In Conversation with Sad Cops
Sad Cops, recently known for their alternative-emo indie records, have welcomed 2022 with a rebranded debut single “All Good Things”. Sounding much different than their previous works, this new single approaches a new hyper-pop sound, where lead singer Grayson Harris finds his hand at producing with an inspiration from well-known producer Sophie at mind. Sad Cops have an interesting work environment as they do most of their songwriting over Zoom sessions as the members are spread across different cities in the United States. The band tells Unpublished that listeners should expect more single drops in the next few months as well as hopes to get back on the road. As they keep the same band name from their older works, Sad Cops finds that 90’s radio sound using impressive drum beats mirroring the likes of Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How did you all meet and start your journey together as a band?
[GRAYSON]: I was given a computer and a DAW by one of my mentors when I was 14 so I just started making music on my own in my bedroom. I then met Christian in high school and Christian, who is a little bit older than me, met our guitarist Mills in college. Mills then introduced us to our drummer Nathan, and Nathan then introduced us to Colin, our keyboardist. We were all living in Denton, Texas at the time which is a college town about 3o miles north of Dallas.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t listened to your music before?
[GRAYSON]: I don’t want to use obscure sub-genre titles but I guess it’s really inspired by Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy. A lot of 1997-2000 pop rock - All American Rejects, Third Eye Blind - that pop rock kind of sound.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Who do you draw inspiration from?
[GRAYSON]: Sophie is one of my favourite producers ever so I feel like hyper pop has been a huge influence. That was my introduction to electronic music and when I first started making music, I was really into Sophie back in 2014 so that would be my single biggest musical influence.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you walk us through your new single “all good things”?
[GRAYSON]: Yeah, so we have a set of up to 8 singles now but this one is by far the oldest, since it was written back in 2018 when we were all living in Denton, Texas. We had a studio in Denton and Mills and I just wrote it one day while listening to a Fatboy Slim song. We were just trying to recreate the drum sound and we ended up writing a whole song surrounding the drumbeat. We ended up spending a year on this concept record and obviously it never came out but this one stayed on with us so that explains the lyrics. The lyrics were the one thing we never changed about the song.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you do most of the writing now completely over Zoom calls?
[GRAYSON]: Usually, yeah just because I’m on tour a lot so I just find myself doing stuff on my computer with no keyboard or anything. Then I’ll hit up Mills when I get home and we’ll finish writing over Zoom or sometimes they’ll come visit me and spend like 5 days not leaving my apartment to just focus on writing.
[UNPUBLISHED]: The music video looked like it was really fun to film. Can you give us a little behind the scenes into the making of the video?
[GRAYSON]: My best friend, Austin Roa, started doing videos and tour documentaries for us back in 2017 and now he’s doing the same on tours with The Lumineers and Hozier. He was on tour for a year and a half and we fell out of contact a little bit but I ended up moving to Austin, Texas where he was. He was actually the one who told us to release this older music because we were on hiatus and so he then ended up pushing us to do the video too. That video was actually supposed to be filmed for the first time in December but Austin and I both ended up getting Covid so we had to cancel the first shoot, and the second shoot was in February. February in Texas is usually when it gets cold but it snowed really hard! We couldn’t get our DP David to fly in from California, and these huge plans we had for the shots weren’t working out so it felt like it was all falling apart. We had to improvise a lot but we did end up getting access to the mall by ourselves for 3 hours, which was fun.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your last release was in 2018 with your EP Transition Songs, do you feel as though “all good things” respectively reflects your growth as artists in 2022?
[GRAYSON]: I think we were all in completely different mindsets. I also think music as a whole was a completely different place than it has been post pandemic so now we’re much more inclined to explore what we can do with the computer. Mills and I have always worked on songwriting even when we were on a hiatus, so I think we’ve both grown as songwriters. Also now I’m producing all of it, which has never happened before. That has changed our sound significantly as it has become more influenced by the music that I was listening to during the pandemic.
[UNPUBLISHED]: The single does sound different than anything you have released before, would you consider this to be the beginning of a new era?
[GRAYSON]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the new tunes don’t sound anything like our old tunes. We had the choice to change the band name actually and do a complete rebrand but we decided not to just because we thought the name still fit for our music now.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was the most memorable show you’ve played so far?
[GRAYSON]: Pre-pandemic we played at this small, 200-300 cap venue and did two sold out shows there which were totally insane. I’ll never forget how the stage was so small and really high for some reason, but the energy was in there. I think we’re probably going to go back there at some point to do a follow up show but yeah that was really fun.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s next for your group after “all good things”?
[GRAYSON]: I wouldn’t expect an album drop, just singles. What we want to do is just release a bunch of singles so I think for at least the next year it’s just gonna be singles every month or two.