M01E Discusses How They Got Their Name, Their Approach to Creativity, and Working on a New Album
Sean Finan (any) // Crew Writer
Livvy Hung (she/her) // Illustrator
The underground music scene in Vancouver is growing into an increasingly undefinable, heterogeneous collage of genre and influence. This mesh seems to be the standard in the age of internet access. The charts are becoming progressively populated with sterilized algorithmic anthems—created for mass consumption but ultimately loved by few and left behind. Amidst this, there is an undercurrent of erratic noise born in protest to the state of popular music, and the mindset of consuming art passively.
Vancouver-based “No-Punk” band M01E is unignorable. The sounds created by the band could be described as loud, harsh, aggressive and raw. Their audience is typically polarized, their sound being frightening to some and beautifully cathartic to others. Their music ranges from soft and introspective to loud and ironic, with their lyrics typically speaking to the most pertinent parts of the human experience.
In contrast to most of their music, a discussion with the band members Jerome, Kit, Willow and Emerson happens to be extremely peaceful.
Like many children of chaos, M01E was birthed in a parking garage.
Kit, bassist and vocalist, remembers Jerome, guitarist and vocalist, teaching him how to play bass in the “UBC Cry Club Parkade,” a parking garage that they turn into an improvisational screaming playroom every week.
Kit claims to be the “Sid Vicious” of the group. Before the band, he had “no musical capabilities whatsoever,” wanting “to get straight to the point of writing cool stuff.”
“You need to go through all this hell first before you can get to the good part. But I got to the good part right away,” Kit says.
“I think there’s definitely value in learning the fundamentals for things that just entirely depends on the person,” Emerson adds, going on to say, “That’s what happened at churches a lot. And then, you had a lot of people who actually had actually had a decent amount of technical skills, but not because they were in lessons, but because they were forced to play it with other people and learn through doing the thing.“
This DIY simplicity is the ethos of the band. The name “M01E,” is a frankensteinian amalgamation of characters from Jerome’s original name for the band “My Sold Out Reverie,” which he came up with when he was 16. “The meaning changes all the time, it doesn’t mean the same to me right now compared to two years ago,” he says.
This ethos is manifested in Willow’s drum setup, using only a floor tom, crash and snare.
But for everyone in the band, M01E is “more like an approach, or an attitude.”
“It means, at least to me, reducing so-called rock or punk or whatever, or just music expression itself to the bare bone. We want to be an active counterforce to the Spotify algorithm driven music evolution,” says Jerome. “[…] human beings aren’t perfect, and people choose professionalism because they’re afraid to face their own humanity.”
At the tail end of completing their newest self-produced album, Jerome reflects on the gruelling process of learning to do it all by himself.
“I think I just wanted to do it, just for the act of doing it, just to prove that you can, you can do it. So hopefully after I’m done with this process, I can just share with everyone just how my experience is, and so they will be less afraid to just do it themselves.”
Sticking a microphone into the crowd is an M01E staple, always providing the opportunity for anyone to let out a healing scream.
M01E is constantly blurring the line between audience and performer, ending their shows by letting people come on stage and play their instruments, while they join the crowd and take their turn in the mosh-pit.
The group pays homage to their local inspirations. Among their favourite groups are “Natlak, Still Depths, Piss, Kidz Help Fone, The Ransackers, Girlwife, Goats and Lasers, Los Duendes, Heterosexuals, Slowicide, Cherry Pick–all of them, every band.”
“Outside there’s a tree that’s red, and there’s a tree that’s green, but the leaves are both shaking in the wind, and that’s how I feel about music,” Willow rhapsodizes.
“That’s beautiful,” Emerson responds.
