Grave Babies are Danny and Tyler. They come from Seattle and play music that’s as sad and crass but more romantic than their name would seem to suggest. They’re lo-fi, goth and industrial, and their track “Dead Babies” has been on the Vice Music Player over there for two glorious weeks. Find their Deathface cassette here, and new track “Haunted” after the pile of words below.

Vice: I haven’t seen any other interviews with you, so I have to ask a few tedious questions. How and why did you start Grave Babies?
Danny: Winter in Seattle is fucking brutal. Just dark, and cold, and rainy. Tyler and I would just smoke weed all the time and I would always be writing and recording music anyway, so I started this project that was based more around weird, dark, operatic vocals. All the songs are about death and human tragedy. We think it’s funny to highlight really fucked up shit and veil it so people don’t really know what they are actually getting down to.

Do you work?
I work for a place that makes vegan sausages and stuff. They’re cool.

What do you make vegan sausages out of?
Wheat. And other stuff. Nobody has ever really told me.

So, essentially, you’re sitting around in the Seattle rain, making vegan sausages and tricking people into dancing to songs about eating babies?
Basically, yeah. That’s kind of my entire life at the moment.

What do you do for fun?
Seattle is kind of a drag. There isn’t much to do. The weather is one thing, but people here aren’t very friendly either. We get a lot of good shows that come through town, but we usually just crash parties and piss people off. I record for friends and Grave Babies stuff here and there. Mostly shooting up and getting into fights.

Sounds like London. Top ten party-crashing/pissing-people-off tips?
I don’t know about a top ten, but you should always wear a disguise and always bring drugs. Mostly to keep yourself entertained. Pissing in corners or a hole in the wall is a great way to garner negative attention. If anyone talks to you, tell them to fuck off.

I always find pissing in baths, sinks or fridges a sure-fire route to consternation. What’s big in Seattle? What do people like?
Gourmet foods, fucking up-scale condominiums, anything dumb and expensive. Music here’s kind of here and there. There are some awesome weirdo synth bands like Gape Attack and bands like The Spits, The Intelligence, and Factums. No one ever goes to any of their shows though. There’s a big all-ages scene, but like most shit in Seattle, it’s very exclusive and full of masturbation.

What about you? What do you like?
I don’t even know. I’m beginning to think I’m pretty anti-social. I ignore a lot of phone calls and chances to do stuff. Like I said, I’ve started to record bands other than my own, but sometimes even that feels like a drain on the time I could be spending laying in my room doing nothing.

Quit smoking. Tidy your room. Drink more fruit juice. Who else are you recording?
I recorded a Gape Attack 7” that’s coming out on FDH in a month or so. I’m in the process of recording another 7” for another Seattle band called Prison. I recorded their cassette they put out last year, too.

Gape Attack are fucking great. They seem to share the delight you take in being gross.
Oh yeah. Chris is total fucking scum. That guy has no class or morals of any kind.

I wouldn’t say your music is too gross though. It’s not puerile or anything. A track like “Gouge Your Eyes Out” is actually pretty dignified. Ceremonial.
It’s supposed to be a very romanticised look at death and decay.

Romantic how?
Romantic like, as we devolve and look at society and how it’s dissolving in front of our eyes and there is no more hope, and our bullshit phony leaders have completely failed us the world over; it’s becoming more and more obvious that the issues we face are actually just the human condition and that we will never escape them as long as we as people continue to exist, so… death and eternity are really the only concrete truths we have left. There doesn’t seem to be any sense in writing shitty pop songs about fucking nothing when the truth is we’re all doomed to suffer and die as long as humans walk the earth.

How old are you and where did you first meet?
White males. Tyler and I are both 26. We’re roommates in Seattle and met after I moved into this big squatter house with nine other people.

Have you always been into dark music?
Yeah, dark music is kind of all we believe in. It’s all we’ve ever known – well, not really dark, but weird music.

How much of what you do is PANTOMIME and how much is SINCERITY?*
The music is 100 percent sincere, but everything else is total pantomime. It’s hard for Tyler and I to really take anything seriously. Like, right after the Haitian earthquake, that guy was making jokes about people drinking blood for survival, calling them vampires.

Is there an ultimate aim to what you’re doing?
There’s no real aim. We never really took it serious enough to come up with anything like a clear direction.

What repulses you?
Magnesium.

What delights you?
This interview is over.

Grave Babies - “Haunted”

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KEV KHARAS

*capitals denote generalised and assumptive journalistic dichotomy.