Getting the Brains in one place for an interview is no mean feat. They’re based in three different countries, always on tour and are deep in the process of sharing their first album in five years, ‘Crazy Monster’.

The Brains on ‘Crazy Monster’ aren’t the same band you’d recognise pre-pandemic, with two thirds only joining recently. “I love [the lineup change] on my side,” explains frontman René De La Muerte, “And the adventure to go get them was super awesome because the album ‘Crazy Monster’ was made by me at the beginning and after the pandemic. I started writing that stuff, and then I went to Montreal to record the drums of the first official version, let’s say, of that album. And then after that, it didn’t work out with the drummer. We were having too many problems, and then it was very difficult. So I ended up coming to Spain to record a band because that’s what I do too, and then I ended up looking for a drummer and somebody suggested to me Txer.” Txernobilly, who De La Muerte affectionately calls ‘Txer’ (pronounced to rhyme with ‘there’), grins broadly before the vocalist continues, “and Txernobilly is the stage manager of the Psychobilly Meeting too. So I had met him already. So I was like, ‘this guy’s cool’, and I decided to go to Spain to meet him for real. I got to an island called Mallorca, and I was like, this is crazy adventure, leaving from Vancouver, one plane to Montreal, Montreal to go to Spain, and then take another plane or something. And I’m finally in a fucking island and it’s like, he’s there: ‘what’s up, man?’

Like I said, I knew him as the stage manager. But then we started recording it. I heard what he had done before, and I knew that he had the right spices for it because it’s not… like all the drummers of the Brains, when I started this in 2001, the first quality of the drummer was that we were pretty intense. It had to be intense and powerful, but rhythmic too, not sloppy. It has to be almost machine, but human machine…” “Tight,” suggests bass player Bruno Malo, and De La Muerte nods. “It needs to be tight, and that comes from Montreal for me because Montreal had a lot of metal in the past. I don’t know if it still has, but I was brought up in metal around me and punk rock and some other music like that, but mostly the drummers that I met in my life in Montreal were either like very sloppy or super, super tight because of metal. There was no middle ground. I needed something between the rock and roll feel, which is very human, driving the choruses and bringing the emotion through the verses into a tight drumming with intense power, which married a lot with the bass. So that’s what happened. I met him in the island. We started recording and it was super cool, man. He didn’t know how I recorded it. I record pretty weirdly, but it works.” “[It was] super intense for me,” explains Txernobilly. “You sent me the tracks. I remember I had one week and a half or something, I [had] to learn all the tracks and then receive René to fucking record that in, let’s say, four days or something like that. I don’t remember exactly, but yeah, it was four days, three days or something like that, not stopping. I was so excited about that because it was a very big opportunity for me. Yeah, I had to do that, you know, 100%. And to receive René to my home, just after meeting him in the festival, just there, like a quick chat there between the shows, or something. Yeah, it means a lot to me, like as a musician and like as a drummer.” 

“It was cool too because the studio’s portable that I have,” says De La Muerte, so I brought the tracks after through his apartment and then I was like, ‘man, listen to this’. This is fucking amazing, and he’s like, ‘holy shit’. So so the way I write music is that I have a studio and then I put like, let’s say a track, which is like a tempo and then like at the time of the tempo and then I record my demo version, let’s say. And then that session is the same session till the end, till the end of the song is completely done. So if I go in that session, I will see my original demo in the back always, you know. So at that point when we recorded the drum, I had the old bass and some songs like my guitar and the vocals and everything didn’t sound right anymore. So I was like, ‘okay, maybe I need to record some stuff’. So I redid the guitars and I redid the vocals and I was like, ‘man, the bass is missing something’. And then we started touring and I was like, ‘sure, we need to find like a bass that is like us’, so Txer says, ‘hey, I know this guy’.” By coincidence, Andy Kandil of the Moonshine Stalkers had contacted the band, and Bruno Malo from his band seemed like he’d be the perfect fit. De La Muerte continues. ” I’m like, ‘okay, who is Bruno Malo? I’ve heard of him’, I said. That’s fucking weird [because] I’ve been trying to talk to him for the past ten years [at festivals] Every time I go say hi, because I know lhe’s a really good bass player. and every time I’ve seen him, I’m like, ‘man, this guy’s just kicking ass!’ I always wanted to go say hi to him, and every time I go say hi, somebody gets in front of him, and then the person leaves and he’s not there anymore.” 

