What does it mean to be fearless and adventurous? If you’ll allow me I’d like to begin to attempt to answer this question by framing its opposite. What is the sound of convention and playing it safe? Prepackaged experiences that fit neatly in their little boxes. They may do what they say on the tin, but likely not much else. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this type of well defined expression or projects that are narrow in scope. Sometimes you just want to scratch that straight up hardcore or death metal itch. But playing too close to genre expectations leaves little room for surprises.
Stander are a three piece heavy band from Chicago, IL and they have built a sound composed of twists and turns. I was able to speak with their guitarist Mike Boyd about their wild and varied influences, their latest record Collapsing, artwork, and more.
When I first came across Stander on their 2022 album Vulnerable they had been billed to me as post-metal. To put it mildly, the record completely blew me away. Not quite halfway into “Wither” this bouncy guitar melody starts up echoed in a refrain with just a touch of distortion. It’s playful and impactful. As you’re getting into this groove everything is stripped away to drum fills and cymbal snaps before a rising crescendo which returns to that same instigating melody. And all this is just the opening track! Fearless.
“Patience” is heavy. This eight minute monster is a steamroller. Opening all sludged out and doomful. A little over a minute in “Patience” drops this nasty little ear worm of a riff that will drill its way into your brain cavity. I know it’s been stuck in mine. Everything just gets more unhinged from there devolving into a wall of sound noise cacophony. Yeah post-metal isn’t going to cut it at all as a label. In fact I’d argue there simply isn’t a tent wide enough for Stander to fit under.
How do you follow up a mammoth epic? Well if you’re Stander how about a two minute machine gun tremolo double bass laden sneak attack. Obviously. “Procession up the Tower” zips a bridge between “Patience” and the rest of Vulnerable with an undercurrent of melody just beneath the surface of all that chaos. Adventurous.
As ever I am continually fascinated by the relationship between art and music. I find the interplay between the visual and auditory mediums enthralling. The way that a single image can encapsulate an entire album or band’s sound and the way that music can evoke powerful imagery. The album artwork for Vulnerable is extremely captivating and I find it gives an incredible amount of personality to the record. Who is the artist? How was it chosen?
‘The artist for all of our releases so far has been my best friend growing up, Caleb Phillip. He’s an incredible, prolific artist who basically only shares his work with friends and is completely uninterested in sharing things beyond that. I think he’s a creative genius, as do most people who know him and his art, but he prefers to live pretty quietly back in Wisconsin for the most part. When we were talking to Caleb about art, we talked mostly about the themes of the record, how we saw the arc of it and how we could communicate vulnerability. I also am a stickler for not wanting to make things look like traditional ‘heavy music’ aesthetics and just reproducing something we’ve all seen before. I get very bored and tired of those things. It’s great when a band/artist does them well, no shade to that at all! I just want way more color and something to make it stand out rather than a drab, grim looking album that people will think seems ‘brutal’ or whatever. It’s just not really us. So he experimented a lot with color and how he could incorporate it into his usual pen-drawing style. Caleb’s a very versatile artist, and he made probably 50-100 different drawings or paintings inspired by our conversations that we could whittle down into the cover and other art pieces. We really connected with the hands intertwining and also the bodies with flowers growing out of them. I think they really speak to hands as gateways to vulnerability and sensitivity. Offering a hand, needing a helping hand… Hands show the wear and tear of human beings living their lives working and struggling.’
Vulnerable was my introduction to Stander, so as an introduction to the band let’s take a walk down memory lane to learn a bit about their origins and early influences.
‘We first got together in late 2012/early 2013. Derek (our bassist) and I grew up in the same area of Wisconsin near Appleton and had the same guitar/bass teacher. He went to school in a neighboring town with one of my best friends and he was moving to Chicago after school, so our teacher sort of helped link us up. We played in a band together previous to Stander called Staves (with me on drums). Stephen (our drummer) and I went to college together and got to know each other there, and played in each others’ senior recitals in 2012 and 2013. Actually, the first time we played live together was at my senior recital, doing the first song we wrote together.
