The Bad Penny (beta)

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“The desire to make something different for the sake of being different or recognized for intellectual prowess is not only pretentious but reductive and asinine. That’s the death of art to me. Great art is made equally for fulfillment of the self and to give back to the world which we are infinitely indebted to for allowing us to be or exist in the first place.“

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Today marks the end of a very, very long journey completed by a young group of particularly talented musicians. It seems almost mythical, the story we’re about to relate to you, but rest assured that every scintilla of it is true. Even if it was relayed to us by fresh-cheeked rock ‘n’ roll fans who could pass as teens. And even though they hail from Los Angeles, where fiction is often truer than the so-called truths that its residents tell one another.

Before we tell the tale of Mildred, which concludes tonight in Colorado, consider for a moment how shitty it is that society derides young people for being idealists, for having dreams, for wrapping themselves in a warm blanket of hope that they’ll lead a pleasant life because that’s what innocent human beings such as them deserve. Pause for a moment to reflect on the damage done to young people, perhaps aspiring artists in particular, when their parents or teachers or counselors decide to lower their expectations out of a misguided abundance of caution. Dreams aren’t always dashed or crushed by the failure of the individual who had the audacity to concoct them. Oftentimes dreams are disregarded because it can be a pain in the ass for the caretakers of children to help youngsters achieve them.

Fortunately, reassuringly and inspirationally, this is a story about a group of young musicians who stuck to their guns and didn’t cede their aspirations as soon as the going got tough. Much to the contrary, what you are about to read is — with all due respect to military veterans and disabled people — the act of resilience personified. And boy, can’t we at least all agree how that is in such short order these days?

Starting in August 2022, Mildred — who playfully tag their sound with amusing descriptors like “post-whatever,” “psychick warfare” and “skramz” on their Bandcamp page — got down to serious business by issuing a steady flow of singles and EPs (a total of nine, in fact). And then, on May 31, 2024, the band released the four-song Pt. of Things to Come along with this statement-slash-plea: “After many trials and tribulations we were burdened with, from a great swath of the recording being lost to personnel changes, Pt. of Things to Come is here.”

The statement continued: “As the title suggests, this is part of the material that will be re-recorded for our next full length, Pt. 1. Hence the cover, which is the canvas for Pt. 1‘s to be built. Here you receive a piece of what we’re trying to achieve. If you’re a visual artist, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to help contribute to the cover. If you’re a violinist, saxophonist or guitarist, please reach out to us! If you like what we do, consider donating gear to us.”

The three years the band spent in “development hell,” to cop a term used in the film industry to refer to a project that can’t get off the ground and is doomed to disappear, has — very fortunately for Mildred —culminated in an epic tour-de-force consisting of 23 songs performed by a total of 23 musicians. It’s a project so massive in scope, scale and size that it calls to mind larger-than-life, ambitious works by legends like Michael Gira, Stephin Merritt, Jason Spaceman and Lou Reed.

Pt. 1, which dropped a month ago, is best summed up by Mildred in a message sent to about two dozen music critics, including yours truly. A portion of it read: “Hello! I’ll keep it brief while I have your attention; we have a two-hour, 10-minute concept album about a neo-Abrahamic Biblical apocalypse with 23 musicians performing, including members of Febuary, Clay Birds and Terraplana. In fact, there’s a song with all 23 musicians performing together without hearing one another called ‘Babel.’ Additionally, they’re scattered across the record.

“Attached is our press kit and a link to the record, and I hope you view the record, enjoy it and potentially cover it because of the insane debt it put us in to produce,” the message went on. “We’re going on a U.S. tour this month with our friends in a band called Washed. Combined, we’ve performed alongside Planning for Burial, Febuary, Clay Birds, Flooding, Missouri Executive Order 44, et al. Also, Perry Farrell’s son did some artwork and was on the record, but I fired him and took his tracks off the record. Love you even if you send a curt message back.”

If you’ve ever wondered how to get a rock critic to at least take notice if not write about your band, you just got a seminar’s worth of surefire tactics. And so here we are, giving Mildred the attention they’ve worked so hard to earn, without letting exhaustion, cynicism or self-defeat get in the way of their mission. What follows is the communication we had with the impossible-not-to-love bunch.

Well, hello, Mildred. To begin, we give you the utmost respect for embarking on a project that seemed like it could only exist in a fantasy world and seeing it all the way to its fruition. To start on a simple note, so to speak, what was the germ of the record?

This record actually originated with the song “Plunge” on the last record [which was called Pt. 2 and released in August 2022 — no, we’re not kidding]. There was so much unexplored [musical terrain] in that very expansive and palpable universe we made that we wanted to discover more with Pt. 1. The origins of evil rather than the repercussions were explored more greatly on Pt. 1!

Were there any other ambitious projects that you aspired for yours to resemble? I’m thinking about records by Lou Reed, Swans, Godspeed, etc.