Malo hit the ground running in the Brains, and he continues the story. “So this was in September last year. And Che’s all, ‘oh, man, we need a bass player for the tour’. I said, ‘okay, man, I can help you guys definitely, and I can work something out’,and then all of a sudden, like, end of September [he] goes, ‘oh, man, we got a show in Madrid. Can you do it?’ I was learning the songs. Actually, I was already quite advanced on that time, and I said, ‘okay, let’s go. You know, let’s do this’. It went amazingly, and we end up actually recording, filming the right after that. Filming on the day of the show. René goes, ‘oh, man, I need you to do this’. So like, what? we’re doing the videos? ‘Yeah, I need to do a video’… so cool.”

De La Muerte jumps in. “Okay. So we put out the audio of ‘Evil’ a day before Halloween for the show. And then we already had the footage for the video [for] ‘Evil’, except there was no bassist, so the only way to get your footage was at the show, so it worked perfectly.” “And then obviously, with the time and you said, ‘oh, I need some footage from the UK, maybe you can get something’. I live in front of a chapel. There’s a chapel right in front of my house. I said, ‘well, let me try something. Let me show you something’. So I grabbed my phone, went outside and I gave a couple of, you know, photos and videos of the chapel. Man, that looks great. Let me see if I can work it out. And we put it all together and it sounded…” “Yeah, then I did the editing and then I made it look like super old. That’s the song, and that’s how it started. And then I was like, ‘I need to I need to get him in the recording’. He has a little studio too. So he’s like, ‘Hey, I’ll do one song’. Then he sends me the song and I put it with the drum and the new guitars and vocal. And I was like, ‘oh, this is this is it! That’s the sound we’re needing’. And so I said, ‘can you do another more? can you do another more after that?’” “And then obviously after the show, you asked me, ‘oh, Bruno, what about if you do it more like permanently?’ I said, ‘yeah, sure, man, let’s, let’s see how it works, man. I’m more than happy to do it.’ And obviously, we’ve done that now. We’ve done the work. And we carry on.” “We carry on. And it’s looking positive. Very positive. Yeah, it’s good. It’s working.”

If you’re already a fan of the Brains, you’ll notice ‘Crazy Monster’ feels a lot heavier than their 2020 record, ‘Satana Tarantula’, as if they’ve pushed every dial on their sound up several notches. “Well, that’s that’s the thing that that’s when when they showed up as the ingredients of the album,” explains De La Muerte,  “it’s like suddenly the album started being like very heavier, it seemed. But it’s like, when I did my first album, I produced it, I’ve been producing all my albums. And it’s always the chasing of something that it’s in my mind of how I hear the song in advance. So I always try to change a bit the mix. I’ve always tried to get closer. Since 1995, I’ve been doing studio,so it’s always like you have to to get better at your art. And so I got better and better at mixing and recording the way that I’m hearing these albums more and more. And this time around was this crazy thing where I had to go to Spain to record, from Vancouver to Spain, because the sound was there. And then from there getting a base that is in London and then taking those three elements of me…them…together. That’s what came out of it, which was like super pretty close to what I hear in my mind when I write songs. So yes, it’s a little more heavy. It sounds it’s a little more faster. But there is songs that are way smoother like the song ‘Hollywood’, which is a wink to ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the movie of that, you know, and that’s the song. Originally, I wanted to call the album ’The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ too, and that song was part of that mind frame that I was having.”

The video for their latest single, ‘One More Time’, has already nearly racked up over eighteen thousand views on YouTube, and combining their song with a wild video is part of what the Brains are all about, as De La Muerte reminds us. “We at the Brains have a lot a lot of videos since the beginning. Every album we’ve done, like I always try to do at least two, three videos per album. And on this one, I was like, I don’t want to use somebody. I don’t want to get a director. I don’t want to like talk to somebody and then wait for the mixing of it. I know how to do this. We have the technology: we can do it,  So like, what do we need? So I started thinking, we need three videos. So one of them is ‘One More Time’. So that one, I was like, man, you know, Go Pros are cool. I’ve been seeing a lot of footage about like people jumping up a cliff with a parachute or stuff like that.  And I’m thinking, okay, what if we do that? But I didn’t know where to do it.

