You wrote and recorded A Sea of Nude Limbs Thrashing over two weekends two years apart and surprise-released it on Halloween. What was it like writing and recording this way?

The fun part of it is this whole act is it's a lot of old friends and some new friends who have never really worked together before. D.A., or Dustin Andrews, the producer and bass player of Our Sins, sorta had an idea to bring back an old band that we all played together in 2014-2015 in London called Confidence Antler. Very briefly, Danny [Kidd, co-lyricist, vocalist, and guitarist], Dustin, and I played in that act. We said, “What would it be like if we tried to write some music together?” We called up our buddy Joel [Siggelkow, drums], who played in a band called Twin, and said, “Hey, why don’t we just see what happens if we get together for a weekend?” The chemistry was just so easy.

The first weekend we got together in 2022, four songs were written and almost entirely recorded. We were in a flow state kind of thing. [laughs] We were like, “Ok, without the encumbrances of what we try to do when we write for our main projects, what would happen if we just churn out this stuff?” I had a couple lyrics written, and other than that, we basically put it all together in a weekend. We thought it could be a one-off or an experiment and then we were like, “Well, what if we just do a whole album? These songs are good.” It took us two years, but two years later, on another weekend, we wrote and recorded five songs. It was just insane! It was one of the coolest stages, especially because Dustin built his own studio during the indoor times in his basement and we just had this space to have fun, be creative, and get sort of dark and weird and deeply silly with the kind of music we ended up making.

Everyone just coming together and reconnecting musically.

It was cool! Reconnecting and forming a new kind of chemistry. I’ve known the other co-frontperson and guitarist and songwriter, Danny, around 15-17 years. Our bands used to tour together. I play in a band called Stuck Out Here, that’s my primary punk act, and Danny plays in Pro Wrestling and Wasted Potential, but he’s been in so many bands over the years. Our band was called Streetcore and his band was called All The Trendy Kids and we played weekend tours from Windsor to Sarnia. [laughs] We played a bar in Sarnia called Puck Around, we’ve known each other that long!

D.A. I’ve known just about the same amount of time, but in a different arena. He used to come play our hometown in Bayfield, Ontario with his old bands. It’s some friendships that were tried and true, but never tried this way. Then getting to know Joel these past 3-4 years has been really wonderful because his taste is so eclectic. His knowledge base is so huge and it’s been really cool.

What went into your decision to surprise-release the album?

The record felt like it wasn’t like anything we’ve entirely done before. Danny and D.A. have worked in a band called Wasted Potential that had some heavier sounds. We do some orgcore stuff with Stuck Out Here and then with my solo stuff, it’s a lot more indie folk and singer-songwriter fare. This was such a stretch and so fun. The subject matter is pretty fantastical and over-the-top; it’s a bunch of Hot Topic songs about killing God, so we were like, “Why don’t we put it out on Halloween?” [laughs] I think that just sort of made sense.

There was a band we all loved, and a lot of us in this particular Southwestern Ontario scene loved, called Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. They were a great band out of Kitchener. They had a four-song EP that was getting tossed around like hotcakes in email chains in like 2010 before anyone really knew who they were. Everyone had a copy of this EP before it came out. I think we sort of thought, “What if we try to get that fervour?” We sent some copies to friends in bands, people whose taste we respect, so those folks would know and then we’d just drop it.

The Halloween release with the subject matter, you couldn’t have asked for a more perfect time.

We leaned into it so heavily in the lyrical matter, in the song titles, in the grim and goth approach we had with this thing. Aside from wearing Jack Skellington pyjamas or something, this is the most Hot Topic thing we’ve ever done in our lives, or the most Hot Topic thing you can do as a band. [laughs] It felt really good to lean into that.

I’m just picturing everyone on stage in Jack Skellington onesies. [laughs]

[laughs] We didn’t take it too far. We had our first show a couple weeks ago. Dustin got married last summer and it was a great wedding. They had all these battery-operated LED candles and we put them on all our amps and wore all black to really continue to lean into it. It was from a wedding, so it wasn’t that gothic, but in the context of playing a gothic punk show in a basement in Toronto, it made it a deal more dramatic. [laughs]

How did the idea to lean into gods and demons and light and darkness lyrically come about?

It’s interesting, it’s almost as if there wasn’t a full decision to do it. I think that first session, I had maybe two or three songs fully lyrically written with no melodies attached. In my solo work in the past, I’ve dabbled in a lot of that cosmic, demonic, bathed in light and darkness imagery, but I’ve never applied it to the kind of punk music I make; we talk about “party angst” feelings in Stuck Out Here. With Danny and Dustin and their approach, it just made sense that the music we were making had these elements.

