Activism comes in many different shapes and shades, and while post-hardcore outfit Blight Future promotes social justice in both plainspeak and poetry through lyrics, the band doesn’t frame itself as hyper-political. In fact, the members work on their own terms altogether, externalizing ideas about success and failure through a tunnel-vision approach to writing, recording and performing.
“Music as activism is what set my life on the path that it’s still on from back when I first heard Propagandhi at 12 years old. I fell in love with punk rock and with creating music,” says Stephen Inman, the guitarist, singer and songwriter behind Blight Future. Nearly two years after its inaugural show, the band has self-released Love & Strategy—a cumulative post-hardcore album wrapped in a handmade package, free of record label meddling.
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Inman spent his early punkhood in Nineteen and Dancing Feet March to War, two different sides of the same socio-political coin. While one band delivered protest songs through the traditional punk filter, the other embraced a loosely fit form of experimental rock that lyrically focused on intersectionality and systemic issues.
Inman spent much of his time in the early and mid-2000s volunteering at the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center, where he booked and worked with bands during the venue’s most active period. After stepping away from St. Louis music in 2006, he returned years later for a short stint with power trio Spending Habits and joined both Loot Rock Gang and So Many Dynamos as a working musician.
“[Loot Rock Gang and So Many Dynamos] are bands where I definitely showed up and they said ‘Here’s a catalog of songs’ and I said ‘Great’ and put my own spin on it,” he adds. Yet, Inman formed Blight Future to express his own songs and ideas—a musical cross-section of earlier endeavors.
“[Blight Future] very much started off with me as this creative ball that just needed to go somewhere and that’s the material that we have now,” Inman says, and continues, “I have a lot of input on everybody’s sections.”
He founded the band after meeting with drummer Jesse Kornhardt, a recent transplant to St. Louis who posted a curious Craigslist ad citing Young Widows, Retox and Arab on Radar as influences. Inman’s longtime friend Johnny Gabbert soon entered the band, bringing bass, back-up vocals and auxiliary percussion to the table along with another member: Gabbert’s former bandmate Emily Hoover joined to round out the lineup on second guitar.
“Now that we have played together, done a bunch of shows and recorded an album, the next chunk of the band is definitely going to be more collaborative, even if that means us not sounding like how we currently do,” he adds. Through its first year, the group kept a rigorous practice schedule and wrote a full record’s worth of songs before ever playing its first show.
After Kornhardt left St. Louis, Blight Future brought in drummer Tyler Bicknese, a former bandmate of Inman’s from both Dancing Feet March to War and Spending Habits. In summer 2015, the band started on its debut record with Ryan Wasoba at Bird Cloud Recording, an institution that has worked with Foxing, Tera Melos, Darin Gray and many others.
Captured over the course of eight months, Love & Strategy stands as a culmination of the group’s output to date. The album opens with “A Plan,” which doubles as the first song Blight Future ever wrote. “Love & Strategy” stands out as not only the title track, but the closer—a bookend that holds multiple meanings for Inman:
“Well, you need love and you need strategy. I think a lot of movements are really motivated by hate and anger. I’m not necessarily always motivated by my feelings. I want to be motivated by my strategy and by my love and doing things from a place of cooperation and collectiveness,” he says. And while the band’s name takes a jab at the bright future idiom, Inman quickly denounces the idea that Blight Future is inherently negative:
“I think there’s also something really powerful and hopeful in just naming what’s real. Songs that are pointing out what’s going on in the world aren’t necessarily depressing. It’s just reality and it’s really important in a culture that does everything to distract us and deny what’s right in front of us,” he adds.
Within Love & Strategy‘s 14 songs, subjects such as lost dogs and zombies sit beside police oppression and environmental collapse. Everything Blight Future does is on its own terms. And while the group does seem focused on fostering vital issues, it isn’t beholden to that deadly serious tone every minute of every day.
