe their sound, and you get a shrug and a menu of comparisons. Cramer offers the most accessible entry point: “Joy Division, but more modern, noisier, and angrier.” It’s the sort of shorthand you can give someone unfamiliar with the darker corners of post-punk. As he puts it, “When I’m explaining my band to my dad’s friends, I’ll say Joy Division but more modern, noisier, and angrier – because even if you don’t know about ’80s new wave stuff, people know Joy Division. Or at least they know the shirt.”
As for comparisons, “We get hit with a new one every show,” Stark says. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Sisters of Mercy, and Christian Death come up most often, while the band’s own touchstones include French post-punk outfit Rendez-Vous and New York noise-rock trio A Place to Bury Strangers. But the band isn’t particularly interested in landing neatly inside any of those reference points or genres. “I call it post-punk dark wave,” Lumry says. But Stark prefers a term coined in-house: death wave. “I’m gonna take credit for that one,” Cramer remarks. “I was messing around with what to call it – deathrock, dark wave, death wave.”
But whatever you call it, a handful of publications offered their own assessment: “too upbeat for goth.”
Collectively, the band laughs at the comment. “That’s awesome,” Lumry says. But Stark quickly offers an anecdote: “We have a live drummer, which is weird for a lot of goth and post-punk stuff. We are on the punkier side of post-punk,” he says. With a live drummer driving many of their songs, Psychic Death has a physicality that often gets lost in the colder, more programmed side of darkwave. The band is also rooted in punk and heavy music. As Cramer explains, “As much as we want to be dancey and sexy and gothy, almost without fail when we’re writing songs, we end up adding some heavy, punchy parts.”
When it comes to writing, songs will either come from toying around at rehearsals or the starting point will be Stark’s Moog – a vintage modular synthesizer known for its thick and punchy bass and piercing leads. Its arpeggiator can provide a repeating pattern that gives the rest of the band something to lock onto. Rather than treating the synth as atmosphere layered over a finished song, Psychic Death will often use it as the song’s structural backbone. “You lock into an arpeggiator, and it builds a rhythm inherently, because that synth is just going to be at that speed no matter what until you change its setting,” says Cramer. The sequence then becomes something akin to a click track, working to hold a pattern at a certain pace until someone changes the settings, which gives the guitar, bass, and drums a common pulse to work with or against. That mechanical consistency gives many of their songs a forward momentum, while the live instrumentation allows more room for noise, weight, and some of the sudden shifts that keep Psychic Death from settling into something too predictable.
Death, Rebirth, and Everything in Between
The Garden / The Grave follows a string of digital singles, an EP on Die Slaughterhaus Records, and a cassette EP released through Funeral Hum. Psychic Death has spent the better part of the last few years playing and touring, leaving little room to pull everything together into a full-length. “It’s weird that this is when we’re putting out the first record, because we’ve been playing constantly for a couple of years,” Cramer says.
Much of the new album was written on tour, with songs taking shape and being finalized in different cities. But time on the road comes with a lot of financial trade-offs; touring independently usually means taking time off work to spend money on the privilege of playing shows. As Estess explains, the longer the band spends touring, the more money they lose out on earning elsewhere. “Gas is ridiculously expensive,” Cramer says. The band is trying to play out of town as often as possible without losing money, which means sticking largely to weekend runs. Estess starts adding up the costs: potentially $700 to $1,000 in gas each week, before hotels and food enter the equation. The experience of trying to sustain a life as a musician while navigating the broader difficulty of being a person became part of the record itself.
“Touring is hard. Being a musician is hard. Being a human is hard,” Cramer says. “I think a lot of that comes together in the record.”
Eventually, they made it into Studio 1 Zero, where producer Josh Monroy helped them explore ideas that took the songs beyond their original forms. Once they reached the studio, the songs continued to change. The band used the recording process to follow ideas beyond their original arrangements, adding unexpected textures and new instrumentation as opportunities arose. Cramer points to the last song on the record, “Fall Ground,” as an example. The final version features acoustic instruments borrowed from friends, a 12-string guitar played by a studio assistant, a viola, a cello, and a violin. The song’s underlying structure remained, but the finished version became something almost entirely different as the band kept finding new sounds and people to bring into the fold. That kind of experimentation runs throughout the record.
But The Garden / The Grave isn’t merely a collection of songs the band has accumulated along the way. Its title speaks to the cycle of shedding an old self to make room for something new. Lumry describes the garden as a place of growth, though growth sometimes requires leaving a past version of yourself behind. “When you’re in the garden, you might as well jump into the grave so you can regrow.” The record moves through “life, death, love, and hate,” Lumry says, while Estess points to mental health and the strange business of existing in the world. “How we cope with being a human. Being human is strange and ugly.”
The singles offer a glimpse of how far the band was willing to push that process. “Control,” released first, is something of an outlier in the catalog. Rather than beginning with Cramer’s usual acoustic drums and building the electronics around them, the band approached the song from an entirely electronic standpoint, starting with electronic drums and synth arpeggiation before layering in analog instrumentation. It’s a reversal of their usual writing process, and one that gives the track a different foundation.
Their most recent single, “Salvation,” is one of the band’s newer songs and a particular favorite among the members. It also fulfilled a very specific studio ambition of Cramer’s: getting a whip sound onto the record. He and Monroy worked through the possibilities until Cramer heard exactly what they wanted. The placement is part of the joke. Estess points out that “Control” seems like the obvious candidate for such a sound, making “Salvation” the less expected choice.
Getting the album out into the world requires a different kind of support. This time around, Psychic Death was looking for a more involved label partner — one that could help coordinate everything surrounding the release, from singles to media coverage and PR. The band is quick to praise Mark Naumann of Die Slaughterhaus Records, whose approach gave them the freedom to handle those responsibilities themselves. For The Garden / The Grave, though, they wanted a more hands-on arrangement and found that with Jacob Gunter’s A Certain Fate Records.
Psychic Death remains DIY, without a manager or booking agent, and most of the work of keeping everything moving falls on the band. It’s exhausting, Cramer admits, but having help with the release is a welcome change. After years of writing on the road, refining songs across different cities, and finally watching those ideas take shape in the studio, The Garden / The Grave is ready to stand on its own.
Once the album is out, the focus will shift toward writing the next one and finding more places to play. Lumry floats the idea of heading west and making it to South by Southwest, while Estess says the band hopes to get to Europe next year. The ambition is there; the economics are harder to work out.
Psychic Death’s debut full-length, The Garden / The Grave, arrives today, October 23. The band plays Fest in Gainesville later this month before celebrating the release with a show at Aisle 5 on December 4.