Reader discretion is advised, as the article includes strong language, mature themes, or graphic descriptions. We encourage readers to approach the material with awareness and sensitivity to their own comfort levels. Parental guidance is suggested for younger audiences.
Dismania
Interview
By Jen Tombs
What can new punk bring to Western Canada? An anxiety about smashing instruments, a raw joy, and a determination to emotionally scar Elon Musk.
In a very small, red-lit room at the back of Calgary coffee shop Loophole, a band T-shirted crowd is violently dismembering a dining chair. Dismania, a punk three-piece on the cusp of releasing their self-titled debut album, encourage the destruction as they play.
Afterwards, frontman Jesse Valentine jokes that he worried no-one would take up the offer to smash the chair. He needn't have. The energy hadn't let up once during the show, and the interview followed a necessary period of recovery lying on the floor.
Jesse, bassist Blair Turner, and new drummer Caden Dayno ― completing his first ever show as part of Dismania ― want their audience as involved as possible. "That's the thing we pride ourselves in. We fucking get people moving," Jesse says.
Breaking instruments is out, though. For all the trappings of old-school punk that hang around the long-haired, makeup-clad band, they share a very Gen Z awareness of their place in an ultra-commodified landscape. "It feels a little bougie these days, you know?" says Jesse. "Like you're saying, I can afford to break a guitar. It's like, oh okay, go fuck yourself."
Much of Dismania's work speaks to the pervasive feeling of paralysis over a nightmarish, burning world. "A lot of it is very anti-capitalist, very anti-imperialist, anti-military. And it's just this abhorrence with the ruling class," Jesse says.
"Just going down to the base of it, being better people would help a lot," says bassist Blair, a quiet presence in a Cobain-esque sweater that he says people keep mistaking for a Freddie Kruger look. But for now, as Caden points out, at least they have "a lot of material to work with".
They've used it well, too. Their music is charged with a raw, frenetic, DIY atmosphere. The trio list off influences from the "hardcore goth" sound of Dead Kennedys and Germs; through to classic bands like The Damned and Ramones; and grunge and garage rockers Nirvana, Soundgarden and The White Stripes. There's something of Pixies in the grumbling vocals too.
The breadth of influences and changing line-up equipped Dismania to take making their "meaty" debut album seriously, re-recording older material, and they have "creative shit coming up", including excessively complicated time signatures, an acoustic track, and "indulgent" stoner rock.
Which brings things to the band's next goal: to gain custody of a certain space tycoon. A surreal moment of their gig is when they get the crowd to jump along to the refrain of "I'm gonna fuck Elon Musk's mom" from new single "Elon's Mom". Why him?
"Fuck him!" says Jesse with relish. "You ever had like a high school bully and you just wanted to fuck his mom?"
"I feel like that's the only way to get to him," adds Blair.
"We're going to be Elon Musk's dad," affirms Jesse. "These guys get to be soccer dads and stuff. I get to get drunk and assault Elon Musk. That's my goal."
As with the chair-smashing, there's a self-conscious element of the outrageous here. It's a part of punk too easy to mistakenly pass off as kitsch. In fact, the rebel yell against the sanitized is part of what makes the genre so vital. That's on display throughout the Loophole show ― for instance when Jesse shouts "Titans of Industry"'s lyrics of "I don't wanna be a number, I'm a man, not a machine", while Caden and Blair provide a background of deep, slow, clashing dread that spirals up into chaos.
Punk is in some ways theatre that the audience takes part in. Egging on a crowd to destroy a chair is acknowledging the pushed-down urge so many feel to break all the accumulated junk of their lives. When Dismania are on stage, they and the crowd are "kind of a family, in the most chaotic way possible," says Blair.
It doesn't hurt either that the trio obviously love making music. "I fucking always wanted to do this, dude," enthuses Jesse.
For Blair, being in a punk band has been particularly transformative. "As a shy kid I never had the courage to ask, and didn't think it was a possibility," he explains. "I needed to be forced into doing it... if I didn't say yes, I would've definitely regretted it."
In fact, the band was formed after Jesse spotted Blair "dressed to the nines" on the train and recruited him. Blair paints a more unnerving picture. "He kept staring at me. I thought I was gonna get jumped."
The Loophole show was the band's first with Caden, who completed the trio after they announced their earlier drummer Bruno was quitting to move to Italy.
"And that's when I knew," Caden says. "Our first jam sesh I could really feel the energy. You ever just get that feeling?"
It means that somehow Dismania are on their third era only a year after Jesse and Blair's meeting, Bruno bringing a "Latin meets punk" approach before Caden transformed their sound yet again with his "jazz grunge" vibes.
"It's crazy, the new outfit coming together," says Jesse. "But what's coming out is absolutely a testament to everything we've been working on."
Caden sums it up best. "We're very much just doing stuff that we want to do. And I think that comes across."
Dismania's self-titled debut album is released on November 24.