You just released your fourth album Got It on Jump Up Records. What has working with the label been like?

Danny: It’s been really awesome! Chuck [Wren] has been just so easy to work with and everything has been really straight-forward and right on track. He’s been able to offer us help in a few different ways like having the financial burden taken off of us of having to actually physically produce the record. That’s great for people like us because we have jobs and our band does what it can but it’s very hard for us to pull in all the money we need for records plus CDs plus tapes plus all of this stuff. He’s been like, “don’t worry about this, I’ve got this!” and just sent us stuff like, “hey, your tape’s coming in on this day. Your CDs are coming in on this day”. It’s great to get updates as opposed to frantically doing stuff ourselves. He’s also helped us out by putting us in touch with certain people, getting us certain shows. He got us onto Slackfest in Chicago this coming November because he knows those cats. He’s also helped us with international distribution. We’ve never been able to come near doing real international distribution and while we were in this process he asked us, “hey, if you have extra copies of your third record Money In The Bank send them to me and I’ll throw them into my catalog”. Ali: We self-produced Money In The Bank. Danny and I put that out.

Danny: He got international distribution for them overnight and they appeared in Germany and Japan and all that kind of fun stuff.

Ali: It’s been very helpful. Chuck’s great, we love working with him. We love Jump Up Records and we also love a lot of our labelmates on there, lots of friends in the scene.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Ali: We don’t really have a set process. Each song is written completely differently than the other ones. I would say maybe the process is not having a process. [laughs] We can be more creative.

Danny: The process is trusting the process.

Ali: The process is just going with it, just rolling with it. Really though, each song is different. Danny and I do the songwriting and the band helps with arrangements and adding in some cool dynamics and everything like that. I would say that some of the songs we write really, really fast. It’s just like an idea pops into our head like with “AIWDIS” which is the last song on Got It. Within a week it was like, “oh! This is done”. Whereas with “Swords”, that’s a song that Danny and I have been working on since we moved to New York seven years ago. We had the idea of it and just never fleshed out. Now, finally, this was the moment where we were able to put all the pieces together. It’s like a puzzle. We were finally able to fill in the rest.

Just go with the flow.

Danny: The songs kinda tell you what they need and sometimes what they need is for you to put them down for a second. I always say this: life is like climbing a mountain but the mountain’s not there until you put your foot down, it comes up to you as you’re going. The songs are the same way. It will be a kernel that comes together immediately and that kernel might be a word or a melody or a chorus or a verse or it might just be some ethereal idea of going from this chord to that chord. It’s just from all different directions but we get there. It’s really great.

Agent Jay of The Slackers produced this album and you worked with him on Money in The Bank as well. How did you come together? What has working with him been like?

Ali: Danny and I are very much fans of The Slackers, we love all of Agent Jay’s side projects, Crazy Baldhead, all of that stuff that he does. We knew when we moved from Miami to New York we were going to ask him to do this next record which was Money in The Bank at the time. When we worked with him on that record it was so smooth. I feel like he really got us and got our songs. He has a really great attitude and approach in the studio, he puts his hands on there but only as much as you need him to, which is great. It was just so smooth. We loved the way Money in The Bank turned out so we knew going forward that we definitely needed him for Got It as well. We’ve become very good friends and we enjoy hanging out with him, enjoy talking about music, and again, he just gets it! It’s the whole theme of the record, he just got it! [laughs] He just knows what to do and it’s really great.

Danny: Yeah, he’s been a god-send. He’s so easy and so knowledgeable. We got really lucky, I feel like, when we moved to New York and when we were looking for somebody to produce the record, his name came up. We were like, “he’s never gonna say yes, he’s busy, he’s doing a million things” and I wrote him and he was like, “yeah! Send me the tracks, send me your demos, let me take a look at them”. I was like, “cool, great!” Then it was this surreal feeling where you’re doing all the things but you’re like, “this isn’t me. This is some other person”. Then he’s writing back, “so what are the dates? We found a studio. I think this engineer is going to do it right.” We’re just having this conversation with Agent Jay about the next steps and it was bonkers. But he’s phenomenal. I think he’d already done a few projects that he’d mixed for other people and a couple of things that he’d produced but I feel like we slid in at the right time to stay with him as he was blowing up because now forget about it. He’s done a ton of people’s stuff and he does such a great job but I think Jay gets us really well. It all works.

