The Warehouse smelled like the late 90s on Easter Sunday, all talc and fog machines. The show that night featured one of the first fully electronic bands I had seen at the place in years. Owing to its exposure in video games such as Amplitude and Guitar Hero, Freezepop tends to get its foot in the doors of more places than a band fueled by programming, keytars, and whimsical lyrics might. Then again, being a fantastic electronic band is what got Freezepop’s foot in the door in the first place.

Earlier in the day I got to speak with the members of Freezepop, whose members – singer Liz Enthusiasm and multi-instrumentalists Bananas Foster and Sean Drinkwater (or, as often is claimed, his clone) – ran through the discussion with the same devil-may-care stream of consciousness that characterizes their music.


The Second Supper: You’ve been around as a group for 10 years. How have you changed in that time?

Sean Drinkwater: It’s more like 9 years and 10 months.

Liz Enthusiasm: We’re so much more mature now!

SD: Yeah, our music’s really matured and deepened. Nah, I don’t know; our tastes have changed and that’s kind of changed our records a little, but I think it’s actually pretty close.

LE: We’re less overtly bleepy-blippy.

SD: We’re a little less silly, although there are still some silly songs.

LE: We’re less twee.

SD: Our sense of style is a little better than it used to be!

Bananas Foster: We don’t give freezepops out at every show anymore.

SS: It seems that your music has covered a wide electronic spectrum anyways, so have you not needed to change that formula?

SD: I think we started out making music that we really liked in the first place. We were fairly locked into our tastes in a certain genre to begin with. We still like a lot of the same music we used to 10 years ago, and a lot of those cornerstone influences are still there. We never go too far. There have been times when we’ve tried to, and at the end of the day we listen to it and it sounds like a Freezepop song with a distorted bass on it.

SS: At the same time, your lyrics also cover a wide spectrum, ranging from something as knowingly self-deprecating as “Pop Music Is Not a Crime” to the more standard lyrics that follow…

LE: I would say, over the years the lyrics have gotten less overtly jokey. I think I’ve learned what has stood the test of time. At the beginning we had some songs that were kind of dumb, and the joke gets a little old after awhile.

SD: We have a song called “Brainpower” which is almost about her discovering that her bad ideas are bad the next day. (Laughs) We turned that into a silly song that happened at work, but it’s kind of like that thing where (in falsetto voice) “Oh, I wrote a song about a kitten and it had half a brain.” And in the morning: “Uh, that was no good.”

SS: You have a lot of side projects. Did Freezepop begin as one of these?

SD: It certainly did!

SS: What was the main focus?

SD: Bananas and I were in a band called Lifestyle in the mid-late 90s.

BF: We’re still in it, right?

SD: We’re still in it. We’re also in another thing called Karacter which is a little bit more like Freezepop. Freezepop works fairly slowly, and there’s a lot of room for us to do other things. In the time that our Freezepop record comes out, each of our solo projects generally releases something. Our tastes are varied enough that we can go ahead and make different records and come back – that actually might be one reason why it’s easy to come back to the Freezepop aesthetic, because we expressed other things.

SS: How much blends over from project to project?

BF: There are synthesizers in everything.

LE: Occasionally songs will migrate from one band to another.

SD: That’s true. Now and then we’ll be playing one, and this will work better for this or that. Lifestyle’s more of a rock band; Karacter’s more of a late 70s synthesizer thing like Kraftwerk.

SS: Any Roxy Music in it?

SD: More Roxy Music in Lifestyle. More…

BF: Space rock disco…

SD: With slightly snarky lyrics.

SS: Any saxophones in it?

BF: No; we’ve been trying to work that in.

SD: We tried to get a horn player last year, but no go so far.

SS: Do you have anything new coming out?

LE: We’re working on some new stuff. We don’t quite know when – maybe early next year. We’re notoriously slow.

SD: We’re really shooting for January. As soon as I say that, it’ll be January 2012.

BF: We are playing some new songs tonight.

SD: We’ve never really done that before, where we tour new material before it’s released. It’s pretty typical for a band to work out the kinks in the material as you play it so you figure out what works. A decade in, we’re getting used to how to do that.

SS: How often do you tour?

SD: We go out for two weeks at a time, every two months. By the end of the year, it’s usually two or three months that we’ve been out, but not ever in one stretch. That’s very difficult on us.

SS: So it’s not just touring in support of a new album.

SD: There was only really one year that we took almost completely off from Freezepop; we just needed a rest. I think that was 2006, and we played maybe a total of four or five shows. 2005 wasn’t particularly heavy with shows, either. That followed a regular pace where we released an album in 2004 and toured a lot, and it kind of died down and we weren’t playing. This record’s had slightly longer legs, so we’ve been able to keep touring and not necessarily have a new full-length. We do have a new EP out, but there’s no real pattern with us, no record-tour-record-tour. It’s pretty up in the air, as our schedules allow us to finish a record. If we can’t, it waits.

SS: You’ve been forerunners of the chipset genre that is just beginning to come into the mainstream with groups like Crystal Castles. Do you view yourselves as ahead of the curve?

