Black Eyes on Splitting Up, Getting Back Together, and Being in the River

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Anyone who was following the general trajectory of left-field music in the 2000s is more than familiar with DC avant-punks Black Eyes' wild-eyed first run, which encapsulated 2003's self-titled debut and the following year's Cough. They initially split shortly after Cough and worked on a variety of projects that, if you were familiar with Black Eyes back in the day, you probably also checked in with across the last 20 years; in 2023, the group—Dan Caldas, Daniel Martin-McCormick, Hugh McElroy, Jacob Long, and Mike Kanin—reunited for a series of shows and, before you knew it, they had a third awesome album in their arsenal: the Ian McKaye-produced Hostile Design, which hits ears everywhere on October 10 via Dischord. In advance of the record's release, as well as the band-curated Speaking in Tongues festival taking place on October 8-10, we hopped on a call to hash out the specifics of getting back together and being in the groove again. It was a really great convo, check it out:

Let's start by talking about how this reunion record came together.
Daniel: Mike kind of led the charge on writing it.

Mike: At some point you, and I had a sidebar conversation about how fun it would be to write new music. Daniel, you've pointed out in the past that there was this moment when we were soundchecking at Market Hotel—I think this was the second show of the three "reunion shows"—and we were messing with something unintentionally, just playing something that wasn't a song. I may have just said, "You know, we should write." That's basically how it happened.

The logistics became the next question—because at the time I was living in Austin, Hugh was in D.C., and Dan and Daniel and Jacob were all in the New York area. So it became a question of, "How can we effectively do this?" Back in the day, we were practicing three days a week. Once we solved that question, and we just started sending recordings of ideas back and forth. I was recording some stuff at the practice space that I was using in Austin and on a computer. Dan, I think you sent some beats back and forth, and Jacob sent some sax stuff back and forth. That culminated with a practice in July '23, maybe July '24, where we all got together with the express idea of writing. We took the ideas that we'd been passing back and forth electronically and started to sculpt them into what would become Hostile Design.

Daniel: What's funny is, that first jam session at Market Hotel wasn't good. It wasn't like we were doing something that had any merit or spark to it. We were just fucking around. But even the feeling of just tossing the ball around was the tiniest little spark. Also, the stuff we passed around electronically—this is not a record that was written over email. I was personally really—I don't want to say skeptical, but I was like, "We'll see." I didn't have any great expectation that we'd come out with a record.

Personally, I felt like, "Let's try it to try it." I was open to trying it, but I didn't have any feeling of certainty when it came to the outcome. But once we started playing and exploring, and the ideas began to take shape and become more distinct and formed within the group, it became clear that there was something there that was exciting—and the more we chiseled and honed them, the cooler it felt. All of a sudden, we had a record.

Between the first era of this band and the reunion shows, was there any previous talk in that 20-year span of getting together again?
Dan: We almost did a 10-year reunion, but I can't even remember how far along that came. It was like, "Alright, should we do this," and then it just fizzled out.

Daniel: I think the idea was floated by me in a brainstorm. At that point, we never met up and never made any actual effort. We just sort of batted it around. It wasn't broached at all until we started talking about the 20 years, and by that point, the vibe had shifted. It just seemed there was a lot more energy behind it.

Dan: Logistically, it's also a little bit easier now, because when it was 10 years, Jacob and Daniel, I think, were both in California. Is that right, Daniel?

Daniel: I was in New York. Jacob was in California.

Talk to me more about the vibe shift that made reuniting more amenable for you guys.
Hugh: When we talked about the 10-year, I was like, "I can't believe this is actually going to happen. This seems really unlikely." And then it didn't. So when we started talking about the 20-year, I was like, "This is cool. I like this idea. Let's see where it goes. But I'm not holding my breath."

Daniel: When we broke up, it was very abrupt. It was coming off a lot of pretty rigorous touring and rapid growth. Excitement, discomfort, interpersonal stress, youth—all that stuff was at play. After 20 years, you feel really different about a lot of that stuff. When I was younger, I was really eager to define whatever's next—to do the next band, solo stuff, international touring, new forms, electronic music, all this stuff. At a certain point, I couldn't deny that what we had done as Black Eyes was special, and that it was one of the biggest, most important parts of my musical life. I wanted to acknowledge that, honor it, and reconnect with the other four people in the band and the music. I wanted to treat it with importance. Revisiting the music, I was like, "This is special."

