Breaking Out of The Box

Photo by Amy Frye // Edited by Lindsey Schiefelbein

With a love for a diverse range of music, it’s no surprise Indianapolis quintet, NORMUNDY delivers such a unique and energetic sound that melds hip-hop, alt-rock and electronic. This unforgettable sonic blend, matched with their unfaltering drive, determination, and brotherly bond helped skyrocket them into a busy and exciting breakout year.

We sat down with Josh Day (vocals/programming), Gabriel Van Arch (rapping vocals), Joel Rice (guitar) and Josh Tompkins (drums) as they take us through their whirlwind year, their favourite aspects of music and their upcoming debut full-length, The Depths Below!

 

JA: Take me through how you guys got involved in music.
JT: My dad was a musician and when I got to be the ripe age of six years old, he gave me an instrument. I learned to drum and I just moved on from there.

JR: I’ve been playing guitar since I was a wee young lad, like 10 years old. Me and [Josh Day] started making music together, and we haven’t really stopped.

JD: I started music when I was twelve. My friend Jay taught me how to play acoustic guitar. He taught me a G chord and from there I kind of took it upon myself and started doing music with Joel in high school. After that we moved on to NORMUNDY and here we. Now I sing and stuff.

GVA: I started writing poetry when I was nine and started writing lyrics when I was 15. Now I’m 24. I was doing solo shit and [Josh Day] asked me to join a side project which became the main project and here we are.

JA: Do you write most of the lyrics for the band?
GVA: Whatever I say in a song is what I’ve written. Whatever [Josh] is saying in a song, he’s written. There are some songs where we have collaborated.

JD: I’d say we each write our own parts but we wrote lyrics together and always made sure that they flowed. We write 80 or 90 percent of our own lyrics but the other person helps with like 10 to 20 perent.

GVA:  Kind of like where one person could be lacking in an area or two, the other person can kind of compensate.

JA: Can we talk about your musical style. You’ve done a cool little mash up.
JD: Whenever I describe it to people I usually say it’s a blend of rock, rap and EDM. If I had to describe it as one I would say probably rock but there’s so much that goes into it. There’s synthesizers in every song we have. He raps in every song except for one. It’s really just combining pretty much everything except country music. [Laughs]

JA: How did you decide this was the route you were going to take with this band?
JR: Money [Laughs].

GVA: He’s actually the newest member, don’t listen to him. There was actually no decision in that style. It kind of acclimated itself. I mentioned earlier, I was doing shit, [Josh] was doing shit, and it melded together. [Josh’s] last band had taken a slight turn for electronic and he was showing me a lot of behind the scenes, kind of demo things that he wanted to do. For me, I was kind of a blank slate. I was like, “I’ll take whatever. I’m just kind of making rhymes” and we had a flow that just worked. That’s how we just built on what was already there.

JD: Everybody in the band listens to all sorts of music. We try not to pigeonhole ourselves into one genre or sonic landscape. We really like to diversify everything.

 This album for sure had the most blood sweat and tears (literally) and all aspects of life going into it.

JA: Take me through what your year has been like?
JR: A clusterfuck!

JD: Last November was around the time when we were in the second half of the recording process of our full-length record. In December we did vocals and banged that out in December and January.  We shipped it out for mixing and mastering to a guy named Josh Buckner up in Michigan who used to work for Joe Sturgis. He did bands like Of Mice and Men and Devil Wears Prada so he had a lot of experience working with that kind of music. He also worked with hip-hop artists so we decided he’d be the best choice. We played our first show in March. In May we put out our first music video for “Take Me Away.”

JR: We filmed that in the dead of winter.

JD: Yeah! It was 30 degrees (F) on a beach. There was snow on the beach at one point so it was tough but it was really fun. It was a good bonding experience. We all got like one hour of sleep!
After that we put out our second video which was for our song “Feel.” Then we split with our drummer at the time and around that same time we picked up our current bassist Colin Fiol . Soon after that we had Josh as our full-time drummer. Then we filmed our music video “Atlas”. That was our third single. Now have two more singles we’re going to put out and then the full-length in spring of next year!

JA: What’s your favourite part, between recording, shooting videos or performing?
JR: Performing. Recording takes so much time and I wasn’t even there for half of it! Live performances are definitely one of my favourite things about it.

JT: My favourite thing is the energy and cohesiveness of all the members of this band. It doesn’t really seem so much like a business as much as we treat it like a business. It doesn’t come off like we’re working. We have a lot of fun together. We know each other very well. We mesh really well together. We can talk to each other about anything. And at the same time, also hate the shit out of each other when things aren’t going right. It’s genuinely like a family. I love these guys so much and it feels so much more like a family than a business or a band or anything like that.

JD: I’m going to have to say my favourite thing is probably performing. As sucky and monotonous as recording can be, it’s really cool to bring sounds together in the way we do. I find because we include so many different elements of music, the recording process also kind of turns into the writing process while you’re doing it. I like the artistry of that, but you really can’t beat performing. Like Josh said there’s so much energy in this band. The live show is really reliant on that. We really try to take everything to the next level and just anything we can do to appeal to people and get them to care about the music we’ve worked so hard on.

GVA:  I would have to tie writing and performing as two of my favourites. The writing process is the expressive part. It’s the part where you get all your emotions out so much as performing does the same you know? You can’t perform something that isn’t already written. My fondest memories come from the whole process of writing what we’re performing. But again going on stage and playing what you just wrote is fulfilling a little dream you had so I think those two parts for me are equal. When you perform so long and haven’t written in a while, you want to write. When you’re writing so long you want to get out there and play the songs. I think those two will always be like that perfect dichotomy.

JA: Anything else you’d like to add?
JD: We’re extremely excited to put this record out. We were talking about it a few weeks ago. By the time this album comes out it, we would have started writing it about a thousand days so there’s a bunch of months that have gone into it. We’re very excited to finally get this out there.

GVA: I was actually thinking about this the other day. This specific album will always have a special place in [our] hearts. It’s almost like if we were filmmakers, we were like the directors, the writers, the actors. We were everything. It’s a slow process when you play every role but to see that come out and really blossom – and you’ve waited many seasons – it’s going to be a good thing. This album for sure had the most blood sweat and tears (literally) and all aspects of life going into it.

Check out NORMUNDY at  Facebook.com/NORMUNDY  or through twitter and instagram @NORMUNDYBAND. Check out their music at NORMUNDY.com. The Depths Below comes out March 2018 on iTunes, Spotify, GooglePlay and Bandcamp.