You recorded this album in a couple different locations. You recorded at Stabby Road Studios, Pencil Factory Recording Studio, the Presses House, and in a secret underground location buried deep within the earth. Do you have a favourite place to record?

Ali: I think my favourite place to record is at home because I’m a weirdo and I like to get lost in the sauce. I’ll be recording something then I’ll go for a little snack then I’ll come back and then I’ll try something else then I’ll take a little more time then I’ll come back - I’ll take the entire day. I’m bad at a studio because then I’m like, “oh my god I have a time limit!” My work is all scheduled, I do lessons and stuff, so I just want my free time to be totally free. I like to record at home because I like to be totally immersed in it and not feel rushed and just do what I’m feeling in the moment. That is not how everybody else in this band feels. [laughs]

Danny: Yeah, I’m nothing without a deadline. It’s one of the funniest differences between Ali and I. If I’m left at home to record, I won’t. I’ll find a million different things to do. I’ll just sit here and be like, “oh, I forgot to tighten this screw six months ago that I found in a bookshelf in the back” and I’ll go do that. I really flourish and live with a time limit and a producer. I need somebody to disappoint.

[laughter]

Danny: So I can kick it into high gear. For me it doesn’t really matter about the room so much. We’ve recorded in a few different rooms at this point. I really loved recording at the Relic Room when we did Money in The Bank. It was a beautiful studio. It had very New York vibes, you had to take an elevator up to the floor and then you open up and there’s all this vintage gear and a fastidious engineer fiddling with stuff. I loved it to death. I also loved the Pencil Factory because we got the keys to the kingdom there and we could do whatever we wanted. We had an engineer there who was telling us, “ok you guys are done with this song, move on to the next one”. You get used to going with whatever room you’re in. As long as we have our people, it doesn’t matter where we are. Our people are so great. Our rhythm section, Jack [Goode, drums] and Steve [Saylor, bass], are just phenomenally easy to work with. The engineer we worked with, Eric Daino of The Holophonics and a great friend, introduced us to Jack and Steve actually. That’s how we met our rhythm section because they all went to high school and college together out in Long Island. As long as we have our peeps, we’ll rock anywhere.

Ali: It is a bonus to have Jay in the room with us because he’s really good at getting sounds right especially for live drums. We did two of our tracks, “Make the Best of It” and “See”, at Stabby Road and those tracks came out really, really great. The only reason we weren’t able to do the rest of the record there was mostly because of the lockdown happening again. A lot of this record was in between lockdowns so we really tried to do a lot of it as a four-piece, as just a rhythm section, maybe with just Daino. It was a challenge but again, having the same kind of crew and the same team with Jay on the dials, it does sound like one work which is what we were trying to go for.

Yeah, it does sound very cohesive. What tips would you have for others looking for a secret underground location to record in?

Ali: Buy a great microphone, buy an interface, and get some kind of recording space set up.

Danny: A dry, quiet environment.

Ali: Yeah! And something that feels fun and relaxing.

Got It features a cover of “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill which is slowed down a bit and Ali, you’ve described it as being “rudie-ska AF”. What inspired you to take this direction with the song?

Ali: We were supposed to do this song for a compilation and we were cutting it close to the deadline. Then there was a family emergency that happened between some of the members so it didn’t make it onto the compilation but we still really liked the idea of doing it. I’m a huge Bikini Kill fan. They’re one of my favourite bands in the world. We were at home and running through ideas for the song as we usually do like, “how should we play it?” and we thought, “well we have to do it in the vein of a rudie-ska song, that skinhead reggae kind of tempo”. I think Danny had put down some rhythm tracks before he left for the day and then I started making up some melodies because there’s not really much of a melody. She’s just kind of screaming it the whole way through which is what Bikini Kill are known for, it’s not about being pretty it’s about the message. Listen to these women pouring their hearts out and their message. I think I was going for a Florence and The Machine thing at first. I started singing it in her voice, like mimicking her. [laughs] When Danny came home later that day I was like, “you gotta hear this!” And he was like, “this is rad!”

