Every vibrant music scene has a few bands that are legit staples but still a substantial presence in the underground, with DIY fashion for touring, a resumé that features a variety of established bands and musicians. In Brooklyn, a prime example are the garage punks Desert Sharks.
On July 30, lead vocalist and bassist Stephanie Gunther, guitarists Sunny Veniero and Cait Smith and drummer Rebecca Fruchter are performing at Café Nine in New Haven with the show starting at 8 p.m. They’ll headline a stacked bill with local punks Qween Kong and Point Radar, and fellow New Yorkers Power Pose rounding things out.
I had a chance to talk with Gunther, Smith and Fruchter ahead of the show about a unique record they put out last year, playing a cool music festival in Italy, performing in Connecticut for the first time, and working on new material.
RD: Desert Sharks’ most recent release is a four-song split record with fellow Brooklynites A Very Special Episode that came out in March of last year, so how did this project come together and what was the experience like making it? You hardly hear about bands doing split releases anymore.
SG: That’s very true. I feel like A Very Special Episode presented us, did they?
CS: Yes, they did.
SG: They approached us saying, ”Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to do a split? It would be less pressure on us to write a full-length album and it’s something we could do together.” We all decided to do four songs based on elements, and we drew which element out of a hat, so we got water and earth and they got air and fire. That’s how that EP is set up.
RD: So the record is like Captain Planet.
SG: It’s like Captain Planet, but with no heart. (laughs)
RD: Maybe the heart is in the music, you know?
CS: Yeah, and they’re an excellent band too. We adore the people in A Very Special Episode.
SG: They’re good friends of ours, so we thought it was a fun idea. We could make our own rules, so we decided to write some music together.
CS: Long live the split.
SG: Long live the split. (laughs)
RD: Yeah, like I said earlier, you don’t see a lot of those coming out these days. Split releases seem to be a very ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s thing, but it’s cool that you did one. Fast forward to now, a couple weeks ago you played the Siren Fest out in the Italian city of Cagliari with The Horrors, Stereolab, The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis and a bunch of other bands and musicians. What was the experience like being part of that festival?
CS: Oh, man. It was a dream come true, honestly. We were really honored to be invited, the festival was amazing at a beautiful venue, the crowd was really feeling it, we were feeling them, and it was just a great experience. We also kind of turned it into a bit of a trip because not too many times in life is one person presented with the opportunity to go to Sardinia, which is an unbelievably beautiful place. It was a dream, it was fantastic, and we got to meet and hang out with some of the guys in The Messthetics, which was really a meet your heroes moment with Joe [Lally] and Brendan [Canty] from Fugazi, of course. Shoutout to those guys, lifer cool guys.
In so many ways, it was a real life highlight and a real band highlight. It was a real treat.
RD: That’s fantastic. Desert Sharks has been a band based in Brooklyn for over 15 years now, so how much do you feel this band has evolved since the self-titled EP you put out back in 2011 and how much has your local scene changed during that gap of time? I heard about the venue Our Wicked Lady closing down in Brooklyn, which is unfortunate.
SG: A lot has changed. First to talk about the band, we were kind of a totally different sound before, and Cait joined in 2021. We feel that’s when the real incarnation of Desert Sharks came to be, so we’ve changed completely, and also so many venues have closed and opened since then, which does happen in New York pretty frequently. It feels especially rough right now, I feel like a lot of venues are struggling all over the world.
RF: So many venues that we’ve loved over the years like Death By Audio, when that closed it was a big deal a few years back. As the scene changes, it’ll be interesting to see which venues pop up that the scene adopts as their home base, so we’ll see if that happens, or if it can even happen the same way that it used to. Our Wicked Lady was the last one like that around.
RD: The state of live music, especially for local bands, definitely seems a bit uncertain sometimes. What are your thoughts on coming to perform at Cafe Nine?
CS: We’re very excited about it.
SG: I don’t think we’ve played in Connecticut yet.
RF: No, this will be our first time.
SG: We’re really excited to be like, “We’ve finally made it here!”(laughs) Everything I’ve heard about the venue is that it’s super cool.
RD: It’s a great spot, and it’s in New Haven so you can be the first-person judge on the eternal debate between New York City and New Haven pizza.
CS: I’m absolutely going to take advantage of the pizza situation, internal comparisons will happen.
SG: We also were just in Italy, so compare the pizza from there too.
RD: There you go, so you have the trifecta.
CS: Maybe we should start a pizza podcast.
SG: That could be a good idea, doing a pizza podcast.
RD: I fully support it if you end up starting one. Can we expect any new recordings to come out later this year or at some point in the future from Desert Sharks following this split record you did?
SG: We have some songs written. We’d hoped they’d be written faster, but we’ve been playing a lot, which is a great excuse to not be writing as fast. We’re really excited about the new stuff that we’ve been writing. You hope to evolve and enjoy writing new things, which can be daunting, but we’re all pretty pumped about what we’ve written so far. We got some skeletons that still need to be fleshed out, but we really like the direction we’re going in.
CS: I’ll say that you can expect some classic Desert Sharks traits, but it’s going to be heavy and also urgent. I think there’s going to be some urgent songs and also melodic. There’s going to be some real nice harmony action and some nice melodies, but it’s going to be hard.