In Conversation with NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS
Combining elements of each of their early influences, from Ed Sheeran to The 1975, from Lorde to the Spice Girls, NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS is making music even the band hasn’t heard before. After meeting at Berklee College of Music, songwriters Gabi Gotts, Perrin Xthona, and Tammy Gonzalez turned their college friendship into songs that have rocked TikTok and brought them closer together as friends and bandmates. Brilliantly exploring everyday stresses, insecurity, romanticizing pain, and (surprise?!) killing sprees, the trio captures the Gen Z experience within the beautiful, maximalist, and ever-surprising genre of hyper pop.
With Perrin and Tammy in LA and Gabi in the UK, we caught up over Zoom to talk about their individual early influences, the story behind writing their new single “evian (boohoo!)”, and what they’re excited for as they continue making music together.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Let’s first talk about your individual journeys with music. For each of you, what originally drew you to this medium?
[PERRIN]: I got into music because my mom taught me piano. She’s very musical but didn’t want me to do it as a career. But then I thought, “This is the only thing I wanna do!” I got really into pop music, stealing my sister’s CDs--Britney Spears, Spice Girls--and into songwriting, which was my main focus in college.
[TAMMY]: I also grew up on iconic 2000s pop stars. I started taking piano lessons when I was seven and stopped at thirteen because I was like, “Fuck classical music.” After that, I started writing and taught myself guitar, and thought, “I finally found my little pocket.”
[GABI]: I grew up in the UK so it was Spice Girls and Britney Spears too but also UK house more than anything. I went to a school that taught a lot of creative subjects like painting and music and took piano, voice, and violin. I’m not really good at any of those anymore because like Tammy, I thought, “Classical isn’t really it for me.” But at the time, my aunt was writing West End musicals so my birthday presents every year was to go to her house and write and record a song in her studio. The songs were shit but there was where I got the bug.
[UNPUBLISHED]: All three of you went to the same college and later began writing songs remotely during quarantine. What do you love about making music together?
PERRIN]: We get to say whatever we want. When we were songwriters, we’d get a lot of lines turned down in other sessions because they were too goofy or on the edge. But when we first wrote together, all those lines were the ones that went in. We are essentially hanging out and at the end, we have a song, something tangible to remember it by.
[GABI]: We have very similar inclinations and visions for how we want songs to come across or feel, and the type of content we’re interested in discussing. Having that vision is what pulls us together and we trust that we all know what direction we should be going in. I’m doing it with my best friends and that makes it more fun and less nerve-wracking.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Is there one of you that gravitates more towards lyrics or melody or tracks, or is every aspect pretty equally shared among the three of you?
[PERRIN]: It’s pretty equal. We’ll just start talking and joking and writing slam poetry on a Google Doc until we say “Oh, that’s a cool concept,” and then write literally 100 lines. There’s always a rhythm we all have in our head even if we haven’t spoken to each other in an hour. Then we’ll pick pieces and say, “This is the order, this is the focal point, let’s rework this” and then add melodies at the end.
TAMMY]: Because there are three of us and we all think similarly, there might be one person finishing up a lyric and the other two will be working on a melody in a different section, and it’s all happening simultaneously. It ends up being just a super quick process.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How would you describe the experience of making music on Zoom and what we’re both the challenges and joys it presented? How does it compare to now making music together in person?
[PERRIN]: There weren’t that many challenges, which is crazy. It was simple and we came up with a good system. And we’d end up talking afterward for hours on Zoom, playing Jackbox games, watching YouTube videos. When we came out of it, we wrote ten times faster because we weren’t dealing with video lag and there was less of a barrier. When Tammy and I moved out here, Gabi came and visited for a week, and we wrote like three songs every night.
[GABI]: We were grateful for that time because when you spend that much time away from body language cues or even tone of voice, there are usually so many elements of communication that you’re missing. We were still able to communicate but when we got together in person, it was like getting three times the amount of information. I remember being so happy because we were drinking White Claws and writing and giggling with glee. It was exciting to be back in the room and I’ll never take that for granted again.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Each of you has your own distinct and varying music tastes. Gabi, you love Ed Sheeran, indie pop, hip hop. Tammy, you name 2010s alt/indie as a heavy influence, and Perrin is very into 90s pop, dark pop, and sad bops, and yet you come together and work under this amazing, unifying sound. Why do you think hyper pop brought you all together and what do you each love about making music in that genre?