The perspective of time and having lived in that more "Racing to the next" attitude—a lot of cool stuff happened while racing to the next, but you also wake up one day and you're like, "Gosh, that was really special, and it kind of blew right by me." The occasion of 20 years was also a really objective moment to reflect. The number doesn't mean anything, but it means something, and it offers this opportunity to reflect and reassess. So when we all got together and played, it felt so natural to me. It felt like coming home in this really special way um that I didn't anticipate, and it's been a great gift to be able to play this music again with everybody.

Hugh: I was coming from a slightly different place, because I was not psyched about the band breaking up. I was really sad about the band breaking up, and I wasn't looking for the next thing. But with all of my youthful baggage and BS, when it was happening, I was like, "Well, fuck it then, that's what's happening then. I'm just gonna shut down that part of my life and walk away from it."

In retrospect, obviously I could've communicated where I was with stuff a lot better instead of being like, "Well, screw it." But when we got back together, it was like, "Oh, I feel like I never stopped doing this." There was some rustiness that we needed to work out, but it just felt easy to to be in a room with these guys and make music. The vibe feels good, we're comfortable with each other in more ways than we maybe were in the last few months of the first run of the band. The same thing happened when we started writing again. It felt comfortable and familiar to the point where, even when something difficult came up, the working through it felt comfortable. There's a lot more of being at ease with how we are around each other, and how we work together.

Daniel: When we were playing originally, we wrote one song at a time. So there was a linear experience for the band, where every song was written in conversation with the previous one and we were always trying to push things further. "We got that far. What can we do next? What can we build on that? How do we contrast with that?" But I think that's pretty normal. We recorded the first record, and then we began writing all the material for Cough. There was this feeling of three distinct chapters that we lived through in the band. "OK, we're on to the next big writing phase where we're going to write differently than the last batch." Playing the music as a whole, after 20 years, I was like, "This all feels really cohesive to me as a band." It feels like a river that you just get in.

I've had experiences playing music with people where we get together and we write something, and it's music, but it doesn't feel like it's our music—it just feels like we made a musical object. With Black Eyes, the music feels like a force of nature, and if you get in the river or you stay out of the river, the river continues. Right now, we're just back in the river, but it's been there the whole time.

Mike: The river metaphor is really evocative for me. It was there, and returning to it felt great, and I've been chasing this musical experience for 20 years. Playing with other folks has also been wonderful in different ways, but to Daniel's point, it hasn't been quite the same thing. It's what we've built together feels very special to me, too.

I'm not sure if I was super sad when we stopped playing. My instinct was to go on to the next thing and immediately bury the feeling. Eventually, you get away from it to some degree—the feeling of sadness of losing something like this—but it just scabs over, and getting back into it has been cathartic and really rewarding for me. I love the experience of playing with these guys. I love these guys.

One thing I'm always interested in talking to bands that reunite is how you guys have observed each other change as collaborators and as people.
Daniel: Are you trying to get us to break up again? [Laughs] I will say this: Hugh reminded me the other day about a show we had on a U.S. tour where we had a big, heavy conversation before we started round two of Cough writing. We were arguing, debating, and hashing out what the direction of the group would be, and if we were gonna embrace more avant-garde elements or not. Recalling that, I felt this full-body cringe, because that's the exact kind of stupid argument you have when you're in your twenties. It's like, "Let's decide if we're gonna use gentle parenting or be helicopter parents." You don't know what you're going to do until you're doing it, so expending any energy arguing over what we were going to do in a month when we got home from tour and kept writing was so stupid and such a waste of energy.

We argue a lot less now, but that also has to do with realizing that, with some things, you just gotta wait and see. Overdubs, writing electronically, playing together, writing together—let's just try it, and if it doesn't work out, it's going to be super obvious to everyone, and if it does, that's great. That common-sense patience is pretty apparent throughout the group now, and that comes with time and life experiences.

But, oh my God, that debate...I can remember so many times of feeling hot-headed or future-tripping. Also, you're young, and you want to check off your whole list as fast as possible. Having all these terms on the front end, you're like, "Let it go, you'll get there." All the stuff we did that was successful happened through collaborative flow, and the stuff we set terms on was totally futile.

Hugh: Hopefully this can assuage some level of the full-body cringe, but I don't feel like that conversation came up in terms of, "Let's have a meeting to determine our future agenda." It was more that tensions were bubbling up organically in the band and we ended up having this somewhat difficult conversation, because there was a range of where people were on the question of how and what we were doing. I was in this place of, "We're in the sweet spot, the way we're doing stuff and what we're doing feels really good."