We had one song where we did the thing where you’re writing it in the space and you’re sort of mumbling gibberish into the microphone. Danny came up with this great hook for our song “Breeders” and it was like, “Well, this song could be about anything, but all the other songs are sort of dark, so why don’t we make this song about falling in love and sleeping in a coffin?” [laughs] It was like we couldn’t back away from it. In the best way, we backed ourselves in a corner creatively to really kind of take the theme to its logical fulfillment. Despite how dark and weird it is, it’s really fun. [laughs]

On “BODYBLOOD” you retell or reimagine the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. What drew you to that story in particular?

I think it’s one of the greatest tragic love stories that you can see echoed throughout all the great stories like Romeo and Juliet and anything with star-crossed lovers, where a romance is cursed by the gods or the idea of climbing back into hell. You can even see it in Disney’s Hercules. [laughs]

There’s a movie called Black Orpheus that’s the Orpheus myth set in Carnaval in Brazil and there’s a jazz interpretation of the soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi Trio, the Peanuts guy, called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus. It was fall, I was listening to that record a lot and thinking about those themes. I think I wrote it after seeing a Single Mothers show at the Garrison and going to Wasted Youth, which is basically right beside the Garrison, and knocking back a couple of what they call “fuck juice”, which is basically just a $10 drink where you don’t know what’s in it but it’s gonna make you feel really stupid. [laughs] Then I wrote the lyrics to that song on my phone. It was a happy accident of conscious and unconscious thought.

Single Mothers always give you that creative power after you see them live.

Oh my god, yeah! Honestly, some of the moments, maybe even two of the songs on this record, were definitely written standing at the back of the Garrison on my phone. [laughs] Those are buddies too and Danny’s played with Single Moms and Drew Thomson and stuff.

We’re calling Our Sins Forest City God-fearing scene music. I won’t say supergroup - but we’re a bunch of like-minded punk rock individuals who have never played together based out of London. It’s sort of cool and a touchstone to pay tribute to the music and the oeuvre of Drew and Single Mothers. I’ve been putting 519 in every social media thing, every email address, really honing in on it. [laughs]

It does help with searching for stuff.

Search engine optimization is a real thing! You don’t wanna get taken to a bunch of hymnals and church websites. [laughs]

The album takes its name from a line in “New Summer Sunday Night Heat”. Did the lyric or the album title come first?

That’s from the lyric. Danny and I take different approaches to writing. He’s such a cool songwriter. He’s got a classic notebook full of handwritten lines of poetry and verses and stanzas. I’m such an off-the-dome Notes app kinda guy, I’m in a steady stream. This song was one of the great collaborations we did on this record, where we wrote together and we went line by line, which is why it’s sung like that. When we came up to the little passage there that’s almost a chorus - it’s such a quick song, it’s not really a chorus [laughs] - and we hit that line, it felt dramatic enough and impactful enough and evocative enough without saying too much that it sort of tied it all together.

It works really well with the album art too, which you created and designed. What’s the story behind the photo on the cover?

It’s such a harmless photo for such a visceral, impactful image. I was hanging out with my buddy, Wholesome Hardwood - I call him Franklin Tennessee - outside of Guelph at Hillside this year. Me and my sweetie were staying over at his dad’s place out in the country. He likes to drink hot milks, which is what I like to call warm Old Milwaukees, and he’s a country kid, so he has no fear when it comes to hopping through a fire. I decided to try and take some images of him hopping through the fire to bring out some chips, some Party Mix, and some hot milks. I posted the photo on my story and a friend of mine, Teagan Johnston, a great songwriter in the city, was like, “You have to make that album art!” I was like, “Well, I have an album coming out, this sort of makes complete sense!” [laughs]

It just ended up being so striking. With the subject matter of this record, it makes total, complete sense to have this visceral swallowed-by-flames image, but the truth of it is, it’s my buddy Frank just being a country bumpkin. He just hopped right through it, like how someone would wave their hand over a candle. It barely licked him, but it looks intense. [laughs] It ruled!

That’s so cool how again everything just lined up.

Yeah, so much of this record is just a lot of coincidence and chance and natural chemistry and natural circumstance. We concentrate on so many supernatural elements, but the most supernatural thing about it was how easily it went. [laughs]

What song on the record was the most fun or fulfilling to write?

