Changing jobs can be a stressful time for anyone, but what if your career was rooted in creating music and changing jobs was completely shifting genres? It’s not a revolutionary concept by any means, but that doesn’t make it any less of a feat. The Black Queen frontman, Greg Puciato, knows this all too well.
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Greg used to be the vocalist for ferocious mathcore band, The Dillinger Escape Plan, who hung up their boots after a 20-year career in 2017. Towards the end of their journey, the vocalist joined forces with former Dillinger and Nine Inch Nails tech, Steven Alexander, and Telefon Tel Aviv‘s Joshua Eustis to create the first TBQ record, Fever Daydream. With their second album, Infinite Games, now out in the wild, I had a chat with Greg about his transition from the extreme to the subdued, and that one time he rode a table during a Perth show.
Sonically, the two projects couldn’t be further apart, so it’s only natural that the first release would be a scary venture for Greg, particularly when it comes to the fanbase surrounding his heaver project.
“I was so fucking scared, I’ve never been more scared in my life,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “The day we uploaded ‘The End Where We Start‘ video to YouTube, I had it sitting on private. For like three hours I was just sitting there at my computer looking at the switch that would switch it from private to public and I was like, I don’t think I can do it.”
Of course, the reaction to the video and subsequent album was incredibly positive, which left him feeling relieved, but guilty for doubting his fans.
“I felt so bad for possibly underestimating the emotional intelligence of our audience, then I realised that they don’t appreciate me for simply the rage element or the violence element, they appreciate honesty, and appreciate vulnerability,” he said.
While the change in style is obviously quite drastic, it’s not something he considers a change or deviation from the creative process used in Dillinger. Both projects are vessels for emotional output, whether it’s via singing or screaming.
“It’s about vulnerability and kinda just tearing your skin off and letting people see what’s inside,” he said. “So that approach is the same, it just so happens these emotions are different emotions and that, if anything, that’s the connection that allows people to connect the two.”
“Things I was dealing with on One of Us Is the Killer bled right into Fever Daydream, which bled right into Dissociation, which bled right into Infinite Games, so behind the scenes of my life, I look at each album like it’s the tip of an iceberg and underneath of that tip is a fucking bunch of shit that person’s dealing with.”
Compared with Fever Daydream, Infinite Games is certainly a slower burning, less immediate listen. Rather than a collection of singles, its effects are best when consumed in a single listen. It almost feels like less of an album and more of a soundtrack.
Fever Daydream, Greg says, is like the very obvious creative intersection of all three members of the band. Like any fresh project, folks tend to lean on the brightest colours in their inventory rather than exploring everything at their disposal. As he puts it, it’s like “you’re only using 8 crayons, you’re not using 64,” he said. Infinite Games is a more considered approach to the group’s sound with a wider palette, and it’s for the better.
“You have to slow down a little bit more, this record’s a little more abstract than the first one, it’s not just like ‘here’s a single, here’s another single, here’s another single’,” he said. “It feels more mature to me.”
“This time, the bulk of the record was created after a year and a half straight of Dillinger Escape Plan shows, so I felt like I didn’t need to make something that was really aggressive and really in your face, so when we were making the record, really early on it became an exercise for me in restraint and nuance and intimacy and vulnerability.”
Similar to the production of Fever Daydream, all of the sounds on the latest TBQ record were made by the group from scratch, which is something that’s pretty important to them.
“We never open up a library and pick a kick drum or pick a snare drum,” Greg said. “Every single sound is either mutated from a synthesiser, or it’s created from some type of noise synthesis.”
Some of the snares, for example, are warped white noise clips, while other parts were made with breath or breathing noises. In terms of synths, many of the sounds were crafted with old analogue synths that aren’t readily available these days. The whole idea is to create a unique sound that can’t be replicated by others.
“To me, that’s all really important because it gives the record a sonic fingerprint,” he said. “If you don’t care about that kind of stuff, it feels lazy to me.”
Back in 2012, a swathe of outlets reported that Greg had been hospitalised during a pretty wild psychedelic experience he had with some magic mushrooms. I was curious about whether an experience like that had a profound effect on his creativity, particularly as a part of TBQ.
