Inspired by the darkwave sounds of the 80s, wrapped in the Gen X soul of the 90s, tied together by the new millennium electro-clash energy of New York City in the ‘00s, LEVVELS blends the subtleties of each influence’s nuances and ushers them into the modern era to do just that…make you feel.
Working with the Los Angeles based production and songwriting duo HEAVY (Lovelytheband, The Unlikely Candidates, Chase Atlantic, Goo Goo Dolls), LEVVELS has put together an initial release that that has been compared to a modern sounding Depeche Mode mixed with the intense refinement of the Killer’s Hot Fuss…had its origins been a late night/early morning Los Angeles after hours party instead of the bright lights and failed dreams of Las Vegas.
Tell us about the genesis of your project. How did you get to where you are now?
Brad: Jay, Ty, and I have known each other for years through mutual friends in the Chicago scene. We have had many a late night together and were all friends way before LEVVELS started. I met Ty when he was managing a bar and knew Jay through his band. Shortly after meeting Ty, I found out he was an amazing singer. Fast forward a few years and I had just gone through a really bad breakup. Part of the healing in that was finding my love of music again, something that I hadn’t explored in a very long time. I grew up playing in punk rock bands, I was in jazz band, and was the go-to bass player in high school but hadn’t played years. It was in this rediscovery that I started writing songs with my friend Anthony, who was in Makeshift Prodigy. After we wrote a few things, we wanted to play them with a drummer. I knew Jay as a singer, but Anthony told me he played drums, and we decided to get together at Jay’s rehearsal space. I don’t even think Jay knew I played bass. As this was all coming together, I approached Ty with an idea for a project that was intended to be more lo-fi alt/garage rock. He came to check out what we were doing, and in that first rehearsal we ended up writing a few songs and started a band called Victories. After a few years, which included a tour and releasing some singles, I moved to Los Angeles. We kept writing and rehearsing, and in 2019 we released our last single, Kerosene. Our sound was evolving a bit, moving away from the garage rock vibe to become a bit more refined. The writing was on the wall for Victories, but we were still working on music. It was time for a change.
Ty: The core members of LEVVELS started working on music together with our project, Victories. At that time, I was on a hiatus from my prog-rock project, Boots With Spurs, and Brad asked me to come to a freestyle jam to sing over some original song ideas he was working on. I didn’t know exactly who would be in attendance, but I hadn’t had a good musical outlet in over a year and was eager to sing. When I arrived at the practice space, I saw a few musicians that I knew from the local Chicago music scene. A few of our bands had even played some shows together over the previous couple of years, but I didn’t know any of them very well except for Brad. On paper, given the genres of our various musical projects, the group didn’t make any sense to me, but I was wrong. Within an hour we found our rhythm as a group and wrote some amazing material. After a few years our interests and priorities shifted, and Victories time came to an end. Brad, Jay and I began developing a few new ideas as a trio, which led to the formation of LEVVELS.
What does music and being an artist mean to you?
Music is everything. It’s the soundtrack of our lives, and the fact that we have gotten such a strong response from our first release means everything. People are playing Keep Me Alive throughout the States and around the world. The fact that there’s a kid in Moscow listening to the same song as someone in São Paulo, Brisbane, Warsaw, New Taipai, Tel Aviv, Indonesia, and on every continent in the world shows just how universal music is and means so much to us. Music is the one thing in a fractured world that everyone has in common. The genres might be different, but that feeling when you hear a new song that hits you is universal.
What are some sources of inspiration for your lyrics and storytelling?
Right now, we’re really interested in exploring the duality of the human experience. So many of us go through our day-to-day life presenting one version of ourselves to the world, while this other more extreme version of ourselves exists within our mind and soul. That manifests itself in interesting ways, and that duality is something that we are fascinated by, inspired by, and spend a lot of time exploring. Life is too short to be one dimensional, and with the current state of a polarized world trying to navigate a pandemic, our inspiration in storytelling comes from these themes, including the darker sides of human interactions, the parts of us that live in the shadows yet crave to be seen in the light. There’s also this sense of urgency that seems to be driving so much of culture today. Urgency in digesting information, in pushing agendas, in scoring points, and that urgency is ultimately ripping away at the fabrics of what makes society work. We’d be remiss to say this isn’t something that we think about and care about, and weave into our storytelling. Oftentimes, the lyrics will be the last part of the song that comes together, so we can try to capture the most relevant ideas or stories as we record.
Who is an artist that you look up to more than others today?
I think that the most interesting band today is The Voidz. Those guys continually push the envelope with their music and their message in ways that are mind blowing. They just don’t care what people think and will go down whatever road they feel will result in a new sound and a new energy. What we respect about them is that you can listen to an album and hear multiple genres that still have a singular voice. LEVVELS is similar, in that we have so many different influences that you won’t get this rinse, wash, and repeat sound and structure in what we’re doing, but it still feels like it’s from the same group.
All time favorite record?