When we recorded Cough, I felt like I was the happiest I could possibly be in a recording studio, even with the tension. I'm a teacher now, so I'm thinking in terms of zones of proximal development, but we were quite good at parts of it and pushing ourselves past what we actually can confidently do. That felt so exciting to me, and that's where I wanted to be all the time. We were in the zone where we could've tipped one way and been really boring or tipped another way and not make any sense.

We started having these conversations where—Daniel, since you just described yourself as hotheaded, this is illustrative rather than a critical thing—but Daniel would say things like, "I'm tired of playing within structures of songs," and I'd just be like, "Dude, what the fuck?" Like, I get what you're talking about, and the impulse isn't one that I think is terrible—but, and I don't think I did a great job of communicating this back then, I wish I'd been more level-headed and less dismissive and pissed off about it, I guess.

But there was a part of me that was believed that our shit's pretty weird, but it's normal enough that some of us are striking this really beautiful balance. When Daniel wants to do something that feels less structured, that tension's part of what makes the music so special to me. I just didn't have the language or perspective to be more constructive about communicating that frustration, because I was just like, "Dude, I think we're actually doing the thing you want to be doing. We're already there." We really needed to take a break more than anything else.

Mike: I think that's exactly right—and instead of taking a break, we went on tour for another 13 weeks. It was a really intense year. Also, though, to be fair to Daniel, and speaking for myself, I'd added some pressure to think more mainstream about the music we were making, and I didn't have the communication skills to let go and understand that the thing was what it was, which goes back to that idea of the river being there. The more that you mess with it in your own head and try to make it something that you want it to be, the more you're going to lose your grip on it. It's really hard to maintain that perspective when you're young and in the middle of things.

Daniel: One thing that was interesting about the time was the music we were listening to and what we were interested in. We were listening to a Reverend Gary Davis CD in the car on tour, and our driver was like, "Turn off this old sad man." [Laughs] We were also listening to noise, dub, free jazz, modern compositions,
drone, folk, and party music too. There was a lot of interest in non-rock music. Something tipped around 2003 where, in the van, rock was in the minority—and if it was rock, it was, like, This Heat. I remember experiencing this feeling of, "Well, rock, that's old hat. That's like your parents' shit, and we're onto this new shit."

One thing that really changed my perspective is that now I teach college and graduate students, and the undergrads I've taught...they're kids! [Laughs] They have no sense of perspective and time. There's so much eagerness to pick up the next thing where, over a single semester, they'll start off and say, "I'm into this—no I'm actually into this—no, now I'm totally doing this." And you're not doing any of it, because there's no time invested in it. You're picking up picking up a lot and exploring a lot, and I know that at a certain point they'll probably put down roots and develop something in a more solid way.

But I was 19, so I remember being in that headspace and being like, "Yo, free jazz, modern composition, atonal shit." At 19, it felt like the train had left the station, and if we didn't hurry up we were gonna miss it— that feeling of, "Fuck, this is crazy, I'm getting my mind blown but also feeling pressure from the inside to hatch up all the crazy shit that we were exposing ourselves to." I was like, "Who wants to be in a rock band?" In retrospect, I'm like, "No, this is a great vehicle for us to explore whatever we want and make something that's our own," and that's the appreciation I feel now that was clouded at the time.

Hugh: A really illustrative thing about that headspace is that Daniel was like, "We're on this new shit." But Reverend Gary Davis—that's, like, decades before we were born. [Laughs] We had seven copies of different issues of The Wire on the floor of our van, and we're all voraciously reading everything we can and fanning out in different directions, and the others are going along to different degrees with that, or not. I do want to give a little shoutout to the other rock in the van, which was Lungfish and Sleep, basically.

Given this talk of what influences were for you guys in the van the first time around, I'm curious to hear you guys talk about how things came together sonically for this record, especially because you guys have been separately putting out a fair amount of music um over the last 20 years. I have to imagine that some of those things worked their way into what you came up with for this record.
Dan: For me, not so much. I was probably the most separated from music than everyone else. I hadn't played in a band since, like, 2009—and I wasn't even playing drums in that band. I did a little drumming here and there in the last 12 years or so, but if you had asked me right before we got back together if I thought I was going to be in a band again, I would've probably said "No."

