The conversation below has been edited for clarity.
@ Grant Slam 2024
Can you introduce your-selves and tell us what you play?
I’m Ian Bond, and I play gui-tar and do vocals for Daun-dry.
I’m Sebastian Jones, and I play drums.
I’m Katrina Hildebrandt, and I play bass.
What are some of your musi-cal influences as a band?
Ian: Sonic Youth is one.
Sebastian: Yeah, Sonic Youth. We each have our own influences. My favorite Drummer is Zach Hill from Hella and Death Grips.
Katrina: I’m from Washing-ton State, the Seattle area. I love Grunge – Nirvana and Layne Staley.
Ian: Melvins are a big one. We like Hotline TNT. They are coming up and stuff.
How did the band initially begin?
Sebastian: Ian and I met at DePaul. He still goes there. I dropped out two years ago, but we met because we were both in the dining hall and the only two with boards on us. We started talking and then went out skating, just listening to music, and we’re like, “Oh, we like a lot of the same stuff.”
Ian: We had jammed out in my dorm room at one point. Yeah, went pretty bad. And we never talked again.
Sebastian: We didn’t talk again for like, a year. And then we saw each other and we’re like, “Do you want to start a band?”
Ian: Besties for the resties.
Sebastian: I was in another band. It was kind of like a funk groove college band. Ian met Kat at one of our shows.
Ian: Over the summer, when Seb and I started, I thought of Kat as a bass guitarist because I was trying to think of people who could play. We had tried some people out, but Kat was just the best.
Where was Pria recorded?
Sebastian: We did it with Gabe Bostick. He’s in Plant Matter, which is another great band. They just put out an EP. We did it at Tree-house, a recording or prac-tice space. Four days- four 14-hour days. It was a lot, but it was good. We spent the next month and a half mixing – again, of just 14-hour days.
Katrina: We made a point to record everything most-ly live. There weren’t many punch-ins or recordings by ourselves for everything. It was mostly all as a band every time.
Do you collaborate in your songwriting?
Ian: I would say it depends. There are a couple of songs we’ve all written together as a group, which is really fun, and it’s always a better outcome. Usually, I’ll make a guitar riff and some lyrics and bring it to practice, and then we’ll try it out and jam on it. If we like it, we’ll keep it. Everyone will add their own thing to it.
Did you use any specific re-cording techniques?
Ian: I think Gabe. He went to school where I go to school at DePaul and he learned many of the mic techniques we’re learning right now. I think what he was doing was really cool. He produced
it a lot and he had a lot of ideas that he helped put into it. “Let’s add this here, or, instead of it being here, let’s add it later,” – stuff like that. He was the big spear-head for the album and the direction it was going in. We came in with the album as we wrote it and then he changed parts of it and made it like it is now, which is really cool. We credit him for that because he’s a really good producer. So we rec-ommend him.
Katrina: Gabe is also a DJ. We have a song called In-terlude, a sick song from a voice memo. Gabe just kind of chopped it up, which is super cool.
Sebastian: Yeah, when we were recording Shatterkane, Kat had class or something, so it was just Ian and I set-ting up. We came up with a kind of jazzy thing. He’s on drums, and I’m on piano. We just recorded it. It’s like, 30 seconds long. Then we were like, we want to put this in the interlude. We tried to recreate it in the studio, but it just wasn’t working. Gabe was like, let me just try to use the voice memo from the phone we threw down. It went super well, and he added a bunch of cool stuff. It is a perfect interlude for that album.
Do you use any alternate tunings?
Ian: I like D, A, A, D, A, C, or something like that. I always like to switch it up with some of our new songs. We actu-ally play as a band some-times at a bar called Lilies. When we do that, we play for hours at a time, like five or six hours sets. We sit there and we write all together. That’s when we really write as a band and have different tunings. It’s hard to fill five hours, so we just make shit up the whole time.
