What’s up everyone! Welcome to my first interview that I’ve done for Sputnik, and hopefully the first of many. This week, I was able to sit down on a Zoom call with Jackal Twins to discuss their debut record, Cuzco. These guy were absolutely amazing to talk with, they all had great senses of humor, and they all genuinely love the work they have done with Jackal Twins. If you haven’t listened to their debut album yet, or this is the first time you’ve heard their name, let me give you a quick introduction.

Jackal Twins is a three-piece band based out of the New England area, with Ben Trussell on drums and vocals, Mike Palumbo on guitars and vocals, and Dante Lamusta on bass. Their Bandcamp profile describes their music as “psychedelic noisy tunes for the hopeless romantic.” Good luck trying to pin a particular genre down, though. They tend to focus on the mathcore side of their music, and lean into the aggressive style. However, there are numerous genre influences that shine throughout, with a great balance of heaviness with melodic songwriting.

But I’m not here to explain the band myself. No, I’m here to let you guys hear from the band themselves. Please, enjoy this interview with the Jackal Twins! You can either read the interview, listen to the recording, or follow along with both.

NOTE: The transcript below was edited for brevity. Some of the wording has been changed or altered to make it easier to read.

I want to go back to 2017 back when Jackal Twins first started. Can you guys tell me how the band formed, and kind of what the purpose and motivation was to starting this band in the first place?

Ben: Basically, Mike and I were buddies for years, and I was in another band for years, so I was pretty busy with that. There was this one time where I was home from tour, and Mike and I got together just to jam, and we wrote an 11-minute-long song, like in an instant, we just naturally write really well together really quickly. Then we kind of just went and did our thing, and then eventually I came back home to Massachusetts, where Mike lived at the time, and we just started jamming, because I think I stopped playing music for a couple months, and Mike had been in a ton of bands with Dante, and so, yeah, we just started writing songs.

Mike: I was basically trying to rope you into being in a band, but you were kind of like ‘I just want to, like, I want to just play to see where it goes.’ I’m like nah, I want to do this. So I was just treading lightly, just like, ‘oh yeah, we’ll just have little jam sessions.’ Then it turned into writing a lot of songs really fast. I don’t know if it really became a serious thing, where we were like, alright, we’re actually going to finish these songs and record them. Like, I don’t know how long that took before we decided it was more official. It could have been a year, I don’t really remember the timeline, it’s been such a long process.

Ben: One thing I’ll add is I was really hyped on two pieces at the time for some reason, which I had never been except I really like The White Stripes. But I think at the time ‘68 was happening and The Black Keys. So I was like, what if we did this crazy math band, and Mike used octave pedals, and we just went wicked hard. It was just the two of us for a little while, and then Mike and I were both like, I think this needs bass. Mike had always played with Dante and was like, ‘this guy is the greatest bassist.’ Even a great bass player, sometimes the whole mathcore thing is just a specific breed of person. So, we played with him, and he’s just, you know, fucking amazing. So, he came in, and COVID happened that put the brakes on us for a while.

Dante: I think [I joined] 2019 it was probably like a couple years. I remember showing up to the warehouse that shall not be named that you guys were playing in. I mean, we were in a project in that same building, but you told me to come check it out, and I came, and I was just absolutely blown away. I remember when you guys were playing like the infant version of “Spoken to Time,” I went into this hypnotic state, oddly enough. When I listen to music sometimes, like closing my eyes is the best way to experience it, and I felt this weird sense of calm. I had told you guys that felt like a lullaby to me, and I remember Ben was just like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I’m like, I don’t understand either, but music that is like that, for some reason, it just lines up with the synapses in my brain, and just how, how my brain is wired to just be all over the place, it just all lined up. I’m like, I need to be a part of this, and I asked Mike, because I didn’t really know Ben too well. I was just like, ‘Mike, I really want to play bass,’ and just listening to Ben’s sensibility with how he played drums, it was very Bodom-like, and I loved that. I loved that there was no double bass, and there was this like sense of grounding in his approach to the chaos. I was just like, bass needs to be a part of this. I’m a really big fan of the rhythm section really locking in like they gotta be like, the best of friends. Iin the music, they gotta really, really do something special for me to just be like, oh, and I feel like I could do that here. It was truly incredible, and I didn’t know it would go this far.

Mike: Music for meditation – that’s what we’ve set out to make.

Dante: Yeah, in my psychotic mind.

Ben: One last thing I’ll add. I’ve been in bands my whole life, and I think I was at a at a point where I was like, ‘Am I going to do something, like, just by myself and just try something else?’ But I think with Mike, he’s just like the only person, if I have a crazy idea, which I have a lot of insane ideas, he always gets it really fast. Mike’s fucking amazing, and he can keep up and, a lot of people you have to explain something for like an hour, and he gets it like that. If it’s a really crazy idea, he gets it pretty fast, and that’s really nice.

This has been in the works for a pretty long time at this point, breaks, being halted during COVID, bringing Dante in in 2019, couple years after. So with all this time in between and stuff from when it began to win this album release, what was your approach to songwriting? Especially early on, when you guys were just thinking through some ideas and figuring out the chemistry between you guys, how was that process in songwriting up until today?

Mike: I mean, it depends on the song. Every song has a bit of a different story. Some of them are riffs that I came up with and then kind of brought to Ben, and a lot of it was stuff we wrote together from just jam sessions. Some of it was very specific things that Ben would come [up with], like he would have an idea for a certain pattern, or he would have an idea of a melody or even just like a dissonant kind of general idea. I had never really played with a drummer who had kind of ideas for riffs before. So sometimes I would end up playing something that I would never normally play, but it always kept it fresh, and then I would always kind of just add my own flair to it. We could almost go through riff by riff, or part by part, or song by song, and each thing would have its own kind of little bit of story to it. There’s not really one method, I would say. Like “Harbor Delirium”, for instance, the first half of it was mostly, I just drank a lot of coffee one day and just wrote a bunch of riffs in the moment, but recorded myself, and then I didn’t really know what I was playing, but I was just kind of into it, and then kind of I taught myself the recording that I had made spontaneously. So that a method that was fun to do, because it was something I had played, but I had to sort of relearn my own thing, which I sometimes end up having to do. Then the whole, basically the whole second half was all Ben’s ideas. It’s like an example of almost cut right in half, as far as the basic structure of an ideas of the song. Then Dante came in and basically laid bass ideas over the entire thing that were all just his way of interpreting the songs, which totally brought them to a new space. That song especially, I can’t imagine it without the low end.

Alongside that, with your approach to songwriting, when you look more at the lyrical content behind it, and kind of how those mesh together with the instrumentation and the lyrics coming together. What was the story and concept behind Cuzco?

Ben: To piggyback on the last question, I like to joke, the whole album is kind of like voice memos in a way. I mean not literally, but it’s a lot of jams. A lot of them are ideas we brought to the table, but we would just jam. I would just find them and be like, ‘Oh, let’s put this here, and let’s put this there.’ A lot of the songs were written together, and then we would like ‘This doesn’t really go with this one, let’s put it on this one, and let’s take this piece and this piece from this song.’ A lot of it was just like cobbling it together. The album was originally  very long, all the songs that you have were on it, but there was also, a bunch of other songs, because I wanted this really expansive, huge, long thing with all these other different sounds. We had a piano song, the violin, and we ended up just cutting those because we didn’t have time. But one of those songs was called “Cuzco,” and was originally the last song, which is kind of going into your next question. It was about a trip that Mike and I took to Cuzco. We went to Lima, Peru, and then we flew to Cuzco, and we just like fell in love with that city, we loved it so much. Mike wrote one of the lyrics to the songs on the plane ride.

Mike: “Ransacked Soul” was written on the flight. It was this really rinky dink plane, and I had really intensely impacted molars and wisdom teeth, and I still have never gotten my wisdom teeth out, and they still hurt a lot sometimes, but the elevation there was giving me such a headache, and I was just like writing down this whole idea. It was the flight to Cuzco. I think I finished writing it while we were there, but that song almost could be a title track, in a way, because it was actually written there. We really fell in love with that city.

Ben: For me personally, a lot of the lyrical and musical inspiration came from that trip. I mean, a lot of the stuff was written before, but also it was happening during, and then there was a lot of cobbling after the fact. That whole experience kind of like leaked into my mind and affected the whole process. I kind of see the album as a capturing of that time period in our lives, and that trip was kind of the centerpiece. Cuzco is the capital of the Inca Empire, which I don’t know like I just, I love researching things like that, the Inca Empire, Aztecs and stuff. I don’t know it was funny, somebody was starting to jokes about “The Emperor’s New Groove,” which is one of my favorite movies, and I totally forgot about that. I didn’t even think of that. People were just like, giving us shit for that.

Dante: Cuzco’s poison.

Mike: Guess that was inevitable, we kind of asked for it.

I think one of the main things that stands out with the album is it’s like a mixture of all these different things. It’s kind of hard to nail down one specific genre, because you’re you have so much going on. You got your mathcore, you got your experimental stuff, you got your more like ambient, sort of atmospheric, weird stuff going on with guitar and bass, you got some jazzy moments. There’s a lot going on genre wise. I’m just curious for each of you guys, what are your biggest influences when it comes to songwriting or performance in music?

