Viagra Boys and A Musical (Bon?) Voyage
Contradiction, Humor, Viagra Forever.
I’ve been listening to the recent Viagra Boys album, viagr aboys, nonstop since it came out, and what strikes me most is the band’s signature blend of goofy irreverence and hard hitting emotional precision. Their music is brash, chaotic, literal, and often deliberately unserious. It’s filled with snarling guitars, pounding drums, grimy bass lines, and that swaggering brass-and-synth grit that gives their songs an especially unhinged post-punk grandeur. However, beneath the noise is a surprising clarity of feeling. In “You N33d Me,” they sing:
“I can bring the type of vibe to the party that nobody likes and I make everybody sad.”
Then in “Man made of meat” they sing:
“I hate almost everything that I see and I just wanna disappear.”
It’s blunt, self-undercutting, straight to the point and funny in a reflective way.
Their lyrics often oscillate between the straightforwardly narrative to the bizarre, detailed mythos, like in this lyric from “Best in Show Pt. IV”
“I survived a sacrificial ritual I was gutted like a fish and stabbed by a shadow man from an ayahuasca cult”
It’s absurd and almost cartoonish yet somehow tinged with a strange, haunted yearning and tangible emptiness calling out for recognition. They also have a knack for political observation that always feels like a damning critique of the hive-mindedness that’s become all too easy to subscribe to. That ability to exist in two realms at once – the sincere and the insincere, the emotionally naked and the completely unhinged – is what makes Viagra Boys so brilliant to me. Their ethos really resonated with me and felt like the most accurate picture of the push and pull I imagine happening in my own mind when I flip from stoic and chronically awkward to squealing vibrancy and unfounded hubris. After listening to it, I realized I had been instinctively building toward that kind of duality in my own work.
If you’ve heard my album Rain’s Recital, you might be surprised to hear me connect the two. But that complicated relationship of tension between emotional distance and emotional truth helped me understand what I was trying to capture when I was making it a few years ago.
The origin of Rain’s Recital actually began with a single song: an overly lamenting, emotionally teasing, but fiercely dismissive track I wrote called “Everybody Hurts.” It was my first formal attempt at songwriting, and it revealed something essential about how I was processing, or refusing to process, my emotions at the time, things I recognized retrospectively might I add. I was detached, treating sadness like an inconvenience, and the song’s cynical almost satirical edge became a kind of shield. It also became the premise for the album: What happens when you downplay your emotions while participating in a medium that forces you to reckon with them? From that seed, Rain’s Recital grew into a theatrically decorated, professedly self-aware exploration of emotional dread lined with melodrama, motivational refrains, narratives of isolation and cosmic screams about the struggle to find freedom.
It took about three years to complete, entirely remotely. I recorded vocals and guitar samples at home with a tiny USB microphone, sending files to producers and instrumentalists on SoundBetter across time zones, hoping the fragments I launched into the void came back transformed. By the end, around thirty people had helped to build the album, a number I find misleading given the small-scale intimacy of the final product but that was the nature of it. I think it was totally worth it.
Don’t get me wrong, I can spend days pointing out the qualities I wish I brought to the table that a band like Viagra Boys seems to fall into by way of the pure inertia of their star power, shocking lyricism, extensive references, live chemistry, tightness of tone, and, of course, the production magic that comes from truly trusted, well-developed instincts. But for an album in pieces, I am far from ashamed of what whole I created.
Somewhere in me will always be a singer-songwriter. My commitment to filmmaking isn’t a contradiction to that, rather an extension. What I find most gratifying as I look back on it is how even with all the setbacks, something emotionally true came out of it. And it represents, probably, my last foray into music-making at this scale.
I’m actually in the middle of writing a live comedy performance to accompany the album. Something that leans into the comedic and politically rife qualities rampant throughout the Viagra Boys album. It feels like the perfect final note to this project: a blend of sincerity, satire, theater, and emotional contradiction. The same balance that inspired me from the start.
You can listen to that album here, but you should tap into Viagra Boys if you haven’t already: