CANDY on Electronic Music, the Boundaries of Genre, and Being the BMW of Hardcore

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I enjoyed CANDY's Heaven Is Here from a few years ago (I even shared a song on the Baker's Dozen from it, shameless subscription plug alert), and their just-released It's Inside You very much ups the ante when it comes to their gnarly digital hardcore sound. I talked with the band's Michael Quick and Zak Quiram about the new record, as well as a few other pertinent subjects:

I want to start off with the obvious here, which is "eXistenZ." I love the movie you've named the song after, and I love David Cronenberg in general.
Michael Quick: I mean, we love Cronenberg too. It's funny, a lot of people have asked about that, which we're really stoked on. It's just coming through and connecting with people. Originally, Zak had lyrics that were more about...

Zak Quiram: Jean-Paul Sartre.

Michael: The lyrics were leaning into how existence precedes essence. We were just going to call the song "Existence" without all the stylization, but it's kind of a boring title. Then we realized that Cronenberg probably took from [Sartre's] philosophy, so we decided to make a more interesting version of the title, and have it be a reference to Cronenberg as well. A lot of our stuff is multi-layered, and that's when stuff starts to pass "quality control" to us. It's not just a Sartre reference. It's Sartre and Cronenberg. We like to re-contextualize and connect these random things.

Well, I kind of think your guys' sound is pretty Cronenberg-ian to begin with. It's Cronenberg-ian hardcore, to me. Tell me about the texture in your sound, because I feel like that's why I make that association. Even when you guys are doing more electronic stuff, there's something very earthy and slimy about your guys' music as well, which I find really appealing.
Michael: One reason styling "eXistenZ" like that also worked was because a big influence for this record, the vibes we wanted to conjure, were soundtracks from the '90s—weird horror or action movies. It was maybe Spawn, honestly.

Zak: It's Spawn. 

Michael: Slayer and Atari Teenage Riot did a song together. There's the Judgment Night soundtrack.

I was going to bring up Judgment Night. There were a few moments on this record where I was like, "This is so Judgment Night."
Michael: The obvious one is Blade, but also The Crow, where you have Pantera covering Poison Idea. We wanted our record to sound like that. That's how we wanted to approach the electronic stuff too. People always reference industrial with us. I guess you could say some of these things are what people think of as industrial, but, like, Slayer and Atari Teenage Riot...nobody's calling that industrial, you know what I mean? They're saying, "That's metal and a weird digital hardcore band." We don't want to be, like, Godflesh. We've always been interested in bringing in electronics to our sound, and we're always trying to get better at it in a creative way—not just re-appropriating genre.

Given these excursions into past vibes, how do you stay vigilant against nostalgia creep?
Michael: On my end, it's about letting it flow. One huge goal we have for the band, first and foremost, is that for our own sake, we want to make something fresh. That's a huge desire. I think most artists want that to some degree, you know? But at the same time, there's some really obvious references on the record, and we're not afraid of that at all. When it comes to, like, stealing other people's riffs, we don't do it directly. But we're not afraid to get close. Some of the only music Zak and I listen to is freaking Boiler Room DJ sets, which is just people playing other people's music and putting that together to create the vibe of a specific moment. That's something we try to do, too. So there's moments where we're trying to very clearly reference an '80s Cro-Mags record, but putting it in the context of Nine Inch Nails or something. Even if we're touching on nostalgia, we always just make sure it's for a reason.

Like, Cro-Mags is everything. From the hardcore lens, I'm here to mosh—that's what hardcore kids think. But you could trace a line from Korn to freaking Cro-Mags—but nobody really thinks to do that. I'm not saying that's exactly what we're trying to do. But when we get into nostalgia and old sounds, we're not afraid to just let that ride.

Zak: We definitely always recontextualize it and connect it to something where we see the throughline, even if other people haven't.

Let's go back to industrial for a moment. I don't think you guys explicitly sound industrial, but Ben Greenberg's a co-producer on this, and I think the work he's done in Uniform and elsewhere has had hints of industrial! Tell me more about working with him.
Michael: When we first started meeting with him, one huge perk was that, since Zak and I both live in New York, his studio is based really close to both of our homes. We've always gone to Philly to make records—no matter where any of us lived—and that's not very fun, you know? He was also very engaged about the arrangements in the songs. He was, like, "Look, I'll be a safety net for you guys, and you guys can go as crazy as you want in terms of ideas and textures." And all this stuff takes time. A song like "Dehumanize Me," where there's a break in the middle that goes from heavy guitar riffs to electronics—making the sound design of those electronics, to make them sound good, and from people like us who haven't been doing electronics for 20 years—that takes as long as writing a song, sometimes. So one thing that was really appealing about working with him was he was that he was like, "Yo, if there are parts where you just need to focus on the sound design, I can get involved on arrangement." He added a lot on that level. I won't speak for Zak, but he was really great at working on the vocals and helping him imagine a million different voices.