We ended up meeting in Camden. And I was like, ‘hey, I’ve had stories here, guys, maybe we can just like start and just walk around but then it became more than that because we were with a friend of us, Jamie Oliver, and it’s his hood, so he’s like, ‘I know where we can start drinking’.We just started recording and the whole thing is real. It’s just cut really, really clear, it’s no joke. Every time we went, we had a drink. So imagine the state of us. It’s real. Like the part when it says family portrait, then we go into like this weird 1970s and 80s format on solo. We’re totally toasted. I go like this,” He mimes confusion, “[it’s]because I’m like, what the fuck are you guys saying? That was intense. That was crazy.” “It was crazy because we felt it was normal, “ says Txer,  “Okay, how we drink, how we’re going to do? Okay, we do shoot at the bar having a couple of shots. I mean, trying to do some effects and to look more cinematic and all that.” “So these are real shots, by the way, and every time we didn’t do just one take of that. Yes, there was the, oh, you drank it first. Oh, no, he drank it. Oh, he drank it last. Oh, no, no. Oh, I have to repeat again. Do it again. There you go. Three more shots. Three more shots.” “ Let’s go, man! Malo laughs, “And yeah, that’s how it happened. We went from pub to pub and we actually, we had help from, even from the bouncers. We had bouncers in the pub. Oh, yeah, on it. We will go and say, ‘hey, man, I have my camera in here and from this video. Can you just like, just not let me in?’ I’m going to film myself. ‘Boy, I’m not letting you in.’ I’m like, ‘yeah, yeah, that’s it. Yeah, push me!’ But it was funny. It was great. Also [a] great experience, you know.”

De La Muerte continues.”So filming on the spot is literally like, yeah, it’s just imagine just a night out with your mates and obviously some bits that we have to write, in a way, but we tested it and it was on the spot, literally we had no time to o run a script, we just had ideas at that moment. Okay, let’s do this. Okay, now. So I had a problem on the solo that had no solo. Like basically I wanted to have something else, but what happened is that we did a photo shoot with David and Henry and he [did a] photo shoot like bunch of big stars and that photo shoot, we had some footage of it. So I ended up just cleaning the footage and then just going like, well, whatever, I’m just going to boost super position of like all this and see how it works and make it look like an old weird movie. I don’t know what exactly what it is. It’s such a weird thing to do videos.” “It’s like going into your mind and you’re so euphoric of party time and it’s like your brain goes, ‘wee, you’re fucked!’” Says Malo.

Just because ‘Crazy Monster’ is finally out doesn’t mean the Brains are taking a break. Far from it, in fact, as De La Muerte already plans to work on new material as soon as possible. He can’t give us the details though for a good reason. “I don’t prepare like that. I just go and do it. Just go and then like it just appears, like we start talking. I have a show in France in two weeks, and then we’re going to we’re going to spend one week at Txer’s house in Spain, and we’re just going to just hang out for a week in the studio. We will write new songs and just take that. Since we have the studio set up, it’s like the real quality right away, and then we have methods of recording where we can basically use everything now. It’s like a real studio and real time with musicians where we all know what we’re doing and we are coming out of a festival with the full set in our mind, and that’s going to feed what we want to do for the new one, you know, like I did the album ‘Zombie Nation’ [in 2010]. I did one month in studio. I didn’t write anything before. I just got in studio with the guys and then I started doing weird games where like [I got] the guys to choose  numbers from one to seven or letters from one to seven. And then I would turn them into notes, you know, and then ‘Misery’s made like that. The song ‘Misery’ was like just a draw of luck of one guy set a note. He said a number. So let’s say he said three so that C, you know, ABC, the other one said four, for ABCD. All right. And then I said, A, one, let’s say. And then  I put that in front of the paper and then I changed the orders of each three of them till one was more pleasing than the other, and then just started doing the song, and then I needed a bridge. So I asked two notes, I put the two notes there and that’s how you do it. It’s pretty cool. That’s it. It’s quick. That’s fun.”

