“Predatory Headlights” is the new album by Tenement, the punk trio from Appleton, Wis. It’s an accomplishment. It’s a double album, with 25 songs, and it took more than three years to make. It gives you an enlarged sense of what the primary songwriter, Amos Pitsch, is most trained at: tightly written riff songs with an almost classical pop sense, descended from pop-punk while transcending its clichés. But it also includes experimental compositions and arrangements involving strings and field recordings and an out-of-tune piano. “Predatory Headlights” is strong and strange and detailed and cohesive; if people are still listening to records from 2015 in 20 years, this might be one of them. Tenement started in 2006 and has spent a lot of its life on the DIY circuit, gigging in living rooms and basements. For quite a while, if you wanted a Tenement record, you had to buy one at a gig. It appears on bills and has recorded split EPs with far more noisy, simple straight-ahead hardcore bands, but it plays music that sounds as if it could have been almost popular at some point in the recent past. Where does Tenement fit into the current punk-hardcore-DIY scene?
Our guests are Liz Pelly, editor at the biweekly online newspaper the Media, and Maria Sherman, a music and culture writer for Fuse, Billboard, Buzzfeed and MTV. Both have written about Tenement, and both have written a lot about the punk and DIY scenes the band is connected to. “It’s pretty clear that for these musicians punk is more something they relate to on an ideological level,” Ms. Pelly said. “It’s a way for people to communicate about the way they interact with the music world — for bands to find each other and immediately know, ‘we’re into DIY ethics, we’re into these certain labels, we’re into house shows, putting out music ourselves’ — and the relation to punk is more on that level than the aesthetics or the influences they’re channeling.”
We talk about Tenement’s relationship to the current punk-hardcore-DIY world, and some of the energies in that world, art-first or ethos-first or mixtures thereof — bands including Glue, Downtown Boys, Vexx and Criaturas.
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