Megan Rollinson: My name's Megan. This is Justin. Our band is Still Depths — we're from Calgary originally, but based in Vancouver. We're here in Boise for Treefort.

Absent Sounds: Right before we came, as we were walking, I asked you about Vancouver core. What would you consider Vancouver core? Or what would you consider Calgary?

Justin Perdomo: Vancouver core — in terms of aesthetics? Okay. Vancouver is like...

Megan Rollinson: Calgary and Vancouver are very different.

Justin Perdomo: Very different. You wanna do Vancouver? I'll do Vancouver, you do Calgary. Vancouver — there's like, shit on the ground. Human shit. It's raining all the time but it's also green all the time, really beautiful, barely any snow. Sometimes you go to the dive bar and everyone's really fashionable.

Megan Rollinson: Yeah.

Justin Perdomo: Like maybe too fashionable. There's this bar called Funky Winkerbeans — it's a karaoke bar, open every night. You kind of just go there and have a bad time or a good time sometimes.

Megan Rollinson: There's lots of hummingbirds. Even in the winter they're around, which is really cool.

Justin Perdomo: People are on the big pants.

Megan Rollinson: People wear big pants.

Justin Perdomo: There's hiking people, but the scene has its own thing going on and the hiking people are kind of yuppies maybe. Something like that.

Justin Perdomo: Calgary is desolate.

Megan Rollinson: Calgary has less of the natural beauty. It's there, but it's not quite as in-your-face. Very dry and very sunny, which is kind of nice, but the sun feels a little too intense sometimes. Everyone wears athleisure all the time and drives massive trucks.

Megan Rollinson: For no reason. But there's a cute scene. Because there are only two or three good venues, everyone goes to the same places — so there's a lot of community. You always see someone you know, which can be good or bad.

Justin Perdomo: Calgary's got trucks and Vancouver's got Teslas.

Megan Rollinson: Hell of Teslas. Vancouver is the Tesla city and Calgary's got the trucks.

Absent Sounds: What vehicle would you use to describe the band, or even yourselves?

Justin Perdomo: We've been renting vans to tour, but maybe if you cobbled something together — like a four-by-four where one door's yellow and one door's red.

Megan Rollinson: Or like that truck we saw on the highway where the front and the back looked exactly the same.

Justin Perdomo: Yeah — so it looks like it's coming toward you. But it's just mirrored. It's amazing.

Absent Sounds: That's terrifying.

Absent Sounds: There's so much satire in your music, but it's also just fun — and kind of dark. Where does that come from?

Justin Perdomo: The world is just fucked up and horrible, and the only way to cope with it is humor sometimes. I always loved music that makes you laugh. When it's funny and it's good — I love that mix. Funny and good, sometimes satire, sometimes genuine.

Megan Rollinson: We're also just laughers. We've been friends for like eight years, so between the three of us there's a sense of humor that comes out in the music. Sometimes it's like, I don't know if anyone else is gonna get the joke — but it's funny to us.

Justin Perdomo: It's funny to us. And I think it's nice to put serious things with unserious things. If it's all serious it gets too much. If it's all jokes it gets too much too. Balance.

Megan Rollinson: It's kind of natural. We just switch between goofy and genuine. We're good at being real with each other, good at having genuine conversations about our feelings. And we've learned a lot about each other on tour — just spending every day together, driving ten hours, talking in the car.

Justin Perdomo: We're not unserious all the time, because we also don't like when people can never be real. There's something weird about it. You can't get close to people unless you can talk about your real feelings.

Megan Rollinson: But also if someone's too serious all the time, it feels too heavy to be hanging out with them. So.

Absent Sounds: That comes through when you talk about being on tour together. Even just watching you play — I was reading that you leave the imperfections in, like you don't tune your instruments all the way.

Justin Perdomo: I dunno. We actually do tune — we tune every song. I think it was just something that got said once and got put a bit out of proportion. You say one thing in a press blurb and suddenly you're the "raw" band. But actually we spend a lot of time trying to make our stuff good. We practice a lot.

Megan Rollinson: Some of our earlier stuff was almost overproduced — we tried to make it perfect. But people would always say, your live show is so different, it's so raw. So we thought, maybe we should embrace that. It's a strength. We've been trying to bring that into the recordings more.

Justin Perdomo: The new music we're recording, we want it to be closer to our live show. The albums have been these collages of different sounds that maybe don't translate live the same way. Now we're trying to write the songs live first, then get a good snapshot of them for the recordings.

Absent Sounds: What's the question behind the album that's coming — the thing you've been sitting with?

Megan Rollinson: It's almost a "where do we go from here" feeling — not just in music, but in life and the world. There's so much uncertainty and chaos. We're trying to go back to the basics of what makes us human.

Justin Perdomo: And with AI and everything — live performance is more important now than it's ever been. You can make a song in thirty seconds, but to get a live performance that actually makes people feel something? That's what excites us. We're also trying to do less, because we always did maximalism.

Justin Perdomo: If you put too many things in a finite container, each thing becomes small and quiet. When you have less, each thing gets to be louder and more present. That's more exciting.