“From like 2011 to 2013, which was like the genesis of this band, I did a lot of drugs,” he said. “I got to the point where I was abusing. I wasn’t addicted, I was an abuser, so it wasn’t like, I have to do drugs, it was like, when I do them, I’m gonna do a fucking lot of them.”
He told me that a lot of the experiences he had in this time affected his creativity, but not from a corny Hollywood perspective where he “suddenly understood the way melody or harmony worked, or suddenly was able to write different kinds of vocal phrasing,” but by allowing him to access areas of himself emotionally which he had closed off.
Honestly, and this is terrible to fucking say, I did have a lot of fucking breakthroughs in my personal life and psychologically because of using, particularly, psychedelic drugs and I think that it changed my creative approach a lot, but not because I had some creative understanding, it’s because I had a more personal, psychological understanding that then changed the way I approached my art.
Dillinger were always well-known for their blisteringly intense live sets, which usually involved Greg and guitarist, Ben Weinman, climbing on anything and everything they possibly could. There’s one clip in particular from the band’s early days captured at a Virgin Megastore where Greg walks so far on the crowd he almost ends up at the escalators.
You could expect energy like that at any Dillinger show anywhere in the world. Not only would you get to see one of the world’s most impressively technical groups in action, you’d also get a fucking entertaining stage show at the same time.
There’s one video, in particular, that illustrates this point better than any other. It’s Dillinger playing ‘43% Burnt‘ during the Perth leg of Soundwave 2012. One second, Greg is standing on top of a speaker stack, the next he’s feeding a trestle table to the audience, then suddenly he’s riding it. You can hear people near the camera asking “what is he doing?” and screaming “Greg, no!” It’s a wild ride and I giggle every time I see it.
To me, that would be one helluva rememberable set, but after thousands of shows, it all seems to meld into one for Greg.
“I gotta tell you, man, I don’t remember these things until someone shows me a video,” he said. “There’s a video on the internet of me running across people’s heads or something, I don’t remember doing that, you know?”
Being on stage, for me, because there’s so much anxiety involved, and because there’s so much happening, you’re in sensory overload mode. The music is just moving really quickly, so I feel like there’s a lot of times people are like, ‘man I can’t believe you jumped off that thing,’ and I’ll be like, ‘hey, I jumped off a thing tonight? Shit, ok’.
So a lot of the time, the thought process and the thing happening all happen in a millisecond and before I know it I’m standing on a fucking table being passed around the crowd and I’m like ‘how the fuck did I get on this table?’
While playing a TBQ show is certainly a lot less frantic, Greg still gets all the same feelings he did on stage with Dillinger, only with different people.
“This going to sound crazy too, but I do feel the same on stage in The Black Queen that I felt in Dillinger,” he said. “If a Black Queen song ended I could easily start playing ‘Prancer’ next because I’m the same person.”
“It does feel the same to me, the only thing that’s weird to me is sometimes I’ll turn around and think that like Ben is gonna be there or I’ll turn around to look at Billy, and Billy’s not there, like, oh, right, it’s not the same band.”
Unlike his previous musical endeavours, TBQ is steering clear of labels and managers and instead self-releasing their work via Federal Prisoner, which is essentially the groups very own art collective. While the idea didn’t necessarily stem from bad experiences with labels in the past, Greg says it’s all about avoiding the dilution of his work.
“I started to surround myself with less and less people that I didn’t agree with because I don’t wanna have my fingerprint corrupted,” he said. “You corrupt your scent and it throws your audience off. The audience is following you because you feel a certain way to them and if you fuck with that feel, they can fucking tell.”
I wanna be at a point where I don’t ever have to fucking do that. I don’t wanna put something out that doesn’t feel like genuinely me, I want it to be completely pure and uncorrupted and I felt like by the end of Dillinger I was at a place where I knew that I had enough audience trust and I had enough people that were kind of following what I was doing for whatever reason.
I don’t wanna be a fucking trophy in someone else’s case forever, man. I wanna build my own fucking case.
You can pick up Infinite Games right now from wherever you get your music. I highly recommend you do, because it’s an incredible record. TBQ will be touring Australia in January with Drab Majesty via Carbon Sunset. All shows are currently sold the fuck out.