Mike: I mean, when we’re playing, we would just play and not — we never set out to sort of make a specific type of music, which is really freeing. There are whole songs that really would almost seem even more out of place. People are talking about the album [being] so long and so eclectic, and we actually cut out the things that were even more kind of standalone, different sounds, just in the interest of time, to sort of almost tailor it towards slightly more heavy music. But we had all kinds of different sounds, so we just like to not really overthink that and just play and just see what happens. I’m not thinking of my influences as I’m playing, but they’re absolutely coming through. So for me, we all three have completely different influences, but then there’s an overlap. If you would look at a pie chart, there’d be three circles that are all kind of coming together with certain bands or artists. For me personally, I think Tom Waits is a huge influence for me as a musician and songwriter, and we all grew up in the heavier music scene. I grew up in the Christian hardcore/metalcore scene, so when Underoath was coming up and all of that. I was like 12 years old, my brother had a whole CD collection, and I was just picking CDs off the shelf. So I was exposed to all kinds of different music from a really young age. I heard The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was like 12, I heard “43% Burnt” and it broke my brain. I never knew music could be like that, and I was sort of chasing that high, and I never found that feeling again, and in some ways, I was always looking for that. I mean, that’s some of it, some of my influences. I know mewithoutYou is an overlap for us, too. That band from a really young age, 10, 11, 12, they’re one of my favorite bands. But yeah, we all have a bunch of different influences that come at it from different angles.

Ben: As a band, I would say I would agree Tom Waits and Dillinger Escape Plan were huge, definitely for the two of us when we were writing – The Chariot and Fear Before the March of Flames and Fall of Troy. For me personally, with vocals and stuff, I think Nick Drake is one of, if not the biggest influence. I really like very airy kind of singing, almost whispery, no vibrato, over ethereal parts. Mike plays a lot of really ethereal kind of pretty shit, so I thought it worked pretty well. Nick Drake is a really big influence for singing, and then the screaming stuff, Heavy Heavy Low Low man. I mean, I just love everything about him on Everything’s Watched, Everyone’s Watching. My influence is Chris Pennie, Dillinger Escape Plan drummer. I mean, I think he’s basically God. I don’t think anybody’s ever topped his performance on Calculating Infinity and Miss Machine, don’t think anybody ever will. Then Ricky Mazzatta from mewithoutYou. Darren King of Mutemath. Those guys are the best man.

Dante: I came at it with  a deep love for The Mars Volta. I think you guys share pretty similar sentiments for the band, even if it’s not like certain parts of the discography that we agree about. You should really listen to us talk about the bands that we love and the discography it’s quite the trip, what we grab from each thing. When I first heard Ben, I thought John Bonham and Jon Theodore and Chris Pennie from fucking Dillinger. I, being such a big Juan Alderete fan, just the way his chemistry with Jon Theodore was in the first three albums, I just love the way that they just anchor down the chaos. I think for the lighter parts, or maybe the groovier parts, I really dip into jazz and electronic stuff. I’ll have certain effects that kind of cater to those camps where I’ll have an octave pedal that can get into analog synthetic territory. I’m a really big fan of Tim Lefebvre, he’s a bass player from Boston, but he’s been in so many bands. He was on the last David Bowie record, Blackstar, his performance with that band, in particular, the Donny McCaslin band, it’s just incredible. I kind of grab a lot of his nuances, and I was like, this fits and it really works and makes sense. The really disgusting, gnarly stuff, I was like need these parts to sound like world is crashing down, so I went into the approach of Sam Walker from Daughters. He grabs the octave, the low octave pedals, and he plays higher up. But he does these crazy slides. I do a lot of sliding and a lot of certain parts to just make it more out of control than it already is. I kind of went part by part to see, ‘What does this need?’

Mike: You were in a unique position to do that, because we had demos written out, and would send them, and then Dante would listen to them with headphones in his basement, and just go note by note, and go, ‘What possible scales could I take from the heavens, etched into stone?’ Ben and I are not musically classically trained or anything. I took piano lessons as a kid, but I don’t remember anything. I don’t know how to read music. I don’t know scales or anything. So, Ben and I would always tease Dante to be like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna do your Trojan horse scale over this?’ He would be talking about like nonsensical scales that I’ve never heard of. He would send me these music theory videos, that I would just be in awe of.

Ben: Dante tells us what the technical term is for what we’re doing. I forgot to add, but what Dante saying about the jazz thing, we all really like John Coltrane, too. The fact that both of them love Coltrane, it’s just so… I’ve never had a band like that. So, we play Coltrane when we’re driving around sometimes, it’s awesome.

