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Midrift: Right place, right time
words : Gracelyn Moore and Leah Wedman
photo: Leah Wedman
photo: Leah Wedman
I'm a Manoa from Midrift, and I play bass and do backup vocals.
I'm Kai from Midrift and I play Drums.
Gracelyn: You guys are playing The Echo tonight. This is your first time in LA, right?
Gus: Playing it, yes. I’ve been to LA a few times but this is my first time playing here.
Gracelyn: Are you guys excited?
Gus: We're really excited.
Gracelyn: Do you have any feelings about playing tonight?
Gus: Are you guys nervous?
Manoa: Yeah.
Kai: I'm a little bit nervous, but I know when we get up there it’ll all be fine.
Gus: We've done a lot of shows lately, I feel ready to do it, and I'm excited. I think we're a solid band right now.
Gracelyn: You had some prep too, playing San Diego, SF, and Pamona for the last couple of nights. This is your first big tour of for the band right?
Gus: This is our first time leaving the Bay area.
Gracelyn: And it's completely sold out! All of them right? Every single venue sold out?
Gus: Yes. This is a big deal for us for sure. Where you guys are expecting it to sell out?
Manoa: Not really, because I thought most of our pull was from San Francisco.
Leah: How fast did it sell out?
Manoa: Honestly, we had about a month left for every venue.
Gus: LA sold out in two weeks. I think every show sold out before we played it by at least.
Gus and Manoa: Three weeks or four weeks.
Gus: I fought a lot to really go into promoting these shows. I just wanted people to be here. These past couple of nights have been crazy playing you know?
Gracelyn: And you’ve been playing this tour all in a row right?
Gus: We played Pomona last night and San Diego the night before, and each one has been just super memorable and awesome.
Gracelyn: You're playing with Juggler and MyVeronica, which are great LA bands.
Gus: Manoa plays Fortnite with Juggler.
Manoa: We have a little rivalry going on
Gracelyn: Who's better?
Manoa: We haven't done it yet because they haven't set it up. But we keep trash-talking to each other.
Gus: I think Manoa is gonna win. He's really good. He secretly plays Fortnite a lot. He's really fucking good because anytime I redownload the game, he just shits on me.
Manoa: It's that natural talent
Gracelyn: I saw you guys in January for Milly and it was your second show ever. It's been about 6 months since then. How have you progressed as a band since then? Have you released any music in between that?
Gus: Not yet. There's a single coming out in July. I think in terms of playing live, we've felt like we're at a different level than what we were in January.
Kai: Way tighter. We understand each other more and about how every one of us plays.
Manoa: I think in January we didn’t have interludes or transitions into any other songs.
Gus: It was an awkward silence. But now I'm confident. We play and I know we're all thinking the same thing. We also practice a lot because we live so close to each other.
Leah: How did you guys become a band?
Manoa: We grew up together.
Gus: We've known each other since what elementary school?
Kai: We all grew up surfing, skating, and stuff.
Manoa: We used to play, like, little jam sessions.
Gus: We used to cover Black Sabbath and Metallica.
Manoa: Gus used to be a really, like, big metal fan.
Gus: Yeah, I was all into that shreddy stuff on guitar.
Gracelyn: So why start a shoegaze band rather than a metal band?
Gus: I don't really know. When I started making music again, I was leaning more toward shoegaze than anything else, and they were actually in a different band.
Manoa: Me and Kai especially are not used to 100 people pulling out their phones at shows.
Gracelyn: How do you guys feel about that?
Manoa: It makes me kind of more nervous because it seems more people are engaged in what they're recording.
Kai: They actually know the music.
Gus: Yeah. The thing about social media is anybody can film a concert and post it. I feel more often than not, people are just inclined to hate on it. Because like, what if this goes on Instagram Reels and some like Keyboard Warrior doesn't fuck with it. That could be detrimental.
Gracelyn: This was a solo project for you Gus originally?
Gus: For at least a year and a half. I was working on my own thing but I wanted to play live, of course. I've known these guys my whole life. The only reason we weren't in a band is because of their other band. But I picked them up and we started practicing.
Manoa: You sent me -
Gus: Oh, I sent them the Spotify. The account didn't have a lot of monthly listeners.
Manoa: I was around 10K maybe.
Gus: They were still down to start jamming and we jammed for about like six months just learning the songs. We played our first show about a year ago?
Manoa: I think it was three or four months after we started practicing.
