How FIDLAR Nearly Went Hip Hop To Avoid Being Boring

You definitely got the impression from their 2013 eponymous debut full-length that the members of party-loving skate-punks FIDLAR lived life on the edge, but not to the extent that their hometown of Highland Park, LA resembles a warzone.

"I'm doing well, there was a drive-by shooting two nights ago and a stray bullet came into our house, but other than that we're doing fine," laughs frontman Zac Carper. "Unfortunately we live in a kinda rough neighbourhood, so it's the price you pay. I'm just glad nobody got hurt."

"We were fucking two decisions away from making like a full-on hip hop album!"

Carper is on the promo trail for FIDLAR's second album Too, and given the stylistic shift away from the brazen balls-out punk of their debut into more diverse terrain he's aware that he might have his job cut out for him.

"I have a feeling that this new record is gonna go either way — people are going to love it or they're going to just absolutely fucking hate it," he admits. "When you're under the gun to make a record it's kinda a weird pressure thing, and it's hard... Especially for our kinda genre — the garage-y, punk kinda stuff — I think you get it in your head that some people expect a certain thing from you and you want to deliver and make them happy, but at the same time, fuck that! There was definitely some weird vibes about where we should go, but we wanted to try something different — that's what it really boils down to.

"We're not the kind of people who can just make the same album again and again — we were fucking two decisions away from making like a full-on hip hop album! That would have been awesome, like a total left-field thing. When things become just 'standard' it's weird — once we went on tour and when we came home all of a sudden there was this 'garage rock scene' and a 'punk scene'. When we started those scenes weren't around, it was indie rock and art-punk and all this stuff, so when what we were doing became standard we were like, 'What the fuck?' — I felt like I wanted to fight it, I always like going against the grain."

Carper explains that they didn't know where they wanted to take Too, just that it was somewhere new.

"A lot of it was kinda written in my head on this road trip, when I put my surfboard in my car and slept in my car for a couple of weeks and just went surfing," he tells. "A lot of the melodies and lyrics were formulating in my head and I was writing stuff down and singing stuff into my phone — I wrote 30 songs for this new record, but the first 20 songs were just absolute garbage because I had it in my head that 'I need to write a FIDLAR record' instead of 'I just need to write music, that's the bottom line'. When I learned that all I needed to do was write songs and not worry about things like, 'How do I make this a punk, garage-y kind of song?' it all came together."