As a performer, Inman takes a more direct and personable path. His rants are less raving and his speeches less preachy. Blight Future’s lyric sheet takes root problems to task while remaining introspective—in this way, the songs start a conversation rather than talk down to a potential audience.
“I’m always asking the question ‘Is there a place for music and art in social change?’ and the answer has always been ‘I don’t know, or I’m not sure.’ Two and half years ago, I decided that I’m not going to let that stop me. And I’m going to keep asking that question, and keep figuring out what my strategy is, and just be open to new ideas and what I learn from them,” says Inman.
We met with Blight Future to talk more about the band’s path to Love & Strategy and what lies in store for the future:
Blight Future debuted in mid-2014 with practically an album’s worth of demo recordings before playing its first show—a rare feat for hardcore and punk bands. Can you talk more on your initial approach to songwriting and rehearsal?
Eager to get moving from the beginning, we used the energy of the “honeymoon phase” to write as much material as possible—and very quickly. That involved setting a timeline, booking a date to record, and meeting once or twice a week to compose and rehearse the songs. Both the initial burst of excitement of being a band and the looming recording deadline inspired the sense of creativity that enabled us to write and record ten songs just a few weeks after starting the band.
We took a similar approach for the first show. When we were invited to play, we agreed first and scrambled to hammer out all the details in time. Part of the motivation was to put on a good show, but most was rooted in a fear of embarrassing ourselves too much for our first performance.
Blight Future is an intense experience on stage. Each member can be seen almost buckling under the weight of the songs. What kind of changes, if any, were made to the music in transition from the practice space to a live setting?
Hey, thanks! In terms of songwriting during practice, we are more production-minded now than in previous bands, making sure to pay attention to the details that make individual songs and a live set compelling. To achieve this, we write a set list before each show using a variety of criteria: what sequence allows breaks for us to introduce certain songs, whether it helps the set sound different from our previous shows’ sets, how to avoid fatigue from physically demanding tracks, and which transitions sound interesting.
We hope some of the intentionality translates live, but are aware that we sacrifice much of it in favor of impassioned performances. The four of us are very moved by the music and view performing as a chance to connect with a group of people who chose to be in a room together at the same time, which we also find moving. Finding and maintaining a balance between tightness and visceral performances is an ongoing goal for us, but we really just want to have a good time. We figure if the audience sees us having fun onstage, the performance is more likely to resonate and stick with them.
Many of your songs were re-recorded for Love & Strategy. Can you talk a little about your approach to recording this release as opposed to the original demos?
We recorded the demos to give ourselves the opportunity to listen to the material, critique it and brainstorm new ideas as a band. As the culmination of that process, Love & Strategy is ultimately meant for the listener. Our goal was to make a dynamic punk album that was exciting to listen to from start to finish.
Working with Ryan Wasoba at Bird Cloud really helped. Not only is he an adept engineer, he knows how to fill in the gaps of musical ideas with which we were struggling. He knows when to push us musically and when to take a break when one of us is beating ourselves up trying to nail a part. Having an objective third party allowed us to further hone the songs and helped us prioritize the material that worked and abandon other material—sometimes whole songs—that needed more development. This was our first time working with someone in a producer role, and the album benefited as a result.
The packaging is clearly handmade and screen-printed with an emphasis on the lyrics and messaging. What led the band to take this approach? Furthermore, did you have any other ideas that didn’t quite make the cut?
The cover art is a result of compromise. There was a protracted lull between finishing the album and releasing it because of the artwork. Everyone had ideas for the cover, but we couldn’t agree on any of them, which inevitably led to us avoiding the subject. We courted a few local artists but couldn’t furnish them with any concrete ideas. Early concepts were admittedly too ambitious—a comic with an illustrated page for every song—and when they fell through, it was discouraging.