Danny: We’re not like a ska-punk band. We’re not a fast band. We really do lean kind of in that tempo range somewhere between rocksteady, skinhead reggae, and two-tone era. We want you to move. The whole point is to always be moving but you gotta be thinking a little bit while you’re moving to our music and that’s the sweet spot that we’re always trying to search for. “Rebel Girl” got there in a really rad way where it’s still powerful and punchy and you’re still moving through it but you’re moving through it kinda hard. You’re like, “Hn hn hn!”, like a train.

Ali: Yeah, the whole thing is on a train, it’s just going. When we play this live I actually just use piano. In our sets I usually play a lot of organ sounds and there will be a piano skank here and there but with the driving piano at the beginning of the song our band was like, “dude, this sounds like ‘9 to 5’!” I was like, “yeah, I love Dolly! Let’s do a fake out.” Which is really funny too because a lot of times when we play this live, it is kind of a fake out, most people don’t even know the song until the chorus hits because the melody is so different. That makes it really fun. All the little things we’ve added in the room with our bandmates makes it really fun too. That’s another one again that I feel came together within a week just like, [snaps] we’ve got this.

I love that song and hearing it slowed down and the lyrics have more punch because you’re focussing more on them. What impact has Bikini Kill had on you personally and as a band?

Ali: For me personally, just being a feminist and really trying to support other women in my scene. Like I said before, we’re from Miami and 2009 was when we were playing in our first punk rock bands and stuff. The vibe was so different with women in the industry back in Miami. I remember at that time just feeling like at every show there was another band that had a woman in it was just competition and it was awful. We were really treating each other very poorly and it was what was happening in society at the time, it’s what you’re seeing on television, and Bikini Kill is not that. It is women empowerment and now even more so of just equality of people. Equality of who you want to be unapologetically, being yourself and people having to deal with that. The Me Too movement had a huge impact on me as well as many other women especially in this industry. It really has been rough for me in the past being a woman, not only as a singer but also as an instrumentalist because there’s a huge amount of weight that that carries. People immediately see me, a small woman, I’m very petite, so immediately upon meeting me I feel that I have to prove myself a lot of the time. Bikini Kill is a band who are like, “you don’t gotta prove yourself to nobody! You are who the fuck you are.” And I love that so much now in this time. What Bikini Kill means to me now is that I wanna support other women, we don’t have to compete. There is room for all of us. We can all be who we wanna be. There are so many more women in ska and punk rock right now that are just inspiring and they’re doing their own thing. We all sound different from each other, it doesn’t have to be like the one female ska band. It’s not like that anymore and I’m hoping that when people hear “Rebel Girl” and our band or they see us playing shows that they know it’s coming from a place of authenticity. We are being who we are. All of our members are into their own things, they are who they are as people. I am who I am as a person and I really appreciate that message and it’s incredibly important to me as a person especially right now. When I do private lessons now, some of my students are getting to that middle school-teenager age and they’re pianists or they’re singers and I’m always telling them, “play out, play loud. Be who you are. Stop saying sorry”. [laughs] You can make mistakes, you can make all the mistakes you want. You’re not sorry, you’re playing music and that’s that. I want other people to hear that message and I’m hoping more people from younger generations are getting that. I think they are.

On multiple tracks on the album, you urge people to stop fighting and find peace within themselves and with each other. Personally, how do you find peace within yourselves?

Danny: [laughs] I’ll let you know!

Ali: Therapy! [laughs]

Danny: Honestly, therapy. That’s the only answer. I’m Cuban-American, my parents are Cuban exiles and I kinda grew up in Latin culture. A lot of Latin culture is like, “shut up and go to work, things could always be worse”, you grow up in that. What you’re taught to pride yourself on is your strength to keep going, it’s very Catholic, because of that you never really have a chance to introspect and you’re fortunate if you ever have examples in your life that help you to do that kind of stuff. Even what Ali was saying with Bikini Kill and where we are in music and stuff like that it’s kinda the same thing, we’re finally at a point where people are talking about it. It’s more of a normal thing to say, “I’m not alright” and people will listen to you when you say, “I’m not alright”. I’m thankful for the moment in history where we are right now, it’s a big piece of progress that we needed. For years the outlet for us was the music, you’d go and write a song about it. You feel bad about something and you’d have to put pen to paper. I still think that we’re doing that on the record. I think Ali and I actually have a hard time with centering ourselves. It’s the deep, dark stuff that we try to work on ourselves and everything. We’re both in individual therapy now and it helps you to see things in yourself and see things in others. It’s weird because it’s almost more important instead of seeing other people in yourself, because you almost always see the negative stuff of other people in yourself, is to see yourself in other people. There is also negative stuff but it causes this forgiveness step like, “oh, that person is as messed up as I am”. It levels the playing field a lot more for me. You no longer have this inherited security, you have more forgiveness for them to be on the journey that they’re on and I’ve found that the number one thing with all of this was hearing things differently in my brain being like, “oh, this is all ok. This is just a stupid situation and we’re going to get through it”. Mental health is no joke and you don’t even know what you don’t know until you talk to somebody outside of yourself.