Dante: Oh yeah, it’s very romantic.

It’s really cool to just see those blend of genres and those blends of influences and stuff. Even though you might not approach something with the intention of following an influence, I mean, everything kind of shines through. I think that’s great, and it comes out great in Cuzco [Ben (above), Mike, and Dante each have Spotify playlists of their influences available here]. Looking at it from the recording side of things with all the songwriting being fleshed out going into the recording. I know you guys worked with Kurt Ballou, legend of the scene. When you guys went into GodCity Studios with your instrumentation, what was it like being able to work alongside someone like him and hear his input or feedback or collaboration with you guys during the process of recording the instrumentation?

Mike: Initially we had planned on, I think, several other studios, and Dante brought him up, and it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, duh, he’s right in Salem, why was he not the first person we thought of?’ I remember thinking he was going to be really expensive or really busy. I was just like there’s no way, he’s so sought after. Then talking to him he was really reasonable. We’re sort of particular about who we’re going to work with, and you can just tell if you’re going to sort of vibe well with somebody, right? We had our first call, and it was just went really well. I think we had similar goals for the sound that we gravitate towards, as far as just organic sound we were all really particular about. We wanted this to not sound like a metal record and not have everything sound polished and replaced, but we still wanted to have a big sound. We don’t want it to sound like small, and he just seemed like the guy to do it. I mean, working with him was kind of a dream come true. When I was a kid, listening to Jane Doe was another sort of like crazy moment for. I had never heard anything quite like that. I’m like, 10 years old, it’s blowing my mind, and then to just be in a room with them and have him make compliments of the guitar riff I’m playing or something. This is surreal. Then we were just kind of buds with them, I feel like, by the end of it.

Ben: I think, like Mike said, we had other options on the table, and we’ve all recorded at studios before, and it’s always a different experience. I’ve had a bunch of experiences where it’s kind of cold, not bad experiences, but it’s very cold. You get in, you record, they’re doing their thing, you’re doing your thing. It’s just bam, bam, bam, bam. I, for whatever reason, didn’t want to do that again. I kind of wanted to have fun. The thing that sold me on Kirk was when we got on the phone with him, he just had such a good sense of humor. He was fucking hilarious; he was making me laugh. We were both cracking jokes, and was just like, this is going to be a fun, and he was just a blast. He was just so relaxed, and he was just making jokes the whole time. He likes the coolest movies. We like really obscure stuff, and he made these insane references, like he referenced one of my favorite movies, Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch, which I don’t know anybody, besides two people, who know that movie. He likes Mike’s favorite movie called Brazil, which is another very obscure. There were just all these moments where we were like falling in love with Kurt, he’s the best man. He was making jokes. I guess I’m a weirdo, because,  when I started the drums, I like to record with silence. I don’t like anybody playing. I just like to do it from memory or whatever. And Kurt was like, you’re the first person that’s ever done that. I think he was getting a kick out of our insanity because, because, in my mind, this is normal. But for him, he was like, what are these guys doing? I think it was fun for him, too, but he was just so funny, man, and he’s just so good. Like Mike said, we wanted the album to sound like a rock record, and he recorded it like a rock record. It doesn’t sound perfect. It doesn’t sound like the drums were completely aligned with the click, he just made it sound good and real and authentic, which is exactly what he wanted.

Dante: I was scared shitless thinking about going to him, because it’s just like you’re playing in front of one of your childhood idols, you know? He was freaking hilarious, like watching him go through the takes with Ben with just drums. I mean, because he doesn’t have like, a frame of reference, like, he doesn’t have a guitar track to go off of, to be like, ‘oh, this, here, this and there.’ He’s just, like, ‘How did that feel?’ It was like a mystery to him, and I think seeing it unfold was also really funny to us. With bass, though, it may have been “Spoken to Time,” he was really thrown off. He like, stopped for a second, like it was the it was the loudest silence in the room. It was like the air got sucked out. And then he’s like, ‘I think you guys need therapy.’

Ben: What was the band that you said he listened to sort of cleanse himself of our sound?

Dante: Entombed.

Ben: He was like, I had to drive home from the studio last night, and I had to turn on Entombed just to get you guys out of my head.

Dante: As a palette cleanser! And we were like, ‘Motherfucker, you wrote Jane Doe!  It was this weird, Monty Python-like, experience, because then he’s like, ‘Well, I’m better now.’

Mike: Yeah, that’s why you’re doing stuff with Chelsea Wolfe.