[GABI]: Hyperpop sounds like it’s pushing the boundaries both popular and interestingly and sonically new. The music we were raised on is all classic pop, just in different styles through the years. Everything mashes together to create the way we like to write pop over the new sonic hyper pop.
[PERRIN]: What we write is very digestible melodies, it’s just over new production. Going to Berklee and working with producers there, we all came out wanting to do it. We had some friends that made great pop music for other artists but we had other friends who made crazy shit! And the same thing as us, they would go into sessions and hear, “That’s great but not for this song.” And we were saying yes to all those ideas.
[TAMMY]: We’re giving our own little facelift to pop.
[UNPUBLISHED]: The band’s newest single, “evian (boohoo!)”, which you all co-wrote with songwriter and artist Alice Longyu Gao, is about turning hard times, everyday stresses into a lighthearted aesthetic. Is that something you take to heart in your real life?
[TAMMY]: We all in different ways romanticize our life. Not trying to detract from any real emotions but we’ll romanticize sad periods once we’re out of it.
[PERRIN]: We all thrive in chaos. I feel my most on-it and happy when I’m stressed because there are so many things happening. When Gabi’s here, we’re doing twenty million things a day and then when she’s gone, we have our normal person routine. But then I’m like, “Damn, if I have time to shower and do a full skincare routine, am I even doing anything with my career?”
[TAMMY]: And when it’s the three of us, we’ll be like, “Are you feeling sad because I’m feeling sad!” and we’ll laugh about it because we’re all going through the same thing. It makes the pain funny and less sad.
[GABI]: We usually blame it on retrograde, like, “Something is a little wacky up in the stars.” Whether or not that’s what’s affecting us, it feels good to blame something else.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What do each of you love about this song? What excites you about it?
[TAMMY]: I always say it’s my favorite song we’ve ever written. The structure is unconventional and lyrically, every line is so cool.
[PERRIN]: The production is hyper pop but it’s not anything I’ve ever heard before. It’s more calming than most hyper pop but still with a lot going on to pay attention to, especially with three different voices. I couldn’t give you another song that sounds like it. Like Tammy, it’s the first song I’ve really loved that gets stuck in my head.
[GABI]: The synergy between the production and the concept is a huge piece for me. The whole song is about water, crying, sparkles, and diamonds, which brings both sounds and visuals to mind. So the production sounds like it should. You can hear the water, the bubbles, the drops in the well, the sparkle in the diamonds. It’s a whole picture of what the aesthetic of crying should look and sound like.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s your favorite lyric from the song?
[TAMMY]: “Chlorine in your eye kind of pain.”
[PERRIN]: I like the first two lines a lot, just from the memory of it. We were like, “We have this idea” and Alice was just like, “Drop drop drop like diamonds/bling bling bling when I’m crying.” We were joking, trying to find the concept before we drove over, and I was like, “Bottle up your feelings like Evian!” because there was an Evian bottle on the table and we had to have something to offer for the day. We were so tired and didn’t know what to say but she made one of our less warmed ideas into reality in seconds. That was so sick.
[GABI]: The bridge is my favorite part. We always write bridges last if we need another section. And “waiting for the pipe to burst / Waiting for the waterworks” combines the industrial idea of a factory with water and the metaphorical idea of “waterworks” being crying in everyday language.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Who are other people in the industry you would love to collaborate with, whether that’s songwriters or producers or fellow artists?
[GABI]: Charlie XCX is one of our biggest inspirations so that’s the most obvious one. We would love to work with Dylan Brady or Laura Les from 100 gecs. Same with Dunbar.
[PERRIN]: EricDoa and Julia Michaels come to mind because she’s very creative with her lyrics and not worried about whether the line fits the melody. Anyone who’s doing something innovative and not worried about structure or norms.
[TAMMY]: Imagine Julia Michaels writing on a song with Dylan Brady! It’d be absolutely bonkers because the production would be insane but the lyrics would be crazy as well.