BF: If you’re far enough behind the curve, you’re ahead of the curve.

SD: This is just our taste in music, and it’s going to come in and out of vogue. The kind of music we do happens to be in vogue right now, but in five years, who knows? Back to nu-metal and grunge.

LE: The whole electroclash thing happened and went away, and we were kind of on the outskirts of that, too. There’s always some kind of electronic thing happening somewhere.

SD: When electroclash died its slow death, then we were scurrying to not be too tied to it – “No, we weren’t really an electroclash band!” – which we’re not!

LE: We’re way more poppy than that stuff.

SD: We just have to focus on making the music we like. Eventually it’s going to be popular, and sometimes it’s not going to be.

SS: How much does it help, being tied in with Harmonix?

LE: Immeasurably.

SD: We were building up indie popularity before we had any songs in games. We had a record out in Europe, and we’d been touring around the world – it wasn’t like there wasn’t anything happening. But especially after [Guitar Hero] came out – which was the third Harmonix game – it was a crazy time to be involved with thing that became a cultural phenomenon. It wasn’t like the other rhythm games where we’d occasionally hear from kids who played our game. Suddenly, my grandmother’s seeing Guitar Hero at Best Buy. It was strange to be a part of that cultural phenomenon, but neat, too. Maybe there’s 30,000 Freezepop CDs in print, but suddenly a couple million kids have at least one of our songs in their lap. That’s as good a delivery system as you can get.

SS: At the same time, it seems that the games are now being co-opted by already mainstream bands…

LE: Now that labels are getting hip to this new business model…

SD: Let’s just say that we got very lucky to get into it when we did.

LE: Yeah. Now, it’s pretty much impossible for an upcoming band to break into it.

SD: Dear Harmonix, here’s my demo tape!

SS: You had a couple of songs that were out for a while before they were put on these games, but “Less Talk More Rokk” came out at about the same time as the game it appeared on. Do you now make certain songs with the knowledge that they will appear in a game?

SD: The process of deciding what song we would submit is not random. Something may make sense because it has a lead riff, but it’s not as though we write songs for the games.

SS: “Less Talk More Rokk” feels very much like a single.

SD: We liked the vibe of that song right out of the gate. It worked out really well. The first Guitar Hero game had “Get Ready to Rokk,” and we did add a guitar to it. Originally, it was sort of done as a joke. We submitted it like, “Isn’t this funny?” and they were like, “This is great!” Oh, yeah! That’s what we meant! We have made some adjustments; we put a guitar in that. We put a guitar in “Brainpower.”

SS: But it’s more retroactive.

SD: Yeah.

SS: Is there any music you feel strongly about right now?

BF: We talk about music all day in the tour van.

LE: We like the new Royksopp album.

SD: None of us wanted to listen to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones when the kid from the film crew wanted to listen to it. We have some kids following us, making a documentary, and he was offering up some music from his phone, and we kept rejecting it.

LE: He had some good stuff.

SD: Yeah, eventually he had some stuff that we wanted to hear. It actually got to be kind of funny, him just naming bands.

LE: At a certain point he began naming bands that he assumed we wouldn’t like.

SD: Our tastes are a little tough to pin down. He’d name a couple of things he thought we’d hate, and we’d yell “Hey, put it on now!”

BF: Dokken.

SS: So you don’t just listen to electronic music?

BF: We listen to a lot of albums that have instruments made of wood.

SS: Keytars made of wood.

BF: Acoustic keytar. Super heavy.

SD: With harpsichord strings. That’s a good idea!


It tends to be interesting to see how electronic bands pull off their live shows, being that so much of the music is predetermined. Freezepop delivered in a big way.

Liz Enthusiasm’s unaffected and intentionally loopy singing style was spot-on (including a vicious growl at the end of “Get Ready to Rokk”), and Bananas Foster anchored the songs with keytar and touch-screen drumming (which was really cool to watch). But Sean Drinkwater was the angel-faced belle of the ball: prancing around stage beneath blue lights, ripping wicked guitar solos, resting his head on Bananas’ shoulder and creeping him out during “Boys on Film,” keytaring the blazes out of “Less Talk More Rokk,” and jumping into the crowd to unleash Robotic Dancing Attacks.

The band played all of its video game hits, which made a group of girls at the front shriek with joy. (One of them had snuck in a dachshund; I’m not sure if the dog was up there with them.) Freezepop also played through some new material and old tunes, each one coming off as well as its name-brand tracks. The Japanese-themed “Tenisu no Boifurendo” was a particular standout, adding a new dimension and urgency to its studio version.

However, none of this blippy goodness could have prepared the audience for the total rapture which came at show’s end, when Freezepop blew up the club with A TWO KEYTAR RENDITION OF EUROPE’S “THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!” The whole place lost its everloving shit, which was only compounded as the band returned to stage and busted out A TWO KEYTAR RENDITION OF JOURNEY’S “DON’T STOP BELIEVING!” I never believed in Keytar Heaven until this Easter, but it appears that Keytar Heaven is real, and Freezepop’s members are its tomfoolery-driven circuitboard archangels.