What advice would you give to somebody who wants to get into therapy but is on the fence about it?

Danny: Jump, go into it and do it. Do it online, do it on Zoom, do it on the phone if you have a hard time seeing somebody face to face. Just try it.

Ali: It’s expensive, not everybody can afford the luxury. We’re both pretty much independent contractors, we’re musicians in a city and we do private lessons and stuff like that. I was able to find somebody on an app, actually and it worked out for me. I was afraid of doing it too. I come from a Greek-Scilian family with a Greek mother who was like, “nope! Don’t believe in that! You can get through it, toughen up. Stop making it about you”.

Danny: Or that “therapy is for crazy people”.

Ali: There’s all sorts of shame in those older generations. I felt a lot of shame for going into it or even just telling my family that I’m going to therapy. It was just kinda like, this isn’t about them, this is about me and what I need right now. I can try it and I can always not do it but it does help you a lot in life. It helps you with acceptance of yourself and self-acceptance is really, really important as a person and also accepting other people. So I would say just try it.

Danny: Yeah, the most important thing is to stick with it. There are days where it’s hard. You have a particular session where you hit a topic that you maybe didn’t even know you were going to hit that day or something like that and you’re left with kind of like a stew inside of yourself. Then that stew kind of breaks free into some really good chunks and morsels that you can slowly get through as the week goes by or as a couple of weeks go by between your sessions or whatever. I don’t want to say any of the stuff like, “oh, be honest with the person and be this and be that” because you’re not going to be. You’re gonna try to hide from yourself and even if you’re going to only give this person 10% of yourself, that’s 10% more than you gave anyone else in that same way. So start and see where it goes.

Ali: As a creative person and an artist a lot of people have this stigma as well like, “oh the artist is supposed to be a crazy mess, you can’t tame that”.

Danny: Like, you need the pain.

Ali: I just wanna say, look you’re going to have the pain no matter what. [laughs] Don’t worry, there’s still a crazy mess inside here. But at least now you can define the crazy mess and actually I think it’ll be even more helpful in your creative process.

Understanding yourself and actually taking care of yourself instead of running into a wall is necessary. What can you do to create an environment that is conducive to finding that peace and benefitting your mental health?

Ali: Surrounding yourself with people who love you and who accept your boundaries. We need relationships and human contact. We need to be around other people, we can’t just be on an island. Tried it - doesn’t work. [laughs] Find the real people, the real friends that do love you and accept you for who you are. I think for me, the biggest breakthrough has been finding who those people are and realizing my own self-worth through that.

Danny: Our band is great. Karole’s under 30 but we’re all in our early 30s, mid-30s now and a lot of the BS of when you’re younger and you’re trying to be cool and looking to have status, which inherently makes you mean to people, that’s gone in our circle. I do agree that some of it you grow out of and some of it is getting away from certain people because they’re never going to get it. But our band rocks, the people in our band rock, they take personal responsibility for things, they want to be there. It’s a friend relationship but it’s also a co-worker relationship. Your friendship goes as far as everybody doing their jobs because if there’s somebody who’s not doing their job that changes the relationship. We’ve been in bands with those people and we’re not in that band anymore, thankfully. We tour in an RV and we bring our doggies along, our emotional support doggies. Everybody loves them, Pepper and Betty. Big up to the little fluffs. We have three female identifying members and it’s weird to do the couch-surfing thing especially with your wife, so everybody gets their same bed every night. Everybody gets air conditioning when we need air conditioning or heat when we need heat. There’s a refrigerator and there’s a small kitchen so we can eat food food. All of these things together make why we’re so happy with our band and everything, we’re in a good situation. Part of it is making it a good situation with us doing things that are involved to make the situation better but also having the right people, genuinely having the right people in our band and us being able to get along.

