And This Year’s Award for Most Vapid Interview of 2025 Goes to …
For all the talk about the upheaval in the music industry – a topic of discussion that started 25 years ago and hasn’t abated since – the monopolistic industry is still riddled with some of the same unsavory practices and behaviors that have persisted in it for decades. That includes major label incursions, which fertilize egocentrism in young, wanna-be musicians who, for the most part, are lucky if their careers last more than a few years.
The Bad Penny was reminded once again this year that, while indie labels are struggling to stay afloat and quality musicians are working as hard as they can and trying to develop fresh ways to establish themselves, the industry still encompasses shiftless, entitled, 401k-backed major label signees as well. Those execs are the people who not only don’t know how good they’ve got it, they seem to believe they can always deny responsibility when something goes wrong and the blame lies squarely in their lap.
[Case in point: Read heretofore unpublished interviews with New York industrial-metal Black Satellite and try to locate any valuable insights, cleverness or deep thoughts.]
Hi Larissa. I’m grateful to have connected with you. How has the tour been going so far?
The tour has been amazing. It’s so awesome to be out here on the road with Marilyn Manson. The crowds are fucking nuts. We’ve been getting such good feedback and responses every night, and I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow.
That bill came together pretty recently, right?
Yeah.
Because you had already committed to touring with Cradle of Filth. How did the offer to tour with Mariyn Manson come about?
It just kind of fell out of the sky. [My camp] said, “Hey, you’ve always wanted to do this tour.” And I was like, “That’s fucking lovely.” Before I knew it, I’m flying my band members and getting us on the road. Unfortunately, we had to drop off Cradle of Filth dates.
All of them?
Yeah, because the Cradle of Filth and Marilyn Manson dates overlapped, unfortunately.
You had played with Cradle of Filth before anyway, right?
Yeah, we’ve actually toured with them three times.
Wow. What is it that you really bond over with them?
They’re all really cool people, super down to earth. And we kind of goof around with each other. They’re like family at this point. We’ve spent so much time on the road with them.
Had you been a fan of Cradle of Filth before you toured with them?
I actually don’t listen to a lot of that style of metal. We have the same management.
Do you share the same management with Marilyn Manson too? Was it through his management that you got booked on that tour?
Yeah, his team reached out to us.
There’s some overlap between Cradle of Filth and Marilyn Manson’s audiences, right?
Some, maybe. Every night, people tell me they saw me at a Wednesday 13 show, or a Drowning Pool show, or a Cold show. That’s so fucking awesome, you know?
Have you found that one fan base has been more receptive to your music than another?
We’ve been very lucky that we get really good responses from a lot of crowds. I feel like, [thanks to] the nature of our sound, we can fit well with a lot of different bands. We’re versatile in that sense. It’s been working out really great on this tour especially. The crowd’s losing their fucking minds, and we feel it too. We feed off that energy. We’re just so grateful for this opportunity, so grateful to play these shows, no matter where we are or who we’re playing with. It’s just the coolest thing ever. We’re living the fucking dream.
Do you feel like the audience is getting more animated because you guys are changing or taking a different approach to the delivery of your music in concert? Or do you chalk it up to the strength of the new material?
I think it’s because we’ve played hundreds of shows. Whenever we approach a show, we play like our life depends on it. We’re really grateful to do what we do. So we never go into it thinking, “Oh, it’s just another show.” Because, for a lot of the people in [sparsely attended] crowds, ours could be a show they remember for the rest of their life. So we always try to lay it [all] out there. We do our best and we give our heart and soul to every single performance, and I feel like that translates. It looks like we give a shit because we genuinely do. There’s nowhere we’d rather be than onstage with each and every one of those people in the crowd.
When you talk with fans after shows or on social media, have you found that there’s certain songs of yours that really hit home for fans more than others?
That’s a really great question. Writing music for me is very cathartic. So I tend to write about personal experiences and emotions. It’s a place where I can be extremely vulnerable. I’m not really afraid to write about these kinds of things. You know when you put a song out, it becomes so much greater than just my personal experiences. It takes on a multiple identity to the listeners as well.
When you’re writing, does it ever dawn on you that you might be getting a little bit too personal, so you decide to maybe scale it back or make it more broad?
I don’t think I write about something very specific. It’s more about the thought and emotion behind it. I try to be very relatable to people.
What kind of a headspace would you say you’re in now as far as your artistry and creative process go?
Like I said, I’m dealing with negative emotions that I want to get out of, and making music does that for me. I’m not one of those people who are always like, “Oh, I’m really fucking happy. Let me go write a song about being super-happy.” It’s only when I’m alone in my room, and it’s like, “Oh shit.” So, unfortunately, for those reasons our songs tend to gravitate towards [sic] the darker concepts there. I think it might be kind of weird for me to write a happy song. I mean, there are positive messages about overcoming trauma or stuff like that. I mean there’s always a positive light.
It seems like younger people can really sniff out the bullshit, maybe because they’re effectively enslaved by corporate dominance since birth. Do you perceive that as a positive, that they can tell when you’re being genuine?
I always just try to be unapologetically myself. I am who I am. It’s not gonna change [how much people] love me. We tell ourselves that “it is what it is.” So, I don’t know.
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“I don’t think I write about something very specific.”
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Can you talk about some new topics or struggles that you haven’t dealt with before but did so this time around?
Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely a lot of new things that I dive into on this record. And, you know, especially our new single, “Downfall,” which just dropped yesterday. It’s available on all platforms with a new video everybody can check out. So I’m really curious to hear what everyone thinks about it. I hope they love it as much as we do.
How long do you see yourself touring behind your new record?
God, if I could just do it constantly and never come home, I would. We kind of have been doing that. Hopefully I just keep going like I don’t want to stop. I love it.
The Bad Penny (beta) 
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