Interview: Redwoods
Born out of a Craigslist ad in 2019, Redwoods is a ’90s-influenced screamo band from Southern California. The band’s sound draws from emotive hardcore and punk rock, with influences like Punch and pageninetynine. Composed of vocalist Veronika Reinert, guitarists Randall Avilez & Adrian Ayala, and drummer Brandon Brunt, Redwoods independently released its self-titled debut EP this past April. Lyrically, the six-track EP explores themes of loss and change. Opening track “Isolation” wastes no time unleashing Reinert’s impassioned screams and raw emotion as she observes her surroundings during the current global pandemic. Standout tracks “When Winter Comes” and “Gaslighter” highlight Avilez and Ayala’s talent for creating melody amidst chaos, pairing their dueling guitar riffs with Brunt’s thunderous and dynamic drumming. The pummeling “Dead Dogs, Lost Loves” is as heavy as the name suggests. Closing track “Funeral” captures the band at its rawest. Beginning with a distorted thrash riff, the track abruptly segues into an anthemic guitar lead and erupts into a cathartic breakdown that serves as a fitting end to the EP.
Below are some highlights from my conversation with the band after the EP’s release.
How did the EP come about?
Veronika: We’re all spread out across Southern California and it’s a drive to get to our practice space at our drummer’s house. We could only really get together one, maybe two, times a month to write. When we felt like we had a good amount of content, we were like, “Let’s record it. Let’s do something really good.” Our drummer Brandon happened to know Dave Swanson at Love Juice Laboratories in Riverside. We recorded the EP in March right before the shelter-in-place stuff started to really pick up. We recorded the whole EP in two days.
“Isolation” seems very relevant to the current pandemic.
V: Yeah, I actually wrote those lyrics at the recording space. That song was written off the cuff relatively recently and we decided last minute to add it to the EP. I had come up with some improvised vocals and then decided to lay down some lyrics right then. Based on everything that was going on, it felt like it was something I wanted to write and talk about. I feel like it flows well into the overall architecture of the EP. I think it’s a good track to start with and it’s reminiscent of what we were going through when we started recording.
What is the overall concept for the EP?
V: I think the overall theme comes down to loss and change. Whether that’s through a relationship, things going on in the world, a death, somebody’s status in your life changing—we’re going through loss and change all the time. I think that’s the root of what makes the the EP so cohesive in terms of the lyrics.
Randall: My goal with these batch of songs was to really find a melodic identity for each and try to find guitar leads that really stuck out and were each their own thing. After listening to screamo and metal for a long time, when I try to take in new stuff, a lot of it just goes through me and nothing really catches my interest a whole lot. When I set out to write, I was thinking about the big melody leads and the small, cool bits in a song that are gonna hook people in to want to listen to more.
What is your favorite track from the EP?
Adrian: I’d probably say “When Winter Comes” particularly because of the connection that it has to the day when I wrote the chord progression for it. As Veronika said, a lot of the styles and themes going on in the album are connected to loss. The night I wrote that was the second to last night I saw my grandmother in the hospital before she passed. It was something that I wanted to show her. She would always question what kind of stuff I do with the bands that I’m in. Sadly, I didn’t get to show her. I really liked how everyone added into it. I was so worried that it was going to be too much of a melodic song, but with the things that Randall added in, as well as the drum progressions that Brandon gave us, I felt like it’s one of those tracks that captures you. And what I like best, is that it does it really early on in the EP being the second song.
V: I love all of the tracks…I think that each track has its own identity. They don’t just blur into each other. I feel like “Isolation” and “When Winter Comes” are part of each other in a weird way, even though they’re about different things. Those two are my favorite in terms of the actual recordings. Lyrically, my favorite is “Dead Dogs, Lost Loves.” That one is lyrically a bit different from the rest. It’s not about a specific person or a specific event. It’s more just this general feeling of nostalgia. I liked writing that one a lot.
What sparked your interest in creating music and what got you into this genre?