Ali: And trusting and respecting them as well. There’s just a level of respect within all of us. What I go back to all the time is they all have their own lives and they have their own things and we’re just happy to be a part of it. We’re happy to be able to put responsibility on our teammates as well and trust them. Trust is a really big factor in relationships, friendships, with family, and with everyone. I think sometimes people struggle a little with control issues and that’s where those lines get a little blurred over time. Again, if you go through therapy and learn more about yourself, you’re able to relinquish control and you’re able to have good friends, good teammates, and respect those around you.

How would you describe the ska scene in New York and how is it different from what you were in in Miami?

Ali: I love it, I think it’s so cool. Ska is the big umbrella term and there’s all of these tiny little subgenres in there. In New York City it’s so inspiring because there are so many different fantastic bands in this city. I love playing with a lot of them.

Danny: Since the New York scene is so big it’s more segmented. You have the New York hardcore scene, you have the New York punk scene, you have the traditional ska scene, you have the traditional reggae scene, you have the dancehall reggae scene and they all kind of are attached to neighbourhoods or attached to people and you don’t get as much overlap. But it’s all so strong here like this show will have its own 40 people at it and this show will have its own 30-50 people at it and in Miami, nobody comes down to Miami. [laughs] You’re starving for bands always, there are more shows here on a monthly basis here than there are in six months in Miami. Florida’s nine hours long and you have to tour all down it or all the way up to make it somehow worth it. The good thing is that Florida has eleven state schools so there’s like college towns everywhere. Florida’s got like FSU, FAU, FIU, UF, USF, UAF, Florida A & M, I could go on, it goes on forever. It’s like California, there’s a ton of state schools. Which was great for us when we were touring there because we could go in circuits but in Miami there is no West Coast punk or East Coast punk or oi or street punks. It's just kinda like, “we’re all the punks and give us whatever you got”. So all of the shows were mixed shows, where you’ll have a hardcore band with a rocksteady band and all this stuff because probably they’re sharing two members and everybody is kinda all into everything. It’s much smaller and much more neighbourly.

Ali: Miami has some really talented bands. I always tell people bands from Hialeah, which is where we’re from, are always killer. They’re just so good and they’re so creative and original and it’s sad that it’s harder for a lot of them to tour out of Florida. That’s why we moved because it was just so difficult. But I will say New York also has some killer bands, I’m loving a lot of the bands here in New York. Like I said, I like watching and seeing what other people do. I think it’s inspiring. I love going out and seeing live music and if I’ve got a free weekend where I’m not doing anything, I’m going out to a show. It’s busy here, there’s something going on every single night of the week but that’s kinda why I like New York so much I think. There’s so much great art.

Danny: Food! I’m here for the food.

Ali: And the food.

Danny: I’m really into food. Ali and I are big food people and I started cooking in our relationship a bunch of years ago because Ali taught after-school lessons and always got out of work later than me. I started cooking for us but I cooked like a boy. I cooked frozen chicken fingers and mac n cheese and that’s dinner! But then I started trying to impress her so I started to get good at food and it changed how I ate. There are phenomenal, experimental restaurants that you can go to here and have fancy meals but fuck all of that. What it’s really about in New York is that people come here from wherever their culture, their country, their ethnic background is and they make that food and they make that food killer. Like FUBU, For Us By Us food. You can go to Queens, you can go to Lower Manhattan, and go to an Asian restaurant or an Ethiopian restaurant and it’s like, “oh this is the place you go for this dish” and that is rad here. The ethnocentric restaurant availability is sick.

Ali: New York City: come for the music, stay for the food.

[laughter]

You need to get fueled to go to the shows so what’s your favourite pre-show meal?

Danny: We’re not big before the show eaters because we don’t like to feel heavy. One of our go-tos on the road is probably French fries. French fries are involved in a lot of different places because it’s easy and it’s fresh. They’re usually not sitting there for a while, they have to be cooked at the moment and they’re veg-friendly. We have varying dietary habits in our band, some people are vegan, some people are vegetarian, some people are omnivorous. French fries are always involved some way or another. [laughs]

What are you listening to now?