Dante: His humor is so dry, and it hits you like a brick wall. It was so funny, because I didn’t have a case for my bass guitar, so I was walking the streets of Salem with just a fucking bass, just holding it and just fucking around with it until I walked to the studio, because sometimes parking in Salem is horrific. Sometimes I would have to walk quite a ways, and I had just as if I’m playing it. I walk in and he’s like, ‘Dude, where’s your case?’ And I’m like, I don’t have one, I can’t afford one, and he’s like, ‘Dude, get a fucking case.’ Then the next time I come in, and I actually get a case, I actually listened to him, and he’s like, ‘Ah, you’re moving up in the world, huh?’

Mike: The Almighty Kurt spoke, and he was embarrassed that he didn’t have a case, he had to go out and buy one.

Dante : I don’t care, I’ll max out a fucking credit card.

Mike: I actually saw Converge for the first time at a Metal Fest recently in in Worcester. It was incredible. It was so trippy to actually see them play, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s my buddy Kurt!’ There’s a lot of stories, I mean, we lived in the apartment above the studio, so we just shut the world out for two and a half weeks, and we did not get as much done as we thought we would in two and a half weeks. We didn’t even finish the music, and we had to come back. It took us months to decide, but we decided to record record the vocals ourselves, and then go back for mixing sessions and doing like little details and we finished the music later on. Went in there and smashed pots and pans and did some maracas and random stuff later on. We definitely underestimated the amount of time, and part of it was just we had never really made a record this long. When you’re having a good time, it didn’t feel like work.

Dante: I think the attention to detail for the instrumentation was worth it. I think he really was pushing for you guys to record vocals on your own. He does express this to a lot of a lot of bands that go in there. He could, he could be that guy that that is like, pay an arm and a leg to record vocals and blow your voice out within the first two days, and you got three days left, good luck. But he didn’t. He was like, I’ll tell you what microphones to get. All you need is to really just pad up your area. He’s like, I’ve had plenty of people do it, and it’s kind of the best way, because you’re doing it on your own time, and you’re not wasting all this money because you’re trying to have a recovery day, and then what are you going to fucking do? He was really thinking about us, and he was thinking about how we’re a DIY band, and it was a good call. It was a good call because you guys were able to just like, kind of fart around.

Mike: Yeah, that’s all we were doing, we were just farting around.

Dante: Well, it allowed you to be able to express, and I think the pressure of doing that in a studio, vocals are a little more vulnerable.

Mike: I’m very glad we decided to record on our own. I think we were like dragging our feet with that decision, and then once we made the decision and actually started doing it, it was the right call, because then we could try things and not feel that pressure. We’re doing a bunch of different vocal styles like screaming our heads off, then you can just like take a rest day or whatever.

Dante: Ben, didn’t you get sick, too, recording the vocals?

Ben: I guess that’s the one thing right, I mean, I love how it turned out, but that’s the one thing where it’s not 100% on the screams. The singing you can, I don’t want to say you can fake that, but it doesn’t require the same guttural effort. On the flip side, it does give it this sort of desperation that’s kind of cool, and it sounds a little busted. I just chugged tea the whole time, hoping it comes out good.

Mike: We had that throat spray that we used up.

For each of you guys, when you look back on that whole process, from day one of songwriting up until finally mastering and just getting the final mix and everything, what was the most difficult part of the process?

Dante: Everything (laughter)

Ben: Mixing. I think that’s always the most difficult part. You can give and take when you’re writing. If I have an idea and Mike doesn’t like it in the moment, he’s like, I don’t really like that and vice versa. But with mixing, it’s like we’ve made this thing together that we love, and we all hear it differently, and we all have different goals and aspirations. It can just take forever, and you just get in your head about it. Then you’re emailing each other and calling each other, and for me, it was just a very long process. Mike ended up mixing it, remixing it with, you know, Dante and I gave him notes and stuff, it was just a long process. But I will say, the guy that we mastered it with, Carl Saff, he’s fucking amazing, and he got what we wanted very fast. Carl got our vision very fast, and it took a couple times, but it was very, very minor changes to what he originally did.

Dante: We’re also pretty neurotic about what we like to hear, and I think that goes with the songwriting that goes with, what do we like hearing in an album, and that’s, that’s healthy, I think.

