Blond Guru’s “The Purpose Is To Entertain” blends nostalgia with innovation

St. Louis indie-rock band Blond Guru nicked their name from a quote by the woman who shot Andy Warhol. Valerie Solanas, a would-be playwright, was furious at Warhol for refusing to produce her play when she shot and nearly killed him in 1968, afterward referring to the famous artist as a “blond guru of a nightmare world.” 

Blond Guru guitarist Josh Hezel tells me this story over a Zoom call that features all five members of the band from four different locations, pandemic-style. The two Gurus who are Zooming from the same space are, adorably, the brother-and-sister combo of Noah (him, vocals and guitar) and Hal (her, keys and vocals) Gregory, sitting behind a pair of professional-looking, podcast-ready microphones. 

The band is justifiably excited about their terrific new album, The Purpose Is To Entertain, released on November 15. The record is a 10-song tour through the band’s influences, and it’s fun to identify the post-punk, garage-rock, lo-fi, jangle-pop, and goth-lite wells from which Blond Guru’s music springs. Whatever their inspirations, they’ve got it down to an impressive amalgamation of their own. 

The Gregorys, who are still in their early twenties, were classmates with Hezel and bassist Cole Conner at Lindbergh High School, where they first started creating music together in different configurations. (Drummer Sean Buchert is the band’s sole non-Lindbergh Flyer.) By the time they all graduated, they had accumulated a fertile collection of intriguing musical ideas. 

Just as he takes lead vocals on most Blond Guru songs, Noah takes the lead in the band’s group discussion, explaining that “Hal and I are siblings. We’ve been doing this forever pretty much.” By “this,” Noah means making up cool, clever rock songs, first under the moniker Handsome Boy as a sibling duo. Later, Noah connected with Conner to intertwine their guitars into elliptical emo-gaze song sketches. 

“Cole and I were recording songs in high school thinking, Oh, we’re never going to do anything with this, and then we were like, Well what if we did?” So the Handsome Boy songs were married to the Noah/Conner songs to create Blond Guru, as the songs were fleshed out with the full five-piece band for the band’s debut album, 2022’s Your Friends. 

That first album, Noah says, like their latest, was organized around a specific aural philosophy. “I think we’ve gotten fairly good at finding a tone for a project and being able to piece everything around that tone we’re going for,” he says. “Your Friends was definitely a Midwest emo shoegaze type of thing. I was listening to a lot of that kind of stuff at the time, so I knew it was going to be loud and effects-heavy.” 

Loud, at times, yes. But also packed with melodic hooks, graceful playing, and euphonious vocal harmonies. The result was a debut album that sounds fully formed, crafted by a band beyond their years. The members of Guru credit the quality of their finished products to the way the band builds the songs piece by piece collaboratively. “There were some songs that I wrote back in high school that were just me playing chords for the longest time,” Noah says. “And then I would bring it to the table, and Hal would add a keyboard riff, and we’d just keep adding parts.” 

Next, Hezel incorporates guitar lines that are inspired by his formative listening experiences. “I grew up listening to a lot of emo and pop-punk, so a lot of that has informed my playing,” he says, “But at the same time, R.E.M. and The Cure are some of my favorite bands, so when I’m going for spacey, I’m definitely looking at these post-punk greats.”

For his part, Cole thinks about how his bass can contribute to Blond Guru’s tonal blend. “We’re certainly a distortion-friendly band,” he says. “When it comes to anything bass-related, I draw a lot from [Joy Division’s] Peter Hook. The presence of the bass tone. With the bass, if you add a lot of fuzz or distortion, especially if you start the song, it’s right there in your face.”

Cole is talking specifically about a couple of songs on the new album that start with that in-your-face bass, namely “Gas Station Flowers” and “Lonely Desire.” The latter is sung by Hal, and one of the big differences between the debut and the sophomore albums is the increased presence of Hal as a lead singer. “‘Lonely Desire’ and ‘Duos’ are two songs that needed lyrics,” she explains. “So I wrote the words, and [the rest of the band] were just like, well, why don’t you sing them then? So I got to sing them, too.”

The mix of sounds that the band describes makes for a diverse alternative rock medley: The hazy IRS-era guitar propulsion and Cure-like melodies of “You’ll Do Fine (Take Your Time)”, the Pavement-esque slacker-rock of “Honey Honey”, the swirly Nirvana chord progressions of “Seeing Trails”, the basement-rocking Strokes-style murk of “Roamer.” 

Noah owns up to the Strokes comparison: “[The Purpose Is To Entertain] is closer to that early 2000’s New York riff-rock thing, that indie-rock revival,” he admits. “We knew the second album was going to be stripped back. Just go for the riff.”

And, as it turns out, go for the sweet drum parts. Buchert is a seasoned percussionist who is also key to helping the band engineer the albums, all of which are self-produced and assembled part by part by the band members themselves. One of Buchert’s greatest hits on the new album is a drum break in the middle of “Seeing Trails,” during which he lets out a spontaneous scream. “When we were recording the song, I was doing the drum break a lot of times,” he says. “It got to the point that I just had to let out a little [scream] to make it happen.”

Now that Blond Guru has put a killer new set of songs out into the world, the next step is to play them live. So how closely will the band be able to replicate the new album once they get on stage? “We definitely spend a lot of time trying to make sure we sound as much like the record as we can when we are preparing to play live,” Hezel says. “For me, I know I recorded my parts maybe a year and half ago. And I can play guitar better now than I could then. I feel like I might throw in embellishments that I wasn’t necessarily doing when we recorded the album.”

Noah agrees. “I’m a firm believer in recording exactly what needs to be recorded,” he says. “Then when you get to playing it live, you’ve just gotta get good.”

So you’ve got a good band getting good on a bunch of good songs. How does that formula translate into success in St. Louis amid today’s musical economics? “There’s no money in this,” Noah states matter-of-factly. “We were really lucky to just break even on the first record with merch and CDs and all that. At the end of the day, if we lose money, at least we’re having fun doing it.”

In any case, Noah says that the band is grateful with the booking opportunities they are getting, including Off Broadway, which gave Blond Guru their first big local show and is hosting the band’s album release party on Saturday, November 30, when they will play the entire new album start to finish. 

And the band is steadily building a loyal following. “We see a lot of people returning to our shows all the time,” Hal says. “So we have all these familiar faces coming out to support us, and the age range is incredible.”

Speaking of homegrown support, Noah mentions that KCLC 89.1 FM (Lindenwood University) started playing “Awkward Detached” from Your Friends a few months back, and some new fans subsequently made their way to Blond Guru shows. 

“We found three people who found us through the radio and came to shows and introduced themselves,” Noah says. “You’re listening to the radio in the 2020s and finding artists you like and you’re coming to support them. That’s really cool.”