The four members of Creepoid—husband and wife Anna (bass/vocals) and Patrick Troxell (drums), Sean Miller (guitar/vocals) and Nick Miller (guitar)—are pretty damn busy at the moment. Having just finished a tour of the US, the noise-gaze four-piece (originally) from Philadelphia, are leaving for their first UK tour the day after this interview. Their third full-length, Cemetery Highrise Slum, comes out in June, and the hype is swirling up around them much like the dark and portentous feedback that underpins the band’s abrasively melodic songs. It’s much deserved too, not least because the members gave up jobs and homes to, as their website puts it be “On Tour Forever RIP.” We caught up with Pat to talk about that leap of faith, the trials and tribulations of being in a band in your 30s and their main mission—to make everybody listen to Unwound.
Noisey: First things first, congratulations on the new record. It’s awesome. What does it mean to you?
Patrick Troxell: It means a lot of things to me, personally. Creepoid has been a band now for four-and-a-half years, and four of those of four-and-a-half years we all worked full-time jobs and the band was our artistic outlet at weekends and in our free time. The first record, Horse Heaven, was a very personal album with a lot of lyrics that mean a lot to us as band members, from where we grew up and the people we grew up around and our families. Then the second record is a very teenage angst album, where every song and every lyric is asking a question. There’s a million questions, but there’s very little in the way of answers. This new record is not only the first album we’ve done being a full-time band—this is all we do and this is our whole everything—but the title, Cemetery Highrise Slum, I feel, right away, that those are things that children just don’t think about—where they are with social standards, where they are with their money, where they are with life and death. It’s an adult album for us. It’s very much: Here we are, this is us, this is what we’re going to be, and this what you can expect. So this is almost like out first record, to me. The other ones, it was a different type of band and now it’s like this is what you get when we put everything we have into something. So I’m real proud of it. I’m real excited. It’s definitely a matured album for us.
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It’s funny that you say it feels like your first album, because for most people, now that you’re getting quite hyped, this will be their introduction to you.
Yeah. And it’s cool. Because the only reason we’re doing what we do is because of the people who listen to it. I mean, the band could have just broken up. We made that decision a year ago that we either need to stop doing this or we need to be as serious or as full-time as we can with it. And we kept receiving requests to tour. Against Me! asked us to tour with them three times, and we turned them down the first two times because it didn’t work out for us because we all had full-time jobs and things in our lives we couldn’t leave because it wasn’t guaranteed that this is what we were doing. And eventually, because of the fans and other bands it was like, “Alright, people really care about this and people really want to see what we can do,” so it was great for us to all jump off the cliff together and all quit our jobs to do this.
Do you all still live together in the same house?
We did, but we moved out of the house last month. We all quit our jobs and moved into a house in Savannah, Georgia, and we were living down in the south. And it was one of those things where one of the members of the band who was in the original line-up, he really couldn’t handle the road that we were about to be on and he didn’t want to do a lot of the things that we all wanted to do, so we parted ways—and he’s still one of our best friends, I’ve been friends with him since third grade and he’s still very much in our lives—and so Nicky, our guitar player, he was always a friend of ours, he was in Far Out Fangtooth and he helped do the art layout for the first album for us and even designed our logo. That was four years ago and he joined the band in July, so he’s always been around. So we moved down there to be like, “Let’s collect ourselves, let’s get good at what we’re doing, let’s get ready to tour and let’s write and record an album and we had no idea that we were going to get signed to a label and we were going to be touring ten months out of the year, but it happened.
We did everything that we planned to do in moving in under a year, so when the new album was finished and everything was ready to go, we looked at our scheduling and had to make the decision that we are now currently homeless. All of our stuff is in storage units in Philadelphia because we leave for the UK tomorrow and I’m not really looking like I’m going to be done touring until Christmas. We might as well just out it in storage—we live on the road now, because that’s what we said we were going to do. When we all left our jobs and moved to Georgia and just concentrated on Creepoid, it was legit all of us just jumping off a cliff together—and if you’re not going to jump, then you’re not coming. You’re either one of us or you’re not.
Was it kind of terrifying, jumping like that?
It was very terrifying. Anna was an adjunct professor at Drexel University and was teaching universities art all over the city, I was booking a 3000-cap venue in Philadelphia—we all had really good jobs. We were comfortable. Anna and I have been married for almost six years now, way longer than the band has been a band. We had a nice apartment in South Philly and a dog and that whole thing, and now we’re literally back to 16-year-old kid status! We’re in our 30s and we’re just like, “We’re gonna go do this punk band for real!” It’s cool to try it again in your 30s when you tried it when you were a kid. You get a lot more done.
I felt absolutely the same when I left my job in England to move to New York. It’s a really weird existence, but it’s really inspiring at the same time.