Mike: I think we’re all very similar. This is, like, the ideal band for me in a certain sense, because you guys are some of my closest friends, and I feel like musical like we have musical chemistry. I don’t really want to play with anybody else, because they’re just not as good. We’re all very similar in the sense that we can write really fast, and we’re very creative and all kind of on the same page, of like where we’re going with a song or something. But that means we also have very similar weaknesses, and with the similar strengths, the similar weaknesses are, like Dante just said, we can just overthink things, or it’s really hard for us to sort of finish what we’re starting. I don’t know if it’s like a dopamine rush from the initial creativity, and then finishing it is not fun. Maybe that’s just me. That’s how it is for me. I’ve done that for years where I get this burst of energy, I write a bunch of shit, and then I either don’t finish it, or I get right to the end of when I’m finishing it, and then I’m like, don’t care anymore. We almost got to that point a few times with this record, and just didn’t let that stop us. I would agree, I think the end portion was tough. I think we just made some decisions really quickly with mixing that had to go back on, so I didn’t remix the whole thing. I just made some major decisions that were just needed at the last minute. I’m glad we did that, and then we were kind of on our own timeline with this thing, and it ended up being what the record needed. It didn’t need a record label telling us what to do and when to do it, because I don’t think it would have been the same thing. That was definitely tough towards the end, and everything else came together really, really fluid. Like even just making the artwork and editing videos and writing actual songs and all of that, even different vocal takes. A lot of that came together pretty smooth.

With that whole process all the way from 2017 when everything was first starting, up until 2025 with the release of the album, looking back to January 10 when the lead single, “Charcoal Lions,” first came out – what was that like for you guys to finally put something out there and finally see that completed work come out?

Dante:  It’s been your baby for so long, right? I think we’ve had this conversation so many times: ‘Dude, what if everyone fucking hates it?’ And I’m like, cool. I think we’re kind of erring on the side of caution, of like, yeah, what if this truly just sucks, and we’re just in our heads about it? You got to believe in what you’re what you’re creating, right? You have to really, really like what you’re doing, and we like it. But when we release something, it’s up to everyone else for their own interpretation, and it was pretty surprising. It was very, very strange like to let something go and see how people receive it, and it’s been, with “Charcoal Lions” specifically, we got a lot of really good receptions from people very close to me. We didn’t have a lot of online presence, so that’s kind of how it started, it was just immediate people, and then just kind of caught on. It was pretty rad.

Mike: It’s almost like when you love a movie so much that you watch by yourself, and then you try to show it to a friend, and then you’re suddenly watching a different movie, because you’re seeing it through their eyes suddenly, and you’re noticing all these things that you never noticed before. It’s like, I’ve heard these songs a thousand times, and then as soon as it was out in the world, I’m like, ‘Oh, my mom’s gonna listen to this!’ I’m like, hearing it through everyone else’s ears, and I’m like, this is just a different thing. It like changes the way I heard it, in a way. I mean, it almost breathes new life into it, because there’s so many stages of the music that I had lived with it, you know? I was just shocked that I wasn’t totally, utterly sick of it. I was like, I was like, I still like this record, that’s a good sign. It was cool to have that initial kind of, yes, something’s finally out, and there’s a little bit of nerves, and I immediately regretted the decision of what song to put out for a single. We were talking about that as if it made any difference at this point. It’s already out. We were like, why did we do this one? I think it wasn’t until “Spoken to Time,” putting that out second, that I think people started to react, like maybe getting a better feel for what they’re in for.

Ben: I felt very excited to release it. I think I was just ready, especially when we finished mastering the album, and then we made the artwork for the album, which was the opposite of mixing and mastering it. We came up with an idea very fast. We barely thought about it. We bought a couple things went in the woods, shot it. It was very, very freeing to just create something very fast and not overthink it like we did the mixing. I think similarly my state of mind, we put the music out is I was kind of just ready for it to be out. I was just excited. Tyler, I don’t know what your experience was listening to it, but I was just excited to put that out, “Charcoal Lions”. Then a lot of my friends, I think, were just expecting a Kurt Ballou record. They were expecting, a Converge, heavy ass thing. There’s some of that, but I think putting this for me, I think I was a little like, I wonder if people think this is what it’s going to sound like. Then putting out “Terror Poem #3” and “Spoken to Time,” it’s kind of was fun to sort of see people be a little confused and like, what does this band’s thing? In my head, personally, I think the best songs were not picked as singles, and then for people to have that experience of listening to it front to back. We talked about doing just really leaning into the mathcore. Let’s just put out all these heavy songs, “Harbor Delirium,” “Ransacked Soul,” just really lean into that. We talked about giving people who are listening to us, a little bit of everything, a little bit of the R&B, a little bit of the heaviness. We ended up taking that route. I don’t know if that was the right route to take, but it was fun. It was kind of fun to see the confusion. But I think when we finally put the album out, the way it’s sequenced, I hope it’s not confusing. I think it’s sequence in a way where it kind of makes sense how jarring things are. Like you’re hearing singing one all at once, and then you’re hearing “Terror Poem,” it could be like, how is this going to work? When you listen the album, hopefully it makes sense the way it flows. But yeah, it was exciting for me. I think I was ready for to put the album out and just see what if people liked it, if they didn’t like it.

