Post-punks Deeper may hail from Chicago, but the band — who are double-headlining Boot & Saddle this Wednesday, September 4th, with Chicago peers Dehd — have some ties to the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection. The band have been touring their self-titled debut for more than a year. The album resembles a beautifully chaotic cross between Manchester in ’78 and Girls Against Boys-flavored ‘90s alt rock. Last week I got a chance to chat with Deeper bassist Drew McBride, and he tells me that they’re pretty excited to return to Philly and have us hear some new music: “We have some new songs we’ll be playing – our second record is almost done – and since The Districts are from there, I suspect we’ll have a decent and fun reunion of sorts.”
When I ask McBride about the early highlights of Deeper, he tells me that SXSW left a nice mark, but that their time touring alongside some of our hometown heroes was also quite nice: “Definitely doing SXSW was a highlight. We played on a boat going down a river in Austin and it was supposed to rain really badly and it was totally clear. That was definitely a highlight, but also being on tour with The Districts out West; they were so great.”
McBride was actually the last member to formally join Deeper (alongside Shiraz Bhatti and Nic Gohl), which he explains is basically an amalgam of Chicago punk rockers: “It’s been a hodge-podge of the whole DIY scene. My old band played shows with an early version of Deeper regularly and when there was an opening for a bassist, it just felt natural for it to be me. We had a strong sense of how we wanted our sound to be.”
He goes on to tells me that Deeper definitely take a lot of inspiration from late-‘70s and ‘80s sounds, like Wire, Talking Heads, The Minutemen, Joy Division, and angular guitar sounds in general, but that their favorite assessment of their work thus far actually had very little to do with their sound: “There was this funny review of the record from Richmond where they wrote about an upcoming show – and, I mean our drummer has a pretty distinct mustache, like a porn star mustache – and the article said, ‘the record is great and you should come out to the show,’ but it was mostly about his mustache [laughs].”
