Still from video for ‘Badillac’ by Together PANGEA

What’s eating Together PANGEA? Well, girls mainly. With a streak of restlessness and malaise multiplying their troubles. Luckily these three Los Angeles natives have found the perfect medium to vent their aggro, latest album Badillac taking the brunt of their frustration.

It also marks a sharp shift in maturity, moving on from the ode to young and dumb fun that was previous record Living Dummy via a change in label (from Burger Records to Harvest), attitude and sound. The lo-fi production favoured in that debut has been succeeded by a cohesive multi-layered texture constructed upon dense fuzz and enervating tempo, stylistically the tone recalls 90s grunge circa Melvins and Smashing Pumpkins. Lyrics follow this strain in adopting a nihilistic vengeance, while production has been polished and vocals sharpened to acutely mordant levels.

As the needle drops, screeching distortion builds, before erupting in a pungent Sabbath style riff as frontman William Keegan launches into the aptly named lead track Alive – ‘Livin’ a lie and you don’t even care’ – leaving very little ambiguity as to the album’s tone. Throughout Badillac Keegan bawls with a swelling angst which lends itself to the sardonic lyrics, ably capturing the band’s ferocity. An immediacy is evident within each song – as if the band were given a time limit for the album and had to squeeze all their feelings of Weltschmerz within that parameter  the ferocity of the sound is pulled together through mature, crisp production which thankfully leaves the edges coarsely roughed.

Their virile ire is incessant, amidst a testosterone-fuelled assault it permeates, culminating in the snarling ‘Where the Night ends’, a gritty, stalking finale channeling Nirvana’s iconic ‘Where did you sleep last night’. Under its vexed husk Badillac does occasionally lift it’s head above the murky depths – ‘My dick is soft/these things mean nothing to me’. The crux? This is a record imbued with a new wealth of highs and obliterating lows. It isn’t about reinvention, it’s about growing up. 

Alex James Taylor: You’re about to go on tour in the US, how’s preparation going?
William Keegan: Yeah, we’re out with Meat Market who are our really good friends from Oakland, they’re one of our favourite bands. And also Guantanamo Baywatch are joining us for the final part of the tour, we’re really excited for that. Then after that we go back out headlining the Burger Caravan of All Stars tour.

AT: Playing gigs with bands who you’re friends with must be the best…
WK: Totally, we love playing with bands we like and bands we get on with, it makes it really enjoyable and I think it gives the whole tour a great vibe.

AT: Badillac feels like a massive outpour of angst is this your attitude at the moment?
WK: Well not necessarily at the minute, at the time that Badillac was written it was. William, our singer and guitar player, him and myself were both going through long term relationship break-ups and I think a lot of the lyrical content is pretty straight forward in that context. Bad decisions, bad break-ups. But now we all have new girlfriends and everything at the moment is good.

AT: So the next album should be a lot happier then.
WK: [Laughs] I guess we’ll see about that. A lot of the lyrical content ends up being about poor decisions that you make, mainly when drunk. But you can write happy songs about making poor decisions.

AT: Did the album come out as you expected when you begin?
WK: Not really no, the original plan was that it was going to come out on Burger Records. But then we got approached by Ryan Adams and he wanted to work with us for a little bit, unfortunately it didn’t really work out. But he did introduce us to people at Capitol Records. Harvest Records, who released Badillac, are part of Capitol. We got some good offers and they were really cool to us, we still work with Burger, they put out our cassettes.

AT: Badillac was recorded over three intensive sessions, do you believe this furiously quick production time translated into the album?
WK: Three sessions that were spread out over the course of about a year. We’d go in with our long time friend and producer Andrew Schubert, he’s done everything of ours. We’d go in the studio during the day after hours once his boss leaves, from like 10pm-7am, all the band tracks are live so I think  the pace and aggression does translate into recording, partially due to recording the songs live.

AT: Do you prefer working this way?
WK: We’re at a point now with Andrew, because we’ve worked with him for so long, that we just work together so well. It’s painless because we understand each other so well.

AT: How have you felt the reaction has been to Badillac?
WK: It’s been great, we had a great run when we were in the UK, I believe that it’s coming out worldwide in September so we’ll definitely be coming back to the UK at some point once the Burger tour is finished.

AT: You have previously spoken of your negative view on the garage rock scene at the minute, where do these come from? Do you feel like it is being over-hyped?
WK: I think it’s more just that we don’t want to get lumped in to any genre, people tend to blindly label bands based on where they’re from or what label they’re on. We just didn’t want to get trapped into any one thing, we want to be able to grow on our own and explore different avenues. You shouldn’t have to appeal to certain scenes simply because you’ve been pigeon-holed.

Together PANGEA plays tonight with Meat Market and Sandy Pussy at The Crepe Place, Santa Cruz CA

Find the band on Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud and Bandcamp and check out their website here. Badillac is out now on Harvest Records