Not only that, but the Brains will be back out on tour in two months, taking in Canada and Mexico. Is it tough following such an intense tour schedule? “That’s what we want to do,” Malo answers quickly. “ I have a day job. I have to go around it, you know, but my boss is all right, so it works and we find ways around it if we plan it ahead. Definitely we can we can achieve it.” “You know, we already thinking about planning another tour for for around April,” reveals De La Muerte, “So you see, we still plan on Canada and Mexico and we already thinking, OK, after this, we need to crack on, you know, with with. So obviously, it’s a cost and we’re going to be recording new material too in a couple of weeks, because it’s like you have to continue to create what you’re going to do. You can’t just like do on tour and then what do you do? Like you need to have new material for coming up. We need to have new ideas. I still want to do more videos. So I want to use the the opportunity for these tour coming up to have new surroundings, maybe or something like that, or maybe do a video now that I’m going to be in Europe for one of the new songs. But I think that’s what it is. You don’t just want to be there. You don’t keep up. It’s a part of you, and [it’s really how]  I see that. That it’s difficult for some people and I’ve been in a situation where  these musicians – either I’m part of their band or they’re part of my band- some musicians really cannot handle to be on the road. It’s difficult for them emotionally and for me, I can do it, you know, and these guys too can do it. We just like ended up doing like things that we couldn’t do in the past, [or] I couldn’t do in the past because either one of the guys was not feeling OK or like tour exhaustion. But this time we’re seeing stuff this time around, we’re having food and nice restaurants because we’re like, hey, we have time to do this now.  And  Bruno is like, Mr. Fucking Wake Up By Like Fucking Four in the morning! Anybody up? Did you fucking sleep? I got to the breakfast early and then he’s like already there!” “I got no life,” shrugs Malo with a grin. 

Tour life is definitely agreeing with the Brains, but they haven’t quite figured out their favourite places yet. “I like Spain a lot,” shares the frontman. “I had the best fucking time, best shows. People are just screaming over there. I think that’s my favourite [but] then everywhere is really, really fun. It just depends [on] how the people get involved and I try to get them involved a lot. But sometimes it’s depends on the week. I think it’s fun every time, and it also depends on the event as well. You know, every country we go sometimes can be great, in a small venue, it can be crappy in a big venue. It all depends, you know.”  “Personally from from experience, not only not from the Brains, but from the past is Finland,” says Malo,  “my favourite country for for for gigs is Finland. But again, it’s like Mexico tour is fun and there you go. Germany is fun, but the one that you can say that you had more fun is this one, and I always say that Finland always been the country that day. I always seem to have a lot of fun.” 

They’ll be returning in the UK in November for the Psychobilly Freakout Festival at New Cross Inn,  and they’re already up for it, according to De La Muerte. “Well, we’ve done it on the last tour and it was it was great. It’s always good to be back in London. That’s the last show of the tour. We leave together from Canada to London, and we all meet in Mexico. This is really funny for us. It’s like we meet in different places all the time. Sometimes we can’t practice. Most of the time.” “We didn’t the tour before the tour to come,” corrects Txer, “I’m all just mostly and like having cigarettes. Strong ones. It was a proper rehearsal [though], it was here in my home. In a normal room, you know, without vocals. But I guess we didn’t even practice for the last one, too.” “And we also included we included a track that we never played,” Malo points out, “‘I’m Your Nightmare’”. “That was cool. We have to do it again!” De La Muerte exclaims.

The Brains’ final message before they head off on their next adventure is clear. “Keep following us, support our records. Listen to our music, show to your friends, show to your family,” shares De La Muerte, “there’s plenty more to come. Not just us, the fucking scene, the fucking music, the live music. “Go follow the music,” echoes Txernobilly,  “Follow the style too.” “Yeah, people should come out, come out to shows, stop looking on YouTube only. It’s fun. It’s better in real life,” says Malo, and he’s absolutely right. Seeing the Brains live is an experience like no other, and with only three months to go before they’re back in the UK, it won’t be too long a wait.

Kate Allvey

Buy a copy of ‘Crazy Monster’ from Cleopatra Records here or directly from the Brains’ Bandcamp here.