This is a loaded question to ask a group with different influences! Answers you’d get from us include Disintegration from The Cure, Is This It by The Strokes, Appetite for Destruction from Guns ‘n’ Roses, Machine Gun Kelly’s Papercuts, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and Spice from the Spice Girls.
Tell us about your latest release and how it came about?
Keep Me Alive started as a drum beat and bass line that Brad wrote. It was one of those songs where its beauty was in its simplicity. The beat was driving while the bass line just felt hypnotic. With the vibe of the song, Ty wrote lyrics around the theme of wanting someone, feeling that you need to be with someone, but they have a different perspective on what they want from their experience with you. But like all of what we do, it wasn’t until we got together as a group where it became bigger than the sum of its parts. We demoed it out and brought it to the guys in Heavy, our producers. We have such a great relationship with them and Keep Me Alive went from a demo to the final version in a day and a half. We really explored the intensity of what it’s like when the person you crave gives you just enough to keep a connection, but you want more while they want less. Personal, our next release, was a different story. We scrapped a song we were working on, and in our frustration, had a few drinks and just played three notes over and over and over again, and out of that came the drum beat. From the drum beat, we worked out that bass line, and when it was dialed in, we knew we had the foundation of the song.
You seem to be fusing several musical genres. What inspires your sound?
There’s a big part of us that just doesn’t give a fuck about being pigeonholed into one sound. We are inspired by so many different things between music, life, love, pain, happiness, suffering, and connection that we are willing to explore whatever direction that takes us in. It gets back to the dualities of who we are as individuals in this band and how it comes together as one voice. What inspires our sound? The desire to make people feel connected to their emotions and place in this world, as confusing and uncertain as that may be at times, that’s what inspires us and is translated in whatever sounds we come up with. Jay loves goth, electro clash, and metal, along with the sounds of moogs and analog synths with big delays and 808 drums with a bunch of effects and reverb that makes transitions interesting. Brad is a bass player and can’t help but be inspired by a song’s rhythm, drive, and groove, while trying to blend the old with the new to create something intriguing. Ty is heavily influenced by music from the 70s through the 00’s, including acts like T-Rex, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and the Jesus and Mary Chain. The intersection of our musical influences and whatever our emotional state is at the time we’re writing inspire our sound.
What are some things you do to deal with anxiety and creative blocks?
That’s a really great question! I think every artist and any person that pushes themselves suffers from anxiety and self-doubt at some point in their life, and there’s a cyclicality to it. In those moments, sometimes it makes sense to push through, as we did with Personal. Sometimes it helps to step away and turn to other outlets. Other times it helps to reach out to someone you trust and get their take on a song. There’s something powerful in stepping outside of your own insecurities and turning to someone whose opinion you respect. Sometimes that advice is heeded, other times it warrants being pushed back on. We’ve all played in bands for a while, and with that comes conviction in our artistic vision. We are the ultimate arbiters of what clears our creative threshold. We trust ourselves and each other to rally around that vision.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
As we’ve seen over the past 5 years, it’s a time frame that feels long when you say it but passes with the snap of your fingers. In that time, so much can change. I think whether it’s the next 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, or 5 years, we see ourselves continuing to push our boundaries, explore different sounds, translate the complexity of our feelings into songs, and hope that it resonates with enough people in a way that inspires us to keep going.
Your style is very original and elaborate. How do you take care of your aesthetics?
Like our music, our style and aesthetic aren’t one dimensional. Life has so many rules. Fashion, vibe, style, and visuals shouldn’t. We wear what we want, when we want, and when we’re on stage, we try to give people visual elements that complement the intensity of our sound. Or as Jay says, just wear black. This works well for Ty, as 18 out of the 20 articles of clothing he owns are black. The other two shirts are dark grey.
What was the most daunting moment in your career so far?
I equate daunting with insecurity, and insecurity with fear. We have an element of fearlessness in us that provides us with a lot of freedom. When you don’t fear failure, you can truly live your authentic self. You can write that song, play that show, give that interview, or whatever you want without feeling like anything is daunting. While we’d love to play arenas, festivals, and have hundreds of millions of streams, that’s not what drives us. We’re in this band so that we first and foremost have an outlet to express and communicate the thoughts and feelings we have, to create our art, and to hopefully have that resonate with enough people so that we can play some shows and make people feel alive. The drama, the superficiality, the bullshit, well, we don’t give a fuck about it, so we don’t find this daunting. At all.
What is the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
“Don’t be a musician if you want to like, own nice things.” – Jay
Where do you think the next game changer will be in the music industry and entertainment scene?
If we knew the answer to that, well, we’d be managers or execs instead of artists, and we’d be able to own nice things. I think the acts that speak their truth, that bring something new to the table, that evolve the ongoing conversation that is music, those are the people that will be the next game changers. The kid who is picking up a guitar for the first time, the one who programs their first beat, who fucks around and finds a new sound in their garage, those will be the next game changers. Accessibility to technology is the great equalizer. While there are certainly evils and ails that the tech world has manifested on society, it has democratized music. If you’ve got game and something to say, you will be heard. You will be that agent of change.