‘We started the band with the idea to do some kind of emo band with math-rock influence, mostly inspired by our shared love of bands like Toe, Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, American Football, etc. I grew up playing heavier music so that kind of snuck into our sound, as I was the primary songwriter for a long time, and funny enough our first ever jam at Stephen’s rehearsal space was right above Pelican’s rehearsal space and we ran into them in the hallway afterwards. They were a big influence on me at the time, as well as Russian Circles and other stuff you might call post-rock/metal like Tortoise and ISIS. I was enamored with the idea of being part of some overall ‘Chicago instrumental rock’ scene for a while, but I think that was more fantasy than reality. I was really heavily influenced by being a metal kid growing up, going from Metallica/Megadeth to Slayer to Municipal Waste to more extreme stuff like early Mastodon, The Locust, etc. And a lot of improv/noise stuff was big for me that we definitely incorporated into the band. Lightning Bolt comes to mind as a big one for me. Derek was always really into more emo/screamo and ambient music and Stephen brought his more pop-punk and hardcore chops. So it’s a pretty weird blend!’
Stander’s debut record 2019’s The Slow Bark has traces of vocal presence just barely bubbling to the surface in a few spots. An echoing growl here, a fuzzed out black metal scream in the background there. These are lingering ghosts disembodied and fading. Half remembered visions of an uncertain past. If Vulnerable leans more toward ISIS, The Slow Bark echoes of an ethereal Explosions in the Sky.
Perhaps the best lens through which to understand Stander is a dreamlike haze. Familiar yet uncanny. There is a sense of having been down this road before as feelings of unease and being just a bit lost or out of place set in. On “The Light That Came From Beside The Sea” the guitar and drums wander in a playful duet while the bass acts as a constant anchor humming and buzzing along in a trance like meditative gong. While the guitar and drums frolic the bass keeps you tethered. A dual experience of freedom and grounding.
Easily my favorite thing about Stander which initially drew me to their music and has kept me coming back for more is their absolute fearlessness. Every song is a unique journey and I never know what elements will be incorporated next. How do they maintain this wild diversity?
‘I think it really just comes down to what we’re interested in individually and what we’re able to do collectively having been a band for over a decade. We all have really diverse tastes, probably even more so than when we first started, and are always bringing in outside influences to make what we make. It took me personally a long time to feel comfortable stretching out as much as we do now, because I wanted to streamline things more, and maybe be a bit more ‘consumable’ for lack of a better term, but I found it way more creatively rewarding to just let go. For me, feelings are way more important to communicate than any genre signifiers or being part of a specific scene or movement. I can’t help wanting to make a song more of a story or a journey.
‘I think we’re also pretty driven by wanting to push forward, with evolving and changing and growing rather than making the same stuff. There’s even stuff we’ve written where I wonder ‘is this too much like that other song?’ I think the ‘fearlessness’ comes from that decade-plus connection of playing music together, and being friends outside of music. We’ve played together so much, half of our band to me is about how we navigate problems on stage, how we can easily catch each others’ mistakes and pick up without making much fuss in front of an audience. A big part of that too is our emphasis on improvisation. We do it in pieces more often than people might think, but especially live. We get bored playing things exactly the same way, so we often stretch things or build in improvised sections that keep them interesting for us.’
How does going so wide sonically impact creative expression? Is it ever an encumbrance or just liberating?
‘It can be an encumbrance when it comes to trying to get some kind of audience or consistent attention for sure. When we released “A Continuation” some people told our friend who shared it ‘Oh yeah, I needed some new shoegaze to check out‘ and he had to be like ‘the rest of the record isn’t really like that‘. So, diversity can be a double-edged sword! But I think we all kind of embrace that. It keeps things more interesting for us, and when people really dig us, you can tell they are really into it and down for explorative stuff. I always say that we’re too weird for the heavy music crowd and too heavy for the weird/experimental music crowd. But at this point that still feels like us just being true to who we are as performers and musicians, and that’s gratifying in its own right. Many of my favorite artists marched to the beat of their own drum, and kind of carved their own path, which I have to remind myself sometimes when it feels like we’re maybe being hindered by being so all over the place. As long as we’re authentically ourselves, I can make peace with that.’