Danny: Weird stuff. [laughs] Yesterday at work I listened to a bunch of cumbia. It’s a Spanish language rhythm and genre. In Spanish a lot of the “genres” are connected to rhythm which is also a very fascinating thing for me and also with ska, ska is a Caribbean thing. All of the genres in music are tied to a rhythm and tied to a dance. So you dance salsa to salsa, you dance cumbia to cumbia, you dance bachata to bachata music, and you do the ska to ska. They’re all Caribbean rhythms or Latin American rhythms. I was listening to this local band here, Combo Chimbita. Their new record just came out which is a bit of a departure from what I knew them to be doing before. This one is more ethereal and slower and more jammy. It’s Mars Volta without the anger which I’m super about.

Ali: I was on a really big dancehall kick a couple of months ago. I listened to a lot of female artists in the dancehall reggae scene and I kind of took a really, really deep dive going back. I was listening to some artists that are newer like Shenseea and a couple of songs that just came out made me do more of a deep dive into older artists. I feel like right now I’ve been listening more to what the newer releases are. I kinda pop back and forth between older music and newer music. We had a bunch of wedding gigs so I was listening to a bunch of covers. All I can say is Shenseea was really doing her thing. It was a little too much, everybody was like, “alright, that’s enough of this”. [laughs] But yeah so I gotta put together some new playlists. I listen to a lot of friends’ records too. I try to keep up on what’s been put out. I like the new Hans Gruber and the Die Hards record a lot. I think it’s really fun. So that’s a more ska answer that I have. Also some punk rock too! I play in another band, Crazy and the Brains, and they’re recording an album right now. We actually just finished the keys yesterday and I also try to listen to some of lead singer Christoph’s influences as well when I’m doing records.

What’s next for Stop The Presses?

Ali: We are very, very excited because October is going to be very fun for us. We’ve got a show on October 20 in Ridgewood with Abraskadabra, a Brazilian ska band and we’re so stoked about that. And also Public Serpents is playing. Danny’s going to be playing guitar with Public Serpents so he’s playing with two bands that night. They’re going to be really fun shows and are all-ages which is really cool. That’s at Trans-Pecos. To anybody in New York right now who wants to buy tickets, if you buy pre-sale right now you’re entered into a raffle where you can win one of the Got It yellow pineapple variants which we got like maybe 10 of those or something.

Danny: Yeah, there’s like twenty total.

Ali: We don’t have a lot of those. So we’re going to raffle one of those babies away. We’re doing a Halloween show with Mephiskapheles, Sgt. Scagnetti, and Skappository on October 28. The Halloween festival, Foggy Days, is on the 28 and 29 and we’re playing on the 29th. That's in Hudson Valley.

Danny: People are saying wild things are going to go on there, I can’t wait!

Ali: They said it’s a wild party.

Danny: And right on the heels of that we go to the UK for the Big One 11.

Ali: That’s a specialized ska and reggae music festival in the UK. This will be our first trip as a band across the pond, I believe that’s what people say when you’re going to the UK. Me and Danny have never been to Europe so this is our first time going over there. We’re just so, so excited about that. And when we get back November 11, that’s Ironfest and then November 12 is Slackfest. So Ironfest is in Cincinnati and our bud Sammy Kay is on that with us. Laura Jane Grace is also playing that festival and we don’t believe she’s going to be on the same day as us but that’s huge. A bunch of our friends’ bands are playing as well. I’m excited to see The Abruptors. We played with them in Buffalo last spring. So that’ll be fun. We like to kinda hibernate during the December and January time. It’s just so cold! We try to use it as a good writing time and when the spring happens we’ll be back out again with all the flowers. I would say just follow us on all of the socials.

Danny: We’ll be gearing up for proper tour season when the spring happens. We lost the ability to tour over the summer because our tour bus broke down in March and we had to get rid of it. It was gone, it was totally unrecoverable. We got a great response from our GoFundMe and people donated a ton of money. They honestly pulled us out of the hole we were in. We not only lost our bus with a week left of touring but we had to scramble and put a bunch of Airbnbs and rental cars on credit cards. So we came back minus a bus, minus money. Because people donated money we were able to get out of that debt hole and put money into a new bus. It was just incredible. We’re back to road ready now and as soon as it gets to a better temperature we’ll be out touring.