[GABI]: But that’s kind of what we’re trying to accomplish with our vision. That pairing of strengths is what we’d like to bring to the table in our music. Let’s put those two together in a room and then we’ll also just be there.
[UNPUBLISHED]: For each of you, what is your favorite song you’ve released as a band so far and why?
[TAMMY]: “Murder Party” because the concept is so insane, the fact that we wrote it about killing boys, which is not the vibe, we’re not serial killers! But it’s fun.
[PERRIN]: I’m between “Murder Party” and “bev hills”. “bev hills” still holds a special place in my heart and line by line, the lyrics are crazy. That was the first one where I was like, “Yeah, we’re writing some weird shit, maybe we should put it out.” Having written it not living in LA and then moving to LA, we were so spot-on.
[GABI]: I’d say “Murder Party” too, more for the meaning of it than anything else. It was the first video that ever went viral, which was so unexpected because we were getting a hundred views on anything we’d ever posted. And then suddenly there were thousands of comments debating about whether or not our song was ethical. It was just a moment for us, having people feel so strongly and care enough about what we were saying to have an opinion enough to say something.
[PERRIN]: The whole song wasn’t even out yet, it was just the first four lines of the verse and people were already debating. I thought it was cool, too, that that little amount of music was making people go bonkers in the comments.
[GABI]: It was also the first song when we chose to be a band. We weren’t originally called NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS, that was the name of the EP. It was never our intention to release any music further, it was just those three songs for quarantine and there weren’t any real stakes. All we wanted for that project was that our friends would listen to it. “Murder Party” was the first song we really cared about. At that point, we were working with our manager Sarah, making content for Insta. We did an amateur music video, we made art. It was a push in the right direction for us to be like, “You can do this. You’re a squad, stick together, make music.”
[UNPUBLISHED]: From there, at what point did you decide to call the band NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS?
[GABI]: It was a natural progression. I remember somebody brought it up, the fact that it was a TikTok joke, and from there, it was the easiest decision ever, not a long discussion.
[TAMMY]: It was literally us deciding between MAIN CHARACTERS and NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS. And we were like, NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS makes more sense.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Are there ever moments when you do feel like the main characters?
[GABI]: When we go out! We have a playlist for our pre-game, getting ready, running around in the apartment. There’s make-up on the toilet seat, clothes laid out on the bed, everyone’s like, “Is this the vibe? Are we doing the boots or a casual moment?” We come alive when we choose how to present ourselves. Tammy always says that it’s the way she introduces herself before she meets people and we do the same thing. Choosing how to present yourself is choosing to be the main character.
[TAMMY]: Music plays a huge aspect in feeling like the main character. If I’m getting ready and not listening to baddie music, I’m not gonna feel like a baddie. Give me Doja Cat, that’ll make me feel like the main character. Or when you’re sad and in the car looking out the window, you’re listening to Bon Iver, that’ll make you feel like the main character in a movie.
[PERRIN]: Us getting ready in the daytime for a big day is literally the start of every 2000s movie.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I could really imagine your music being featured in a teen movie with horror or murder-mystery or intense party scenes, like Jennifer’s Body. If you could have your music featured in any piece of media, past or present, which one would it be?
[PERRIN]: Euphoria. I’m obsessed with that soundtrack, it’s ingenious. They are songs in themselves but they set the scene really well.
[TAMMY]: I could imagine “evian” playing in the scene where Jules is underwater at the Halloween party.
[GABI]: If there was a Gen-Z Project X, it would be that. Which is kind of what Euphoria is.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Looking ahead, you have a debut EP coming out next year! Could you tell us a little more about that project? What are you excited for listeners to hear?
[PERRIN]: It’s darker but still really cute and fun, a lot of play-on-words. It progresses in a cool way because “evian” is more bubbly and the rest of the EP is more party pre-game. We have a pre-game playlist but in a way, we wrote what’s missing from it, what we wish the energy was.
[GABI]: The lyrics are the same vibes as “Murder Party” or “I Hate Every1”, very tongue-in-cheek, but it’s heavier production, the kind of stuff you bump in the car. This EP makes us feel like the main characters.
Make sure to check out NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS on Spotify now!