EIN: So are these kinds of appearances/performances something that you call the shots on, or is it left mostly with management and agents?

NS: Now Daughters is Jon, Lex, and I. We have a fourth member, but he doesn’t tour, so we don’t know where that leaves him with making decisions, but with decisions like performing on Adult Swim, he’s left out of the mix because he isn’t touring. It’s not just the three of us now, we have people that manage us and book us. Our management’s really good, they work hard. We voice our opinions, and think on it. My perspective right out of the gate was ‘I don’t want to play in a fish tank, this is going to be dumb.‘ We’re in a group, so you’re one voice of several. You start realising that you have to be self-aware enough to let them know what works for what you’re doing, and what doesn’t. They said ‘A lot of people watch this, a lot of young kids, you’re gonna introduce your music to new people’, so I agreed. Why not try new stuff? We never had these opportunities before.

I’m in denial still. I’m used to this band not getting attention. Even when we played at Roadburn to 3,000 people, even then I said ‘this probably isn’t real’. I can’t accept this as a truth of my life. We do things as a team, as much as we can. I’m glad that we did Adult Swim. The footage is sick, it reminds me of when I was a kid seeing bands in weird situations. The way I would discover edgy music that was only available late at night on MTV in the middle of the night. It’s too self aware for me to admit it outwardly like this, somewhere that folks can read it, but there’s something still attractive to me about seeing bands in awkward situations. There are some great photographs of John, Lex, and I looking miserable on the Adult Swim couch. It’s both Daughters and not Daughters. If you’ve known any of us personally for a long time, watching that must be hilarious. This speaks a little bit to why I didn’t want to do it initially, I’m definitely the most protective of our aesthetic as a band.

EIN: In the last half a year or so, a wider audience than ever before has been introduced to your music, through several different channels including those we’ve mentioned. You’re now being recognised as a serious heavyweight in the world of alternative music. How did that happen, and how does that feel? What’s expected of you?

NS: When developing a record I start to see what the moods and the tones are, and the common threads throughout. Then I think about the campaigning afterwards. Lex and Jon are into what we’re doing right now, too. We fight a lot about the vision of the band, but right now we’re in a place that’s cohesive. Lex has had a great attitude about it all. I used to be the optimistic one, now I’m the cranky up-tight one. I’m very grateful, and I’m self aware of all the cool things that are happening to us; it’s just strange. We’re all in our mid-thirties to late thirties. We’ve been in this band for 17 years for it to all work out now? That’s strange. I used to clean bathrooms, do live sound for bands sometimes, and take the bus everywhere, and now this is happening. There’s this weird expectation that we can pick it up as if we never stopped. As if I didn’t spent a lot of time not doing this, getting used to a different way of life. I come back to this and everyone expects me to know what’s going on. The band unexpectedly has all this attention on us, it’s fascinating to see this weird peripheral expectation that we are pros. As if I wasn’t slowly spending a long time putting together our record on GarageBand…

Off-record: After the interview, Nick and I hung out for another 15 minutes or so before he had to head backstage, and he confirmed that the horns at the very end of the record, heard in the song “Guest House”, are MIDI audio from GarageBand. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and it still gives me a kick now every time I hear that song, especially live. To paraphrase, he said: ‘I can tell you there’s a lot of things we’ve simply exported from GarageBand and put right on the album, just because the performances are spirited.‘ I digress…

…When you think about a band that has marginal success, or cult success, you have to think about the odds that those people would meet each other, playing the right instruments. There’s an unlimited number of variables that have to magically link up for any band to be good. Especially when you think about the thousands and thousands of musicians who would love to be doing what Daughters are doing, they probably don’t understand how what we’re doing appeals to other people. When you imagine some dude who’s very well-practised in music, he must hear us up there and think ‘what the fuck are they doing?’, and I’ve gotta say, I don’t know either. I’m always gonna make music. It doesn’t matter if anyone else hears it. This was gonna come out, and it was either gonna do what it’s doing right now or it was gonna do nothing. I think that’s where my cognitive dissonance comes from. There was some buzzing, cult-like thing around us on the internet after we broke up, after the fact everyone realised that they couldn’t get to us or hear anything new. I don’t understand the climate of music in 2019. I’m still going to shows, checking out bands. I think that’s heard in our music. It feels like we’re capturing a moment.

EIN: Personally, I found your music through the Dillinger Compound Facebook Group, around the time of the Terminal 5 shows, that TDEP played to mark the end of their career. That must be a huge honour for you guys, a lot of people feel like you’ve picked up the torch that they put down…

NS: I recently met the guy who admins that group by the way, he’s really nice! You know it’s funny, all the things we’ve talked about in this interview are things I didn’t want to do. I find that funny, anyway. With the Dillinger thing, I don’t really like that band, I’m not a fan of that music. I’ve been trying to get Daughters away from the math-metal crowd, it’s nothing personal or judgemental, but it’s not in line with what I hope our band will become. That said, I was flat-out wrong, though. We’ll see faces from those last Dillinger shows at our shows now, it was an honour to be there. It was a poignant moment from Dillinger, to be invited to do that is a huge deal. We got out there and, a bunch of people knew who we were, Ben Weinman was trying to sign us to his label at the time. People we expecting us to get out there like a well-oiled machine and destroy the place. It’s 3,000 people, two days in a row. I’m used to 190 cap rooms. I didn’t know what to do with myself. We’re lucky that Lex has risen and become a better front man, 99% of the time he’s holding it together for us.