V: I had been writing my own acoustic solo melodic stuff since I was 16 or 17. I was super into Ani DiFranco and her punk rock ethic when it comes to music and distribution. I had a couple bands in junior college and did my own thing off and on. Writing music and creating in general just feels like something I have to do. I don’t feel like there’s necessarily a rhyme or reason for it…Being involved in hardcore and screamo for a number of years, I didn’t necessarily feel like I could contribute the way that a lot of guys did. Both genres are heavily male dominated. You don’t see a lot of women doing stuff in those scenes besides showing up to shows. I think in the last couple years, we’ve seen this major increase in women starting to participate and starting to front bands and contributing in their own right and being seen more as equals and peers, rather than a novelty. I feel like that as more and more women get involved, the less it becomes this weird like, “Oh, yeah that’s this band but they have a girl singer.” It doesn’t need to be talked about as much. I remember listening to Punch and even Oathbreaker and both of those vocalists just blew me away. And I think there’s this notion that if they can do it, and if all these other women can do it, why can’t I do it? I think that’s really what got me motivated to try and start screaming and figure out my own sound and my own voice and figure out what that looks like for me.
A: For me personally, it just comes from my upbringing. Everyone in my family is a creative. All my uncles and cousins are musicians. My dad and my brother are artists. They like to paint and sculpt. As far as playing music, my dad started to notice that I wasn’t really picking up on drawing or painting the way he and my brother took to it. He just showed up with an acoustic guitar one day to see if I would feel it any more than I did with painting and I was drawn to it right away. I’ve been playing for about 17 years now. A lot of my older cousins pushed me into the screamo path with a lot of the hardcore punk, death metal, and grindcore they were listening to at the time. I really got into screamo when I got into emotive hardcore. Instrumentally the music was very intense, but a lot of the lyricism was what people were feeling or emotions that people had towards society and politics. That drew me a lot more to what I like to do now.
R: Music’s just always been a part of my family life at home. I remember playing air guitar to Metallica when my dad worked out. Growing up, I just wanted to be that punk kid that played Ramones. I got a guitar in seventh grade and I’ve been playing ever since. It was only after high school that I started seriously writing and trying to write stuff that I was proud of and challenged me.
How has your hometown influenced your music?
A: My hometown—especially where I grew up in Hollywood—affects it a lot because for anybody that’s from here, you tend to recognize the two sides of Hollywood. If I were to put it into the current state right now, you have the Hollywood that’s influencers and TikTokers and people that do that kind of lifestyle, as opposed to the people like me that come from the working class and just do what they have to do to get through their day. My family is very political. We come from anarchist backgrounds in El Salvador. So, a lot of stuff when it comes to the working class and the distinctions between class hierarchies, comes in…I feel like a lot of the music that I write, I try to recognize that aspect that gets shadowed away by the limelight. Especially with what my family does—my dad’s a janitor now—and that mentality of whether it’s medical, entertainment, stuff like that, even the lowest person gets the biggest amount of respect from me. I feel like music needs to recognize that. A lot of stuff I write, I try to highlight that. It shouldn’t be something that should be disregarded as like, “Oh, because this person isn’t on every site or has all these followers or does this, it shouldn’t be recognized or acknowledged.” So any chance I get to express that with my music, I do it 100%.
R: That’s a good point when it comes to the way class politics manifests itself within your surroundings. I’ve had that experience too, being from Orange County. In the wider media, you just think of shows like The OC that represent what people abroad think about Orange County. It’s that and Disneyland, right? I also come from a more working class background. My dad grew up in gangs and I’ve had a whole section of my family that had been involved with the cartels and drug smuggling and shit…There’s this whole other side of Orange County and Southern California that doesn’t get brought out into the consciousness as much. In music and other art, it’s something I do think about a lot. The fact that you have Disneyland—a multi-million corporation, a big fucking entertainment monolith in our landscape right now—and a few blocks from there, there’s a really bad neighborhood that was there in the ’80s that had all kinds of drug problems and poverty and shit like that. I don’t know how that manifests itself exactly when I write guitar, but it is something that is on my mind all the time no matter what I’m doing.