So we switched gears and decided on a stripped-down approach to print the lyrics to the song “Love & Strategy,” which conveniently features the term Blight Future. We worked with Chelsi Webster on the cover and booklet design and Leave Your Mark Printshop for the screen-printing. As soon as we admitted that we weren’t equipped to do it all ourselves, we found that reaching out to people in the community with actual expertise was very empowering. Once the ball was rolling, things moved fast and the album saw the light of day. We couldn’t be happier with the result.
You often make use of pre-recorded samples in your introduction and transitions between songs. While this isn’t present at every performance, can you speak on the content of the samples and what Blight Future looks for as a band when putting together these pieces of a live set?
Samples act as an additional medium to communicate ideas in a performance. We try to pick things that are politically relevant and topical, such as Marilyn Mosby reading the charges against the Baltimore police involved in the murder of Freddie Gray. Samples offer a way to be clear about an idea or to provide context for whatever song that follows. They also give everyone a break from the music while also adding a cohesiveness to the entire performance. Now that you mention it, we should use them more often!
While the songs contain heavy and heady lyrics, typically with an activist slant, what other ways does Blight Future exercise its “music-as-activism” mentality?
We don’t see ourselves as experts on the topics we write about, and we understand that music is only a part of social reinvention. Within those limitations, we do our best to live the ideas of our music and write about those lived experiences. Ideally, what we convey as a band isn’t different than what we convey in our everyday lives. On occasion, we have the privilege of having a microphone, so we try to say something worth being heard.
This means that, as a band, we try to connect the broad themes of oppression—structural racism, environmental collapse, rampant consumerism, ingrained sexism, LGBTQIA liberation, class struggle (to name a few)—to our music as a strategy to deal with and eventually triumph over those realities. Specifically as individuals, Emily counsels schoolchildren, Stephen works with a legal collective, Johnny edits for a research center that promotes social development, and Tyler builds things with his hands and advocates for workers’ rights; we attend actions, support causes, and care for each other. Our lived experiences inform our musical activism and vice versa.
Let’s take it further: What ways can rock or punk groups in general be socially conscious and aware while working in the confines of a band?
This question is always at the front of our minds, and no answer so far seems completely satisfying. In many ways, playing in a band like Blight Future is a socially acceptable form of dissent. Rock music, especially as performed by privileged Americans like us, has been so thoroughly subsumed by modern capitalism that it hardly appears to be a threat. We’re not ready to give it up though, and there are likely infinite ways for bands to orient themselves towards creating a better world.
Conceptually, bands should consider being both informed and critical of the social context of art. Punk rock, for example, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is informed by structures of racism, sexism, classism and other oppressive forces that are so normalized that they often go unnamed. Bands have a public opportunity to be either complicit or oppositional to those structures. The more we are honest about this reality, the more creative we can be in our tactics, inside, outside, and alongside our music.
Concretely, bands can align themselves with already existing struggles, asking themselves where effort is most needed and focusing their energy on that work. This often takes the form of fundraising and momentum building. We played an event to raise funds for survivors of the Pulse Massacre in Orlando recently. Another show was held at Blank Space to raise money for people incarcerated during the Ferguson uprising. These are clear, practical ways that artists can participate politically, and they really only scratch the surface of what can be done.
Following the release of Love & Strategy, what does the rest of 2016 (and even 2017) look like for Blight Future?
We’re excited to do all the things bands do! More writing, performing, and recording. There may be the occasional short tour or out-of-town weekend, though we are most able to focus ourselves locally. First and foremost, this band has always been a way to prioritize each other as a sort of chosen-family, and that will continue to take on different forms as time goes on. That personal cohesion makes for the best music, and we’re always trying to do better at supporting each other as society ostensibly collapses around us. We’d like to include more and more people, and keep pushing what’s collectively possible.
Blight Future celebrates its album release show along with Skin Tags and Everything Went Black on September 24 at 8:30 p.m. at Foam, 3359 South Jefferson. Admission is $5. For more information, visit the band’s page on Facebook or Bandcamp.