That’s a good question! I know we all had a lot of fun with “BODYBLOOD”. I think in my head it could’ve been a hardcore song, like our other tune “Rolling in the Arms of an Empty Saint” - kinda like a big, throaty shouter - but Danny just started playing the chords to it and it sounded like From Under the Cork Tree Fall Out Boy and we were like, “Ok, let’s get into it!” We put this kind of oversized, dramatic screamo bridge on it with a little La Dispute in there and a lot of Pete Wentz energy. [laughs]

It kinda took it to this really maximalist, ridiculous place that I think informed how we went forward with the record from there on out, like, “Oh damn, we can have a lot of fun with this. We can be sort of ridiculous and take it to all the places we’re accidentally taking it.” I think that tune in particular was a touchstone in the process of writing these songs.

What do you think is one of the directions you accidentally took it in?

I think we all know what our strong suits are as musicians. Joel’s an incredible drummer and he loves a lot of different types of music. He comes from a world of sometimes emo revival stuff, but he had his history in scene music as a fan. We all like that music, but we were never able to write that kind of music. When we got together, we thought it would maybe sound like the other projects we do - and there are definitely elements of that - but accidentally we ended up going a little harder into some stuff that sounds like Big Shiny Tunes, like a more maudlin Big Wreck song or something. [laughs] Or even more sugary and pop-punk or, like “Breeders”, more Alkaline Trio, more Misfits-y and get a little more goth-y, get a little more genre experimental. There was a time maybe we couldn’t explore that kind of stuff in our lives or in our careers.

There’s something about the risks we took in terms of genre experimentation of the kind of genres that, in all of the revivals and in all of the kind of different new waves of punk expression, aren’t always given the most love. There’s a lot of love for '90s-indebted kinda jangly, Gin Blossoms-y stuff, and we have that on there, but going into the more Warped Tour corners was really fun for all of us to sort of embrace that. When we do another record it’s like, “Ok, are we gonna try and write something that could’ve got put out on Ferret Records in 2004 or Jade Tree or Fueled By Ramen?” Really lean into the more, I guess, less critically respected genres and versions of punk expression.

There was so much good stuff that came out of that. It’s unfairly maligned.

It’s unfairly maligned! I’ve been loving that music and holding a candle for it through my entire adult life and brushing up with a lot of eyeroll-core musicians, I like to say; folks who don’t shoegaze, they skullgaze. They’re just rolling their eyes through every pedal they push on their pedalboard. It feels fun to make unabashedly fun, smartly stupid scene music. All that stuff was so good and so informative.

There’s a reason it became a massive cultural force. There’s a reason you can watch an episode of any show on television, like Emily In Paris, and they’ll say, “Oh, you’re so emo right now.” That can happen today because that was mass media. It was a big cultural moment in the early 2000s and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with revering that music and then trying to see how you can fit that in a smaller subtext in Southwestern Ontario punk music. [laughs]

It goes so well with punk, it’s a perfect marriage.

Yeah! It should be harmonious. That’s something we’ve all learned over the years that so many of us, even on our most coolest days, still love Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. [laughs] Those records in that era, that Alternative Press stuff, were bangers. I never didn’t like that era and I love when bands come back now and they’re still doing creative stuff. The Starting Line came back this year with a new record and it rules! I saw Hellogoodbye a couple weeks ago and it ruled! This stuff is still good. It’s still pertinent and there’s still more to explore, I think, in this kind of direction of tunes. Honesty is relative, but I think there is something deeply honest about being like, “Whatever, let’s make it ridiculous. I love this shit!” [laughs]

“Sparta Candles // Shipka Drive-In” references two places in Ontario: Sparta and Grand Bend, respectively. What do these places mean to you?

“Sparta Candles” I know D.A. came up with that angle and we thought it sort of had a Sparta vibe. I’m from Huron County originally and that’s the drive-in I grew up going to. We’d go up and do a double feature out the back of a minivan with the trunk door flipped up. [laughs] These are places some of us have been to, some of us haven’t. It sort of regionally placed us like, “Let’s see who gets the reference.” Of course, it’s also a double At The Drive-In and Sparta reference. We kinda busted out our Southwestern Ontario lore and our deep scene adoration lore. [laughs]

It’s the Ontarian scene.

That’s it. It’s a big thing and it’s been really fun. We’ve had a lot of names for it. There was 519 Punk Vids, which was such a home for 519core, Southwestern scene music. We called it the Juicebox scene because there used to be a really great digital record label called Juicebox Recording Co. and a lot of our bands put stuff out on there in the early 2010s. It still is a vivid and vibrant scene.

It’s been fun to see all our friends from over the years who were in all these bands and who we played shows with from the Phog Lounge in Windsor to the Salt Lounge in London to L'AgitéE in Quebec City. It’s wild to have all these things and we’re still like, “This rules! I didn’t know that Glenn from !ATTENTION! liked this kind of music, that rules that he reached out!” We all sort of checked in with our homies after all these years like, “We still love tunes, right?” [laughs] There’s so many waves and generations of bands and it’s still so fun to create and be motivated, to make something interesting and fun and fulfilling.