Gus: We were just so excited to play, you know. It was impossible to get a show. I had to reach out to a band that had a date booked at Bottom Of The Hill, and I think they had like a thousand followers and then no openers. I was just, please get us in there. I emailed so many venues and it wasn't going anywhere. We played for like 20 people
Kai: Might have been 40, but honestly, I think less.
Gus: There was literally not a single soul there.
Manoa: I think we were so stoked at the end of the show, we got $150 for the whole gig.
Gus: But then our next but our next show was Coded.co and that was a lot better for us.
Kai: That really like took us off. Then a lot of venues started to reach out to us, right?
Gus: It wasn't much of a hassle anymore. But Bottom Of The Hill really came full circle because we sold that place out. It was our first-ever sold-out show, so it was our first show with that many people. I mean, it was - Yeah, it was insane. We weren't expecting anything like that, like that shit is fucked up!
Gracelyn: It's crazy. But in the last 6 months, you’ve played with Wisp, Yuele and also Jane Remover and have Juggler, MyVeronica, and Blossom being your openers. How are you aligning yourselves with the right people to play with?
Manoa: Gus knew Wisp
Gus: I knew Wisp about a year ago. Natalie and I jammed when she had her first song out for a couple of months. I was like oh I'm just in the Bay Area as well let’s play. We went to this studio in Oakland called Sound Studio. I played Your Face on guitar and we jammed and kept in touch ever since. She moved to LA eventually but we were both growing on our own. Then she was like “I’m coming to the Bay Area you should play on our bill”. That's how we got that. But as for Yuele and stuff I was at school one day and got an email from a promoter who was like, “Do you want to get on this bill at Regency Ballroom?” I ran out of class and I called both of them. I was like “We’re playing the Regency Ballroom!! Oh my god! It’s going to be fucking crazy!!!!!!”
Kai: It’s a really big deal. That's a huge venue. So many of our favorite bands have played there.
Gracelyn: You guys also just got picked up by Tour Peachy?
Gus: Yeah. Really crazy. I emailed months ago, like last summer because of how impossible it was to get a show. Then randomly a few months ago they emailed back. They picked us up and now we are with Matt Sanders who is taking good care of us. We’re excited to start doing shows with management and are going to Texas in August.
Gracelyn: Where are you playing there?
Manoa: We're playing Dallas, San Antonio, Houston.
Leah: How did you guys blow up on Spotify?
Gus: It was so much luck because of how much Shoegaze is popping up. I would do this thing - this is good insight as well - where if you want to post your music on Spotify you can submit it to a bunch of the Spotify playlists. We ended up on a lot of radios with artists like Wisp and Quannic (?). This kind of new wave of Shoegaze artists.
Gracelyn: Do you like being called shoegaze?
Gus: Fine thing to be identified with.
Manoa: I'm a big shoegaze fan, so.
Gus: But I think our live sets aren't very shoegaze.
Manoa: I think we are more alt-rock than shoegaze. I think we have shoegaze elements of course.
Gus: We just got lucky with timing, you know? We also had some TikTok trends people did.
Gracelyn: You have new music coming out in July.
Gus: So it's coming out July 19th, and I wanted to get it professionally mastered. I wanted the sound quality to be good. We matched up with Corey Kaufman who is a really great engineer. He just made the song come to life and I’m really excited about it. It’s a good one for sure. Yeah… it hits hard. It's hard.
Manoa: For sure. Eventually, in the future, we want to have a live release on vinyl.
Gus: Manoa is a huge vinyl junkie.
Manoa: I'm. Yeah, I'm in charge of all the merch and stuff. Oh one more thing, Midrift’s first EP is going to be on vinyl in 2 months? A couple of months?
Gus: I didn't even know that I just found that out.
Gracelyn: Any colored pressings?
Manoa: For anybody who's really interested in this…It's going to be a translucent red half with black ice translucent with a white splatter.
Gus: Woo! [ clapping ]
Manoa: Well have some special screenprinted covers for some events hopefully.
Gracelyn: Well, that's all I have to say. Any goodbyes, any shout-outs? Bands you like to shout out?
Mixed: Shout out flying fish, shout out juggler, shout out whirr
Gus: Shout out Blossom! Shout out Manners and Love Letter.
Kai: shout out Luster.
Gus: Shout out wisp I guess [ sarcastic ].
Manoa: Shout out turnover, Fiddlehead
Kai: Shout out Fleshwater.
Gus: Now shout out everybody.
Shout out Midrift!!!