Dante: We’ve experienced it as an album, and we also had our hands in the pot so long to curate it as an album. We are avid album listeners. We so appreciate a well thought out album. It’s just a chef’s kiss, you know? And I think that’s what we appreciate the most, and putting them out as singles was weird, because you can only get so much from each single.

Go listen to the audio component to hear my breakdown of the album, I don’t want to bore you with my thoughts here, this is a Jackal Twin’s interview, not a tyman128 review.

Like you said, a big part of it is sequencing, and you have all those moments that work together. But for you guys, for each of you guys, looking back at the record, you guys sat with it for so long you knew the songs like the back of your hand at that point. Is there a particular moment, whether it’s a song or like a specific section of a song, that really stands out to you as something that you are most proud of when it came to the writing process and recording?

Mike: I’m really happy with “Ransacked Soul.” I think that it just kind of has its own feel, there’s something about it. I think it came out closest to what I was envisioning, and I don’t know, I just sort of tried things I had never done vocally, and I felt like the lyrics were sort of, I felt like I was kind of transcribing, I didn’t really feel like I was writing anything. It’s satisfying in a different way for me, that song in particular, but there’s a lot of moments in there that I really like. I mean, the end of “Terror Poem” was the last thing that I wrote on the record. That was something that was a transition out of what that song was about. It was sort of transitioning to sort of update a certain feeling, and that I just did in like one take, and it was just sort of a throwaway idea, that’s another moment. I think it’s natural when the when you sit with something for a long time and then you have a new idea, the new things stand out to you because you haven’t heard it a thousand times. So that was something that was a fun moment. I really love how “Never Tamed” came together, mainly just because that was the most Frankenstein song, if you can believe it, because it feels it’s pretty straightforward. I think it’s the same tempo the whole song, but that was one of those voice memo, hodge podge, cobble it together over time, so that’s a song that hearing it all together feels more satisfying because we didn’t write it and play it the way that it’s structured initially. I love the ending, I love “Barn Owl,” that’s just probably my favorite song to play. There’s different moments that are satisfying for different reasons.

Ben: I think I was the most happy with just how uniform it seemed to me to be, and then how uniformed it seemed to other people. I’m very, very, very, very critical of lyrics, and I think again, with Mike, I really, really love his style and his lyrics. It happens to be very similar to my style. It’s very abstract, stream of consciousness kind of stuff, which I love. It almost seems like there, it doesn’t seem like there’s two lyricists. I think the way the album flows, the lyrics all work very well together. I’ve had several people, and this very really surprises me, like not be able to distinguish, Mike and I’s voice at times from each other, which I think is really cool, because there’s a symbiosis going on. Like Dante said, I am an album guy, and I think I’m very happy with how it just all works together with our chemistry. Sometimes I put out albums and have just been like, this album’s awesome, but musically me and this person are really butting heads here, or this isn’t really what I wanted. With this, it just feels very fluid, it works really well. We all seem like a unit, and I’m very happy with that. I agree with Mike, like you’re always into the thing you just wrote, but as we wrote this album, we fell in love with every single one of these songs. There’s nothing on here that was like a throw away or filler. As we wrote it, we were like, I love this song, this is incredible. I definitely think, for me, “Jazz-a-Jag” was … that’s not what it’s called now. (laughter) We have this list of scratch track names, and I still call them that.

Mike: It’s funny that you say that, because “Noose Shaped Galaxy/Celestial Eyes” is “Jazz-aJag,” what he’s talking about. I think lyrically, I mean, we’re gassing each other up a little bit here, but lyrically, I think it’s the best lyrics on the album, and Ben wrote those lyrics. I love just even reading through them, and yeah, that song is a high point, for sure.

Ben: For me, that’s the song that I’m just really into right now. One of the last things we did on the album, there’s like a jazzy part right in the middle, and Mike’s doing a little almost a spoken word, kind of fucked up Dr Seuss part, and that was, if I’m not mistaken, one of the last things we recorded, one of the last ideas. It just feels like it was supposed to be there the whole time. I love that song the most right now. I probably listen to it more than anything.