Our Sins' debut show was on November 14 at the No No Room in Toronto. What was it like to bring these songs to life in a live setting?

We were such a studio band and our rehearsal space and our writing space were all sort of done with headphones on into amps or amp simulators in a studio. The first time we ever played live was the first time we ever played with amps in the room with guitars plugged in, which is so deeply unnatural, but it’s a band full of pros, so it ended up working out pretty well. [laughs] We were like, “We’ve never actually played in a room and heard ourselves, what is this gonna be like?” It was so natural and so fun and so great to play that space and play with a great Toronto band, Mavis, and great friends in Guilhem. It felt really cool.

The people who knew the record were already singing it back, which ruled, and the people who didn’t know it were like, “What the hell is this?” So that feels good. It felt like it made sense live for being concocted in our little song dungeon. [laughs] It came out into the light very well.

I never considered the with and without headphones aspect of it.

It’s something I’ve never done before. I’ve never worked in that capacity. Every rehearsal in any project has always been very tactile; we plug in, we play, we hear what it sounds like, and let’s hope this gets ready on the stage. This was even more plugged in, but plugged in in a different sense. It ended up being pretty cathartic because it was a surprise to us all how easy it happened.

Did you have a song that was the most cathartic?

I really like the closer on the record, “Brimstone Piledriver // Burn It To The Ground”, and we closed our set with it too. It’s such a big, sweeping closer. It feels almost like a Snow Patrol song mixed with Finch. It’s kinda 2000s and there's some balladry that feels easy to understand, but is still about burning up hell from the inside. [laughs] It just felt really good and it’s such a ripper of a closer. It felt like, “We did it. We did our first set and that made so much sense.”

Which part of A Sea of Nude Limbs Thrashing are you proudest of?

I mean, honestly, I gotta say D.A.’s production. As much as our songwriting and our playing together are great, this is Dustin’s first time doing a full album. He trained himself with YouTube videos, he got the studio built down there, and workshopped it for a while. He sat in there, in the dungeon, and fine-tweaked it until it sounded so explosive and cathartic and honestly, what I think it sounded like in our heads as we were writing these tunes. I think he just did such a great job of bringing it to sonic fruition. We’ve got an incredible bunch of players and writers in this act, but in the wrong hands, it could’ve just fell through our fingers and he just guided it right home. It was so cool.

Stu McKillop did a great job mastering too. He’s a pro who’s worked with a lot of bands that Dustin’s worked with over the years. I saw his band, Aspirations, play and we played with them at the Salt Lounge with Dustin’s old band in like 2009. [laughs] That’s how far back it goes and after all this time, we’re still working together in some capacity. That feels really cool to me.

You have those strong connections and strong friendships.

Yeah, just new levels of strength and it’s been so cool. Joel texted me the other day, and this was such a happy accident and I don’t want to come across too schmaltzy, but our drummer’s message was, “I’m just so glad we’re in a band and this all worked out and we’re all getting better friends.” I was like, “Yeah, man, this rules!” It’s just so easy and so wholesome, despite all these songs about having God’s head in your hands. [laughs]

[laughs] There is something wholesome about holding God’s head in your hands.

Yeah! Beating obstacles, beating fate.

What does the future hold for Our Sins?

We got a couple shows lined up for next year. We’re playing January 31 with Penske File, Chuck Coles, and Emmett O’Reilly from Stuck Out Here and Pkew Pkew Pkew in the back room of Cameron House. It’s gonna be good.

We wanna do more music, we wanna be a functional band in some ways and I think it’s just so easy to keep making this experiment happen. They all live in London and I can just drive down from Toronto and take a weekend and see what comes out. I’ve written a couple songs.

I believe we’re going to have a Christmas song coming out, funnily enough. [laughs] I do a yearly Christmas compilation through my little label, Eternal Bummer Records, and we have the beginnings of a Christmas song, so we’ll see if that sees the cold, hard light of a snowy day. We’re going to keep writing, keep doing tunes, and keep sharpening it. It’s easy chemistry and it’s so fun to be in a room with these guys and see the kind of ridiculous stuff we can cook up.

Do you have anything that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?

Shipka Drive-In is a real place! They say it’s in Grand Bend, but it’s in Shipka. It’s just down the road. This is just me talking too much county-speak. [laughs] The band is a great conglomerate of really fun, creative, seasoned scene veterans who bashed their skulls together and had a lot of fun with what spilled out.

It’s like Zeus giving birth to Athena through his head.

We all fell out of Zeus’ head, that’s why we took it back. [laughs]