Absent Sounds: Who does that well?

Justin Perdomo: I really like Still House Plants — no bass player, from the UK. Just a drummer, guitar player, and singer. Their songs are kind of these trance repetitions. It's cool to just decide, we're not getting a bass player, let's make the songs like this.

Megan Rollinson: I've been inspired by old folk music too, just guitar type stuff, where it's someone singing with a guitar and somehow it feels full even without drums or bass. To make a song good with just acoustic guitar and voice — you have to do a lot of work.

Justin Perdomo: Our drummer. He's the soul of it, the beating heart of Still Depths. The backbone and the toes and everything.

Justin Perdomo: A lot of bands have simple drums and bass with really wild vocals or leads. Our band stays more stable, which lets our drummer push further out. He plays near his limit where he could mess up even though he's good. It's exciting to watch someone balancing like that.

Justin Perdomo: There's a Kim Gordon quote — the more chance a performer has to mess up, the more exciting it is.

Megan Rollinson: You don't wanna play it safe.

Justin Perdomo: And things do go wrong. I've broken a string, Brendan messes up, we all mess up. But when you watch someone mess up and you know they're trying really hard, it's exciting. And seeing them recover from it and keep going — that's really cool.

Justin Perdomo: Like Lil Wayne — there are songs where he's kind of mumbling at the beginning, almost getting there, and they just leave it in. It sounds super sick. Or Cindy Lee's new album — there are so many mistakes where the tempo gets messed up and it's not on a grid. But when you listen, you're never upset. You're just like, oh, this is cool.

Justin Perdomo: It's nice when you do things and you don't have to lie about them. With songs especially — you have to remember how you felt in the moment when you were psyched about it. Because you're gonna keep working on it and your love is gonna die out. You have to put yourself back in that spot where you heard it for the first time and knew there was something there.

Megan Rollinson: Being more in tune with what you actually want. I'm a very indecisive person — there's that Sylvia Plath quote about the fig tree, dying before choosing. But it's good to just nurture something. The opportunity to do other things will always be there. Just keep watering your garden.

Justin Perdomo: And falling one way doesn't mean you can't go another. You learn the skills to go in a different direction. You're never wasting your time.

Megan Rollinson: As long as you're doing something — that's better than doing nothing.

Justin Perdomo: And once you get close to the goal, it moves. The goalpost always shifts. Set goals to enjoy the process — you reach it and then you don't feel anything. You have to find it in the getting there.

Megan Rollinson: There've been several things I thought I was going to end up doing that I didn't. When I finished high school I thought I was going to med school, become a doctor. Did a year of pre-med and was like, actually I hate this. Changed programs. Now I'm a teacher.

Justin Perdomo: I ran out of money for school and dropped out after three years of music school. But if I can do decent stuff in music, I don't really need to keep going. I made good relationships and actually learned things. People sometimes go to school thinking they're going to get a job from it. With art stuff that's not really how it works. But if you get better at your skills, you find your way. And it's not all about the job — it's about yourself and your development.

Justin Perdomo: Sometimes I'll talk to people after the set and they'll be like, your voice is so different when you're singing. Or, you're very chill — and then you go on stage. Like they kind of expected you to scream at them.

Justin Perdomo: One time we played a show under a bridge and someone was disappointed that my name was my name. They were like, you sound like you should have a cooler name.

Megan Rollinson: Being a woman in a band, sometimes you get overlooked. People assume you don't really know anything, especially if you're not the singer.

Justin Perdomo: And our drummer always gets a lot of attention because he's awesome.

Megan Rollinson: And he's handsome.

Justin Perdomo: Handsome and awesome.

Justin Perdomo: I'm an attention seeker, so I'm running around anyway.

Megan Rollinson: You're more social than me for sure. Though sometimes I'm just like — great, I don't have to talk. You can take this one.

Justin Perdomo: If you have something you don't like it, and if you don't have it you want it.

Megan Rollinson: I still get to have good conversations. Such as yourselves.

Absent Sounds: What do you want yourselves in one year to look back at this moment and remember?

Justin Perdomo: Gotta keep the real ones around you. There's a lot of weird pressure all the time — who you think you should be, how you should act, how other people want you to act.

Megan Rollinson: At a festival like this, there's this weird pressure to be networking, talking to all these industry people. But it's made us realize what's actually important.

Justin Perdomo: It's so hard not to get jaded with music. We're not even doing this that long, and when you talk to someone who's forty or fifty and has been in the music industry a long time and they're not jaded — that's really awesome. So many people, especially when they get more success, end up jaded. Weird people, weird interactions. And you can't figure out why something does better than something else.

Megan Rollinson: But we've learned a lot about ourselves and each other. And we've had some really good times. We went to a beach in Oregon and watched the sunset — just nature and friendship. Most beautiful thing we'd ever seen.

Justin Perdomo: Time and friends and community is more valuable than any kind of money or clout.

Absent Sounds: Thank you.

Justin Perdomo: Retweet.