Dooms Day Trippers Fear Collapse Of Internet

Day Trippers joined our host Josh G to talk about the Trippers their latest self-titled album and where they see themselves poppin’ on the scene over the coming year.

Josh G: Welcome back to Atomic Radio Australia, broadcasting all across the Atomic radio network. Hey, I’m joined here by the Day Trippers, another Josh, I love meeting another Josh and Ammon lad’s hey how’s it going?

Trippers: Good Good. How are we?

Josh G: Aw mate, swell as a bell because boys, I haven’t met you before you came in today and it’s a pleasure to meet you I’ve been listening to Disarray the single but now there’s a brand new album out, as well, I’m really excited to see there’s some vinyl’s out too. Tell us about the new album lads.

Lovett: Yeah so we just dropped a new album last month on the 24^th, our self-title debut. Yeah, ten tracks of pure mayhem.

Ammon: Very brutal, it’s pretty hardcore stuff.

Josh G: Cause it’s quite a hybrid between rock and hip hop yeah? You guys have said that yourselves, in your bio and everything, where do those influences come from? Where does the rock influence come from, where does the hip hop influence come from?

Ammon: We definitely just heard so much growing up and it went on to form different loves. But you know it was definitely hip hop that started everything but like yeah, lots of heavy metal influences, to like thrash whatever.

Josh G: So you wanted to bring those instruments across?

Ammon: Yeah, definitely

Lovett: A big part of what we wanted to do in Day Trippers was try to create songs that were really heavily influenced by music that was nostalgic to us. So Disarray was quite nineties grunge sort of stuff, and you know there’s some other tracks that are more you know sort of hair metal and glam rock influenced or more straight up boom bap hip hop and stuff like that so yeah we really tried to pull from our influences so we weren’t necessarily boxed into one genre even though hip hop is the driving genre of the album.

Josh G: Yeah I get super Hilltop Hoods vibes. Is that kinda what you were going for or did that just sort of happen?

Ammon: Not really what we were going for but they were probably big influence you can’t escape that.

Josh G: probably more in your voices.

Lovett: It’s probably hard to be a rapper in Australia and not be influenced by the Hoods in some manner but yeah it wasn’t necessarily an intentional thing it was just, yeah

Josh G: A lucky coincidence? 

Lovett: Yeah

Josh G: Sweet, you guys are doing, have pressed a few vinyls. I’m a big fan of vinyl. I love your vinyl, that blue. Why did you guys decide to go vinyl. It’s very digital, the music market as you guys are aware, CD’s are dying, vinyl’s have finally sort of taken over again since the nineties. What made your decision to go down that road?

Lovett: So I’m a bit of a Doomsday prepper, like you know we could wake up tomorrow and the internet could be gone.

And that’s where a lot of people’s discography lives. So and being hip hop we sample from vinyls. So it’s a bit of giving back from where you take from sort of thing. So there’s a really famous DJ Shadow quote where he says that one day you will be in the dusty pile that you are digging from. And I always try to think of that. You gotta press it to vinyl, that will live forever.

Josh G: Yeah right. And you mentioned samples before, there are quite a lot of samples scattered throughout the album.

Ammon: That’s it, it is a real mixture of half samples, half instrumentation but even you know the samples have been built and had more live instruments and that added through the rest of the process. A good friend of ours is a sick guitarist, he played a lot of things on the album, organs and stuff like that.

Josh G: Who was that?

Lovett: Timothy Klien is his name and he does like a, we’ll make a beat, make a song and he helps us flesh it out with a lot of added instruments and things like that. 

Ammon: It’s a real sort of crazy process of everyone else’s stuff just coming to the table you know. I’ll go through his beats, and be like, I wanna do something with this one, or whatever he thinks.

Josh G: that’s really cool because there’s a lot of musicians that take on everything themselves

Ammon: It’s all done in-house first either by Josh or myself. We’re both making beats at the time there’s always lots of demos happening. 

Lovett: There’s lots of folders with hundreds of beats and hundreds of demo’s and when it’s time to create an album we both pull it out and listen to it and make an assessment and see if we can’t get the song off the ground. So it could be anyone’s brain child in that sense, it could be a demo either of us bring to the table and then we both flesh it out into a song.

Josh G: How do you decide from hundreds of demos, because it’s only a ten track album, how do you decide what gets put in there in the end.

Lovett: It all gets the time of day, every track could be an album track and then it’s just a question of what lasts. So what makes the cut is what stands the test of time. After a year or two of making an album what sounds fresh 

Ammon: or what sounds good playing after each other (on the track listing)

This album is kind of built upon the titles and once we sort of had enough we were like ‘yep that looks like an album’ on the whiteboard.

Josh G: so you’ve got a bunch of tracks sitting there ready to go, to use in the future if you want?

Trippers: Ah yeah we’ve already started DT2. Yeah I think we have about sixteen (tracks) up on the whiteboard at the moment.

Josh G: So how do you transform this hip hop rock collab thing into a live show, have you guys done a live show before?

Lovett: So the live show’s pretty hip-hop based. It is two MC’s and a DJ at the moment but we’ve got plans to do shows with a full band so in that sense it would be pretty fun to do, bass, keys, guitar, drummer.

Josh G: That would be super sick, I’m really looking forward to seeing that. I know everyones been locked up and there hasn’t been much going on but things are starting to happen again around the country, are you guys planning on doing anything soon?

Lovett: Yeah we’d love to do a couple of launches being that we’ve just come out of lockdown in Victoria. We’ve only just started to look at doing launches. 

Ammon: That’d be pretty exciting.

Josh G: So there’s nothing, no pen to paper yet on dates.

Lovett: Nah but we’d love to do a couple of local ones, Albury, Beechworth and stuff like that.

Josh G: Boys, that’s so insightful and very exciting. Thank you so much, it’s so great that we have some aussie hip hop coming up around here as well and super keen to be spinning it here on atomic radio Australia. Lads before we go, where can we find your music and I spoke about your vinyl before, where can we find that because that looks super sick?

Lovett: So you can find it at itsdaytrippers.bandcamp.com and there’s a few shirts and merch available there too. 

Josh G: And what about the socials as well?

Lovett: Yeah, you can find us on everything and that’s @itsdaytrippers. You can find our personal ones too.

Josh G: nothing scandalous on there?

Ammon: not yet, there will be soon.

Josh G: Well just before we go if there’s one scandal you’d like to be known for, what is it?

Lovett: Well I wouldn’t mind being caught for trafficking something across the border. [laughs]

Josh G: That is fantastic, lads thanks so much for coming into the studio, super keen to see how this album goes and super keen to see you guys playing live soon too.