What did you learn about yourselves making this EP?
V: It was a very different writing style than I’ve ever done. Usually when I’ve written songs in the past, the lyrics are long and in complete sentences. This was much more sparse, writing wise. It was interesting to approach songwriting in this very different way. I guess just discovering my own voice and what I’m comfortable sounding like and what’s coming out of my mouth— whether you can understand it or not—has been a very different avenue for me. In general, making this EP and making this band has been a testament to if you really want something, be brave and try it and see what happens. It’s okay if it doesn’t work out the first time and it’s okay if people don’t like it. It’s definitely opened up a lot of courage in me and in getting out there and screaming and seeing what that feels like.
R: I think most of my learning has been trying to find a space and to figure out what’s required of me from my other bandmates.
A: I learned that I’m a lot more willing to be experimental and come out of my comfort zone when I’m solely focusing on guitar. I do vocals as well in my other band. Up until I started playing with Redwoods, I made chord progressions simpler to manage the vocals as well. Being strictly on guitar, I know I have the potential to write more cohesive and intricate stuff, especially with Randall and how good of a guitar player he is. I tend to be able to see what I can add to the parts I’m doing to add more dynamics in a song. I’ve been able to transition that to my other bands to get more creative and be more willing to try things that don’t necessarily feel safe. I like that a lot. And because of that, I’m able to do that with things outside of music as well…I just recently got into cycling. It’s a big thing I’m going full force with now and it’s just from a sense of confidence I have now from what I got as a guitar player in the band.
Who are you currently listening to?
V: Besides Phoebe Bridgers all day, every day, I’ve been listening to Power Alone. They’re a California straightedge hardcore band. It’s fronted by Eva Hall who used to sing for Gather, which is this old ’90s vegan straightedge hardcore band. She’s a good friend of mine and the band is awesome. They’d span from members in Berkeley to Santa Barbara to Orange County, and they just put out an LP this year through Indecision Records. Besides that, we played a show with a band called Bent Blue. I think they’re like us in a lot of ways. They’re spread out across Southern California. They started playing shows at the same time that we started playing shows. They have kind of a Dischord, Minor Threat meets Fugazi kind of sound that’s really, really good.
A: First is a post-hardcore band Vientre from Columbia. They released a new EP recently and a lot of it is really fantastic. I’ve been listening to it constantly, almost to the point where I kind of want to rip off a lot of stuff that they’re doing because I love it so much. But I’m using it more for inspiration. I’ve been listening to the rapper Mavi and Phil Ochs—a lot of his early folk political stuff that he did back in like 1962.
R: I’m listening to a lot of old stuff lately. The Menzingers, AFI, The Replacements, Joni Mitchell, and The Townes Van Zandt. I do want to shout out Shannon Wright, especially if you’re into really melodramatic, sad piano stuff. Shannon Wright’s amazing.
What is your favorite album to listen to from start to end?
R: Converge’s Jane Doe is one of them I think for me. This band called Ten Thousand Leagues had a self-titled EP a couple years back. That’s another like 10 songs that flies by and every song’s a banger. I love that album. Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor from 2010. 36 Chambers by Wu-Tang.
V: I’m a huge Zao fan and all of their albums are great, but I’d say The Funeral of God is my favorite album that I could listen to start to finish. More recently, Knocked Loose’s A Different Shade of Blue is a great start to finish album. I’m also a big Taylor Swift fan and I remember when Lover came out—after practice and after I’d screamed for four hours—we’d get in the car and I’d be like, “We’re listening to this.” I sang along the entire car ride back. It was a good time. It’s a great album.
A: Condition by Summer Vacation. Suadade by Thievery Corporation. Paranoid by Black Sabbath just ’cause it’s one thing that made me wanna play guitar more.