Dante: There’s a lot of really weird moments…There are a lot of things that happened in the studio that were not on the demo tracks. The thing that you gotta learn about this, this thing, the Jackal Twins, is as the music speaks: expect the unexpected. I feel that way as well throughout not just the writing process and finishing a song, but there’s an evolution to each one of these tracks. When I was met with a certain drum part that was not exactly like the demo that I had to reference, something new came out, which was scary, but it was also very exciting. There’s certain moments where I had to really be on my toes in the studio, and I’m so proud of some of those moments. I think I overwrote a lot of what I was going to put on this record. Some of the most simple, not most simple, but like parts that actually needed to fit the vibe, I had overwritten quite a bit. The pressure allowed me to be grounded in, like, this is the part that needs to be here. It needs to be here. It needs to exist here. I can’t remember, all the songs and parts kind of blur together sometimes, because I do listen to them as an album, but I think it is, we called it “Punk Song” forever, “Sweet Huntress”…

Mike: Yeah, that’s another one that Kurt’s like, ‘what… what about this song is punk?’

Dante: Yeah right, but before it transitions into the second part, there’s this almost like Mike Patton-y kind of type vocal on there, and with the rain sticks – like they did a lot of like percussion, alternative percussion stuff, after I was done with bass – but there’s just ear candy in there that really made this special.

Mike: I think one of my favorite bass parts that you do, because I literally don’t know what you’re doing, Dante, is in the noodly part in “Television Dream,” where it goes into where it does that, it basically does that same riff, and it does in three different time signatures. It’s like that noodly one, when it goes to the clean part and you’re matching with the drums – I don’t know what you’re doing there, and it like, it’s fun, it’s fun to listen to. Yeah, I don’t get it, just your choice of what you chose to do over that part, like nobody would think to do that, except Dante.

Dante: That was one of those parts that I had to buckle down, because the drums were similar, but not exact, when they were recorded in the studio. What I had written was, I just wasn’t happy with the way it was aligning with the drums at that time. So I listened to that thing for hours the night before we had to track that thing, and yeah, I’m proud of that one too. But what I was referring to in “Sweet Huntress,” it’s like that part, but then when it slows down to me, what Ben is playing is very much a swing time beat, like a half time swing beat, so I wanted to swing with it. What I’m playing there on bass is very much a feel thing. It’s, I was just like, yeah, alright, I like this, it grooves, but it also has this weird R&B swing thing going on. I think that’s something that I pick up on a lot throughout the album, is Ben’s appreciation for R&B and hip-hop, and that allowed me to really have a place that’s unique in the bass world.

Looking towards the future for you guys, this album came out, people are loving it, at least, from what I’ve seen on Sputnik and other reviews around – what’s in store for you guys next?

Mike: We don’t know. Our plan here with this was let’s just finish this record, and then finishing the record turned out to be more of a feat than we had planned on. We’re in different places in our lives than when we first started the band, and for me, I want to play some shows. I don’t know if I want to do a big tour, at least, maybe not yet, but it’s just sort of cool to see it have anybody, enjoying it. Right now we’re looking into the possibility of pressing it to vinyl and doing some merch, and we don’t even have any of that. So it’s just releasing the album, seeing how it’s received, and then kind of going from there. We have a whole other, probably two albums worth of stuff we’ve been sitting on so I’d love to just make another record. The stuff we were writing once this was this record was done, made me even more excited. I’m already like, let’s go to the studio again.

Dante: No, biiig announcements (laughter)

Ben: You know, we have families, and we have, jobs and just like a bunch of other things. I think at this time in our lives, we’ve all been in bands and either toured or played lots of shows or just made tons of albums and stuff, I think at this time in our lives, we were just wanting to make the album and then just kind of see if it got a response. Like you mentioned, Tyler, there’s decent amount of listeners for the fact that we’ve only existed a little over two months on the Internet, no label, no backing, no budget being poured into that. We’re very, very grateful for that, and really amazed by that, thankful for that. I think for me, like my take on, it was just like, let’s put the album on, let’s see what happens, let’s see if there’s a response and a demand for more, and if there is, we’ll go from there. I think since we put the album out, we’ve just been taking a little break and just posting things here and there. We poured a lot of time and effort into promoting it ourselves, and just getting on Reddit and getting on Instagram like crazy, and just anywhere we could trying to let people know that this is going to come out. This was all DIY, so I think the last couple weeks we just been kind of resting, just getting our minds together. That’s a conversation we’re going to have, and we’ll figure that out. Mike mentioned the vinyl thing, I would love to press it to vinyl. We did post just to see if anybody want this, you know? I think that’s kind of where we’re at right now. We’re just feeling it out. Is this something that there’s a desire for from other people, or was this like a cool project that we made that we love?

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Well, I hope you enjoyed the interview! Once again, huge thanks to the Jackal Twins for being willing to do this interview with me, it was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to highlight their work. If you haven’t, please do yourself a favor and go check out Cuzco.

With all that being said, thank you guys for sticking til the end. See you in the next one!