Well that’s about enough looking in the rear view. As much as I fell in love with Vulnerable and thoroughly enjoyed The Slow Bark; Stander’s newest record Collapsing released this April is on another level entirely. First of all there’s vocals this time around, like quite a bit especially for an ‘instrumental’ band.
Giving their newest record a spin I am once again awash in feelings of uncanny remembrance. This is all so familiar yet so different. Hardly over the shock and awe from the vocal laden intro track “A Continuation” we dive right back into reminiscent dancing guitar melodies bubbling in conversation with drum break snaps and fills on “Defeat” which is another absolutely massive track from Stander at a whopping twelve minutes. This epic cascades through movements from the light opening to a noise wall assault featuring brass, plenty of chunky riffs, and dramatic escalations in tension. All of this with vocals completely absent for the time being. With Stander you learn to expect the unexpected and somehow still end up pleasantly surprised.
After wave after wave of pummeling “You Don’t Have to Suffer” is so freaking mellow. Drawing from the Explosions in the Sky vibes of their debut record, Stander takes a beat here to offer up a soothing balm. So of course the next track opens up with… *checks manically scribbled notes nearing indecipherability* screams and guttural death metal growls? The aptly named “Avarice” is the sonic and emotional equivalent of a nuclear explosion. My body was not ready, my mind was not ready, I was destroyed. The first of two tracks on Collapse to feature Genital Shame is an absolute knock-down drag-out affair. Also featured on the album are Dylan Walker (Full of Hell) and John Kerr (Pyrithe) with additional instrumentation by Mathieu Ball (BIG|BRAVE) and Patrick Shiroishi.
‘For this record, we really wanted to get away from sticking to the instrumental thing. I think we never felt super strongly about being an instrumental band, it was just a product of no one feeling confident enough to sing or even come up with a vocal part that fit. I also think we compose a lot of really dense music that feels like it wouldn’t need a lot of other elements and vocals would feel sort of tacked on just because. That said, we tried to leave a bit more space on this record for vocals on purpose, to see how that might change our dynamic. “A Continuation” just felt right with them almost immediately, and “Exhaustion” was one I kept listening to mixes of over and over again in my car until I started hearing a melody in my head, and then decided vocals could ratchet up the intensity at the end. Stephen pretty much designed “WWRO” to have a shouty hardcore vocal part in it, and he’s always dreamed of running around as a front man doing that kind of thing, so this sort of scratched that itch for him.
‘The rest of the vocal parts were more about getting our friends involved and trusting their intuition where things would fit. It was funny because we were so open and collaborative about it, we just gave them a huge lyric sheet of ideas but said ‘feel free to change these or bring your own lyrics and we’ll see what sticks.‘ We didn’t really change any of them once we got them though, I think they all turned out great! John Kerr especially really outdid himself on “Avarice” and I think it kind of makes that song what it is. It’s the perfect blend of accentuating what’s already there and improving on it with his own ideas.’
So, what’s next for Stander?
‘As I write this, we’re gearing up to head on the road with Planning For Burial for an extended weekend tour around the Midwest. After that we’re going to be focusing most of 2025 on writing and playing select shows in the Chicago area. We’ve been doing a lot of touring lately as the backing band for our friend Genital Shame, and we’ve got a few more shows doing that this summer. Then we’re going to be working on a possible split with some folks we played with on this recent tour, as well as getting started on a new full length. We’ve talked for a long time about doing a ‘mixtape’ type of release that would expand even more beyond the kind of rock band format stuff we make, but that has been an idea we’ve kicked around for years. Who knows if we’ll ever actually make good on it!’