Definitely. You live life a little bit better. You have no problem to just stop and take in the fresh air. Like, 48 hours ago, I was on a stage in front of 2,000 people at Psych Fest—that is amazing to me and it still blows my mind that these things are all happening, but at the same time we worked extremely hard for it. And I think the difference is that a lot of bands expect things to just happen and we don’t. We know that we have to go grab the bull by the horns and go what we have to do.
Are you feeling any extra pressure now that the hype is building up?
I really don’t! Because this is what we set out to do. I feel like there could be more, that we could be doing more. I’m the type of guy who can’t sit still. I’m always doing something. Even our management is blown away by the fact that when they came in to become management they were like, “Okay, we need to set up and organize all these things” and we turned around and said, “Oh, you mean these? Here’s our Excel spreads.” We are literally a working machine and I think we’d be doing it even if no one was helping us. I’ve been working in the business for so long now that you figure out what to do and what not to do. So I don’t really feel any pressure on that side of it. I only really feel the pressure of the live shows. I think the pressure is more the things I have to worry about that most bands bigger than us don’t have to worry about—we still drive ourselves every night, we still sleep on people’s floors. Those are the only things that I find pressure in. We had 48 hours to drive from Texas to Philadelphia to then fly to England and within that time Sean is getting the cast cut off his arm. We’re more pressured by that than any public eye or opinion!
You also sound a lot more organized than your music would suggest.
Definitely! But I feel that also just comes from what we grew up with. We all grew up with punk and hardcore. That’s where we all came from. But it’s funny, we had a member join the band for this tour because of Sean’s broken arm, and he had never been on tour before and he’s very young—he’s great, his name is Bill Fries, he plays in a Philly band called Drone Ranger—and he was even saying, “It’s funny listening to you guys for so long and then meeting you and being around you—I thought you’d be these wild, wild people, but you’re actually real chill adults who just really enjoy music!” And I was like, “Well, that’s what we’ve always wanted to do and now we get a chance to do it, so we’re not going to try to screw it up.”
There’s a lot of bands out there who are drug bands and just do way too many drugs and are all fucked up. No one in our band does hard drugs! No-one does anything like that. We’re adults. We smoke weed, we drink whiskey, we drink wine, and occasionally we’ll eat psychedelics. We’re not out there doing blow or heroin or anything like that, because that stuff’s all fucking stupid. If you want to get caught up in some world of “This is rock’n’roll!’ then you just don’t get it and you’re not going stick around that long because it’s been proved that you don’t stick around that long living that type of life. But yeah, the best thing about our music and us is that we know what we want to do and we know what we want to sound like and we know what it takes to still have a good time while we do it.
Speaking of which, what happened with Nick? He was put in prison for bit recently, right?
He was only in there for, like, 13 or 14 hours, but I’m actually not allowed to talk about because it’s still an open case right now. But he’s going to be okay and everything’s going to be fine. We just have to go through the motions. It’s one of those things.
But to see the response to that must have been wonderful—you raised over the $5,000 bail money on GoFundMe extremely quickly.
Yeah. We honestly thought—because we had a little bit of money and we thought maybe we’d put this out there and someone could help a little bit in able to get Nick taken care of. But that was another proof that we can’t stop, that was more proof to us that the band is important to more people than we know, because they don’t want to see that happen to us, and it’s like, “Damn! People love us? Okay…” It was really overwhelming and it felt really good to see people step up like that, especially not even fully knowing the situation because we can’t legally say it on public forums. But people know who we are and they know our integrity and they know we’re not out there doing scumbag stuff.
Finally, how do you feel being labelled as a revival band?
It’s kind of weird. They call it a revival band, but it’s not really something that’s being revived. It’s always been there. It’s just now more people like it! For instance, I think it’s so out of whack that people keep saying that Creepoid is a shoegaze band, because I don’t understand it. I don’t see people saying that Unwound was a shoegaze band. Just because there’s some reverb on parts does not mean we’re a shoegaze band! People want to feel like they’re part of something that’s being rebuilt or re-brought, but that’s the difference between those people and the other people at the shows, because the other people at the shows have been going since the beginning and go see bands like this every day of their lives.
It’s definitely a weird world, the quote-unquote 90s thing, because I honestly don’t know how to put a finger on that. I don’t know what makes the difference between a 90s revival band and a straight-up working class band who puts records out. I really wish someone would explain it to me. I feel like our band draws a lot of inspiration from bands who were amazing that didn’t see the respect they deserved. I mean, Unwound is such an underrated band, but to a lot of people that make music and a lot of my peers it’s an important thing. That needed to happen for this to happen. There’s a lot of steps along the way that needed to happen, and a lot of other bands that really speared the way, and it’s just a shame that it’s now that the mainstream world is accepting of the sounds they were doing 20 years ago. But the only thing I can do is keep doing what I’m doing and keep talking about them like I’m doing right now, so that some kid out there goes, “Wow! I have to listen to this band!”
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