Speaking over zoom, Weadee and Weajue caught up with David from Gulfer to talk genres, the Montreal scene and covid preoccupations. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How has isolation and your quarantine life been treating you?

David: It’s great, I love doing nothing. I’ve been working on a lot of music and stuff I wouldn’t normally work on and its been fun. I’ve been catching up on TV shows (the Sopranos), cooking a lot of food and playing music. I’m slowly starting to lose my mind, but not in the crazy way yet.

For those who aren’t familiar, can you give us a bit of a breakdown on who you guys are and how Gulfer came to be?

David: We started about 8 years ago in Montreal and genre-wise it’s hard to describe but if you’re hip to obscure subgenres, then its a pretty 50/50 mix of midwest emo revival and math rock with a lot of indie rock and pop punk influence. Through the years we’ve slowly started get out of the niche but we’re still very much a math- rock/emo hybrid band foundationally.

How would you describe what math rock sounds like to someone who’s never heard of it before?

David: Like many of these niche subgenres, they’re all subject to what specific time we’re talking about in the genre. There’s a lot of overlap between our brand of math rock and our brand of emo (or the type we identify with). A lot of it is categorized by a specific style of guitar playing called “tapping”. Instead of finger-picking, you’re using a guitar picks. A lot of our riffs are played by tapping the frets on the fretboard and it allows for really technical, and a very busy sound. It’s very influenced by progressive rock and the math part of it comes from odd time signatures. Instead of 4/4, the standard rock or pop time signature, we have a lot of bits in 5/4 or 7 and things like that. So kind of a mix of those odd time signatures and technical shreddy guitar parts, but filtered through a very indie- pop punk lens. Its almost like entry-level math Rock in a way.

Unlike a lot of other math rock bands, you guys have vocals. Was that a conscious decision or did it happen naturally?

David: It’s a really interesting morsel of our history that maybe is rare. We came to forming this band historically being more listeners of math rock/ instrumental math rock and that was the foundations of the band. Then when it was starting, we were discovering the beginnings of the whole emo Revival thing and we were like, “lets try and make a math rock bands that’s really influenced by this emo pop punk stuff”. It was a concerted effort at the beginning to take the influences we had and do something different with that.

How do you balance the technical side of being a math rock band, but also having to work with the song writing and the composition of the music?

David: I think as we’ve gotten older its been easier to filter out a lot of what you might be more excited about in your youth, like “lets try and write the craziest part we can come up with”.  I think you have a lot of that in your late teens or early twenties and then you start listening to more genres of music and reflecting more on the song as a whole versus how hard you can flex your musical prowess. A lot of it just comes with maturity and I think being influenced by a lot of indie rock, which is really straightforward music. A lot of people in the band have gradually moved away from listen to math rock and closer to listen to indie rock. It’s writing with that math rock foundation but being influenced by way more straightforward music.  

So in the genre, who would you pick as your biggest influence maybe like three biggest influences specifically math rock band.

David: There’s so many influences, our biggest are probably the ones that already thwarted classifications really early on. There’s a band called TTNG (This Town Needs Guns) which did a really good job of that really early on. Even now 12 years later I see debates on Reddit about are they an emo band or are they a math rock band and I have very strong feelings.

What are your feelings?

David: I think they’re an emo band and have been horribly disregarded as a foundational part of the emo Revival. All those articles and all the listicles have completely ignore that. Especially with Animals, their 2008 album. I just don’t understand how they’ve been just dismissed as a math rock band. I think they were just before their time maybe. But that’s a really big influence to us, bands that can’t really be pegged as one or the other genre.

I know that some people say that since Gulfer was formed in 2011, it can’t be really considered part of the emo revival. Do you consider it to be part of the Emo Revival?

David: I think we were there, at the end of it, but we were there if you look at our shows and the bands we played with in 2012. I wouldn’t say we contributed to it by any means. We were in that weird awkward middle period between then and now that’s kind of oddly been forgotten about. At the time, we were finding our sound, the music we put out at the tail end of the Revival was still more math rock or more UK math-pop than emo revival. We put out our really emo Revival worship music around 2015, a couple years after the bubble had burst. We were just experiencing it, are we considered significant players within it? No absolutely not, but I’m just happy that we got to experience a little smidgen of it.

I’m more familiar with bands in the US/UK and even Japans and the scene seems so much larger than it is over here. How did you find your footing in Montreal and Canada on the whole?

David: I was hoping you bring up because I wanted to briefly mention Windsor Ontario. It was a hotspot for math Rock like 10 years old, it was amazing. There’s a band called The Bulletproof Tiger from Windsor which is one of my favorite bands of all time. There’s a person named Bob who was the drummer and they had a collective called Next Level Syndicate. They booked this thing called Syndicate Fest in Windsor, Toronto, and Montreal with like 20 or 30 math rock bands. We played with bands like Tiny Moving Parts, it was so much fun.

I think I can speak to Toronto and Montreal specifically. They both have ebbs and flows. In 2013 to the beginning of 2014, there was a really cool vibrant community around the emo Revival and then the trend kind of went away. Toronto had a few really good moments too, I think Toronto wins because of demographics. With a bigger city, you’re going to have more people listening to niche genres. A lot of people here in Montreal kind of have this very francophone music listening to trajectory and gravitate towards local music more than they would in other places. A lot of youth-based niche genres suffer because of that. We’ve had some good years here. This new generation of pop punk bands (or whatever you want to call them) has brought in a bunch of new listeners that weren’t around 8 or 10 years ago. It’s fun to see [the scene] grow and its sad to see it go away. I know it’s always going to be around but it’s good to have new energy.

It’s been a little bit over two years since Dog Blessed was released. How has the reaction been?

David: I think that’s the record for us that we finally felt like we made something that we were front-to-back satisfied with and proud of. It’s a really fun feeling after six or seven years of being a band to finally release something that we were just totally proud of and excited about. I think the listens definitely matched that in terms of listens on Spotify, sales, reviews and response from listeners. I don’t think we can ask for much more especially since we didn’t really do a tremendous amount of touring behind it. At this point two years later, we’re pretty much ready to release the next one and that’s kind of where all our positive energy and excitement is going right now. I’m like 5 times more excited about this one.

I read somewhere that you were planning on having it out by 2020, is that still happening with COVID?

David: The COVID thing helped and hurt at the same time because the person who’s mixing it was going to be away on tour, but not anymore. We don’t have artwork and it’s still not mastered yet. We’ll have to see what the label says and I’m kind of curious to watch what other bands do. I think its still so early in this whole thing that there isn’t really a president of what the best move is. Personally, I just want people to hear it as quickly as possible but who knows if there’s delays that supersede what we think is best. I’m hoping for August, or September? Hopefully a single out by May or June. This year no matter what. Everything’s pretty much done for a music video. So hopefully within the next month and then the rest of it within the next six to eight months. I don’t know, who knows this year [laughing].

Mentioning music videos, for the song Fading you guys are all on your car and there’s a bunch of random stuff in there. How did you guys come up with that idea and how did you fit all that inside?

David: I’ll cop to the fact that there’s a lot that I don’t do in this band. I have my role and Vince (who does most of the singing) has many, many important roles like writing the songs. He does a lot with coming up with concepts for music videos, so I just let him do his thing. Its really fun too especially with a shoot like that. Like how do you come up with this and kind of there just like him just instructing me to do stuff its like I could never in a million years come up with these ideas.