I don’t think we really had any records in mind. There’s definitely an undeniable influence from all of the above, as any good musician I imagine should have. We set out to make an all-encompassing record that acts as a parable and warning of how we get to the present-day world with all of its shortcomings. We just had two prerequisites: 23 songs and 23 musicians, for the number of chaos, which is a central theme of the record. 

Did your original vision for the project evolve in any unexpected ways? Did you let it grow organically or try to keep it in line with your original idea? Undertaking such an ambitious endeavor must’ve resembled the recording equivalent of herding cats.

When you’re working on an album, you maybe have an initial outline, but you’re kidding yourself if you think you know exactly how it’ll take shape. Not only will the ideas change or evolve, but so will you! In cases like these, maybe it’s better to be anecdotal. [For example, on the Pt. 1 song] “The Crash,” I originally wanted to get [mysterious Korean pop musician] Ren Takekawa to play guitar. It fell through, so I got Cameron Puleo and Foster Hilding on instead because I knew they would still deliver the performance I was looking for. 

We originally had a trip-hop song from a band member who was fired and removed entirely from the record. So we replaced all of his parts with a good friend, and he played bass on “Self-Hating Trip Hop Song,” which added this sense of upheaval to the track. We had a very clear plan and generally most artists delivered, albeit far later than I had accounted for, even considering the tardiness of artists, haha. We still managed to get everything done down to the wire. I tried to keep us adaptable and let fate dictate what the record would become. 

Did you initially want to rope in as many musicians as you wound up doing or did that happen incrementally and/or organically?

Yes! We always planned for 23 musicians, which hopefully won’t be so much of a challenge to convince people to work with us next time. 

When an artist sets out on a project with such an ambitious scale, they typically have a very clear vision of what they want it to be and see to it that the final result fits that vision. In what ways, if any, did your project gestate or mutate into something you didn’t expect?

I think maybe I didn’t expect to become the person I am, for the takeaway of the record to be what it is to the degree that it is. Maybe I had the general idea, but it manifested in an unexpected and beautiful way, with [the closing track] “A Song for Everyone.”

What was the most challenging aspect of making a record of this scale?

Money. It’s always money in America, dammit! We were on a shoestring budget and accrued a ton of debt making this record. It was all ultimately worth it though to make something we’re all proud of. Other than that, the complexity and length of the material was a major challenge. Some songs had to be divided into sections during writing. [The 13-and-a-half-minute] “Lila’s Death” had to be divided into two halves and combined later. Even then, it took three months to carve out the rough draft of the song.

Which came first, a desire to make something different or a thematic or musical idea that you found couldn’t be boxed into conventional rules of making records?

Not to name names, but that desire to make something different for the sake of being different or recognized for intellectual prowess is not only pretentious but reductive and asinine. That’s the death of art to me. Great art is made equally for fulfillment of the self and to give back to the world which we are infinitely indebted to for allowing us to be or exist in the first place. You should be fulfilled even by the act of giving the world what you believe it needs and you provide. Art is a labor of love made to immortalize that which is transient with something paradoxically transient itself. The idea of adhering to genre convention or rules when making a record seemed like a baffling inhibition. 

What did it feel like when you finally completed Pt. 1? 

Relief! Personally, I dedicated 40 hours a week from August 2024 to August 2025 to working on this album. We were all not only relieved but truly happy to finally hear the fruits of our labor. I hate when musicians don’t love their own music. You should be making what you love, otherwise you’re not sharing anything of value to the world. I think there’s two kinds of artists, maybe: those who are selfish and those who are not. 

How on earth are you presenting this to audiences in live settings?

Just like the record! Maybe, without all of the guests, but we try our best to have a full lineup. These days we’re just a four-piece if we’re lucky. Unfortunately, we’re mostly playing 30-minute sets, so we have to prioritize our absolute favorite tracks. 

What could you possibly create after this, which is kind of like the music equivalent to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis except not ludicrously expensive and ludicrous as a movie in general?

Our next record will probably be our last before we all move on to other things. Some of us leave the country. Not that we don’t love each other, but at that point, we might go on hiatus so that we can all live our lives and not interfere with each other’s long-term plans or life trajectory. We’ll come back eventually if the material demands to be made or people really want us to perform the other records again.

We’re very excited about the initial stages of our next record. It’ll take place in Los Angeles and will be about how Los Angeles is this microcosm of everything that is wrong with the world. Yes, we’re insane, because we’re probably going to debut a new song already in January. Please god, get Yeule and Chino Moreno on the next record! It’ll be awesome. Mildred loves you all.

Visit Mildred’s website to learn more about the band and its philosophy, then head over to Mildred’s Bandcamp page and throw down for some of their releases.

This entry was posted on 09/24/2025 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Interviews with tags Chino Moreno, Deftones, Mildred, yeule. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.