That was a big question when we were talking about writing, though. I was like, "I wonder what it'll sound like," because I was thinking about all the disparate stuff that the other four had been doing. Mike, Hugh, and I did do a band after Black Eyes, Horses, so that was probably the last time I wrote drum parts. I really had to kind of relearn how to play drums again. It's almost like my drumming fell asleep like Rip Van Winkle, and then all of a sudden I woke up and I was the same person, but a lot older with other issues going on.

Daniel: I started experimenting with electronic music in 2006, two years after the band broke up. So I've made as much—or more—electronic music in my life than I've made punk music. The main way that that has influenced our work together, for me, in terms of listening to the whole and appreciating individual parts and interplay...when we were playing together back in the day, it was a big, big sound. It was a lot to be immersed in. A lot of times, I wouldn't really realize exactly what was happening in the song until we got to the studio, and I think other people had that experience too, where it's just like, "Oh, that's what's going on." Everybody was honing their parts individually, and there were pockets of interplay, but it also was pretty dense.

I had no interest in applying electronic production to our group. It was more about appreciating what we did together—the energy we brought—and letting that interplay breathe instead of setting any terms. In the backs of our minds, we were gonna have to be happy with the material and feel like it had a place, and there were these moments when we were writing where I was like, "Whatever we're writing is cool, but I don't know what this is, exactly." But the more things became detailed, the more excited I felt.

A lot of people describe us as this jammy freakout band. This guy came up to us after a show in Colorado last weekend and he said, "I was expecting it to be this like crazy freakout the whole time. It sounds exactly like the records." And I was like, "Well, yeah, we wrote it that way." We wrote this music. It doesn't have a lot of improvisation, structurally. So it really got exciting to me when like we would get the form and mold the details into something that really felt like you could sink your teeth into it.

Mike: One anecdote from when we were writing was when we were working on "Yeah Right." We'd struggled to find the exactform for that song. I can't remember exactly how it started, but there was certainly a different beat behind it, and I was trying to play something entirely different. At one point, the conversation of a blast beat came up—what would that do if that was in this place? Back in the day, I think I would've been like, "Fuck no." But I was like, "Yeah, let's try it." For me, it made the song a lot more difficult and more interesting in a way that I'm not sure that it would've become 20 years ago.

In the intervening 20 years, personally, my mind opened up a lot about what to hear. There was this one moment when we were recording, and Ian put on a New Orleans jazz thing or something, and I was like, "Oh my God, what is this?" I was so into it and really feeling it, and he made this perfect joke, which was like, "This is what happens when you don't want to listen to jazz—you miss all this stuff." For me, shutting my mind off to a lot of stuff in my 20s meant that I missed a lot. Realizing what I missed allowed me to, I hope, be a better musician—and it also made this experience that much more rich in both looking back and being able to do it again.

The reunion era of this band has been quite busy, between the tour, the festival, and this new record. Do you guys have your eyes on what's next for the band as well?
Daniel: I work at a venue where I'm privy to how a lot of other artists operate, and I do also festival curation, so I've worked with a lot of artists and their teams on the back end. Personally, when it comes to, "Are we here for good? Are we taking it a day at a time?" it's like, "Yes, both." We are currently operating as a band. I'd expect we'll probably write some more material, but we haven't sat down to do that yet. But also we have our lives going on. Things happen on their own timetable.

But watching other artists, there's always a temptation to eternally grow and become bigger and more dazzling in your career. That's something I personally would like to avoid. I'm happy to keep growing, and I feel like this collaboration is going to reveal new music to us—new ways of playing together, and maybe some new opportunities. We have dates we're going to go play, and I'm really excited about those. It's just a great joy to be able to do this.

But I also feel like I often hear people talk about their careers in terms of conquering or taking over, and I'm like, "Fuck that." I just feel really grateful to be able to play together again and find new pockets of expression within that. The body sensation of playing this music and being together is a really wonderful homecoming feeling and a very deep and familiar native tongue. It's so special.

Hugh: I was texting with Ian after our first reunion shows, and he was asking me how I felt about it. I was like, "Look, to the extent that we can do this in a way that sustainably lets us keep doing it—that's the best possible success to me." We get to keep doing this thing that is one of my favorite things to do, and we can do it without bankrupting ourselves or putting ourselves in ill health. As long as we can keep doing it to the extent that it makes sense to us, that's the extent of my vision.