Zak: Definitely. We had ideas, and we wanted to try kind of new vocal styles and approach vocals differently. One thing Ben wanted was to make most of the record vocal-based, and we'd never approached a record like that before. The music always came first, and the vocals after. The music still came first with It's Inside You, but while we were in the studio, there were many days that were just super strictly vocals—approaching that differently and coming in with new references, which Ben definitely helped with that a lot.

Tell me more about your guys' relationship with electronic music—the "Eureka!" moments where you started really getting into it.
Michael: It really honestly started with stuff like Primal Scream and New Order—not stuff that we really sound like. Zak and I and everybody in the band have been making hardcore and punk music for 15 years, at least. At a certain point, we started getting into those bands heavier—like, really getting into it and starting to study, and noticing that they have drum kits and samples. With some of New Order's songwriting, Peter Hook comes in with a crazy bass line, but then the kick drum is this crazy syncopated thing where, if you took that rhythm and put it into a hardcore breakdown, it would sound crazy. And if you start diving into Primal Scream, you find that Andrew Weatherall was involved in acid house. And then you start looking up acid house, and you find that a lot of that stuff was super distorted. Then you start to notice that illegal rave culture sounds more punk than punk does a lot of the time now. The way that stuff functioned was exactly how a Black Flag show in '82 would be—in a weird warehouse. That was the tip of the iceberg for us, and then we just dove deeper and deeper.

We don't sound like New Order, and nothing we could do would ever make us sound like New Order—and we shouldn't sound like New Order. But if you go deeper, you start getting into the heavier and crazier stuff—modern techno and everything in between. That's the big picture for me—drawing connections. You can use electronic production to make guitar-based songs sound better. You can draw really cool parallels between DIY punk culture and DIY rave culture. Realizing those things was a "Eureka!" moment, for me.

Zak: Michael definitely started putting me onto all that stuff a while ago, and one of the "Eureka!" moments for me was when he explained that punk music and rave culture is all just dance music. Hardcore is dance music. That's the fun of it—going to shows and having a great time, and then going to the rave and dancing all night long. It's all high-energy, and that's what people crave about it. That just made so many things click for me.

Michael: Zak and I got into hardcore around 2006, 2007, 2008. From that point on, hardcore—what that is—has just become more and more obsessed with moshing and stage-diving. That is completely synonymous with hardcore, even if it wasn't that way in the '80s. Now, you realize that you're moshing and all these moves people do is just dancing. That's a big part of it. And there's so much cool DIY rave stuff in New York—and I'm from Richmond, where there's cool DIY rave stuff that cemented those connections for me.

Tell me about the cover art for Heaven Is Here and It's Inside You. I find both images pretty striking and unique, especially in regards to the music you make.
Zak: Heaven Is Here was done by Andrew Barnes—we'd worked with him on the last three releases. We've always just had a base idea of an image, and Michael and I would talk about that for a month straight and then bring that idea to Andrew. He'd just come up with his version and pretty much nail it on the first try every single time. We were like, "Yes, this is exactly what we were thinking." A similar thing happened with It's Inside You. We talked for weeks about what we wanted it to be—the color palette and everything—and we sent that to Nick Atkins, and when he came back we were just like, "Yes, this is it, exactly." Without being able to describe specifically what it should be, it just kind of materialized.

Michael: The album art for Heaven Is Here was this massive body tangled together, and it represents rave and hardcore, which was how we described it. With this one, we were talking about it very differently—we wanted it to be energizing, empowering, and motivational. We never gave a specific concept with this one—we just started being like, "We need bright colors, like greens." We needed somebody whose work focused on that, and that's Nick Atkins. His work is so cool and very bright and neon, but it's not without a sense of danger. We felt like that was a perfect representation of our sound. Even if we brighten up, we still want there to be some menace to it, and he just knocked it out.

Walk me through the fake BMW logo on the band's Twitter account.
Zak: I'm not actually positive how that originated at this point. We really drove it into the ground.

Michael: That really has been a touchpoint for people for a long time—I don't know why. I guess you could say we're the BMW of hardcore.

Zak: People really seemed shocked by it when we first started adopting that logo as our own. It seemed to blow their minds for some reason.

It's a strong image! It takes you by surprise.
Michael: When we first started working with Relapse, one of their marketing-type people hit us up and was like, "I noticed the BMW artwork—would you guys have any interest in working with them in some capacity if I could get them on board?" We were like, "Hell yeah"—not that we like thought anything was gonna happen. He comes back two months later and is like, "I showed BMW and they would rather you guys didn't use the logo, so you guys should delete that." We were like, "Uh, okay, there's no way we're deleting it." We honestly were hoping they would send us a cease and desist so we could put it on a shirt, but they still haven't.

You guys are opening for Dillinger Escape Plan's reunion show in Brooklyn in a few weeks. That's a pretty big deal! What's your guys' relationship with their music in general?
Zak: I love the video of them playing Virgin Megastore and him head0walking from the stage to the back—that's pretty epic. There's this remix that Ben Wineman did of a Bring Me the Horizon song, too. I'm gonna be real, I have a lot of respect for Dillinger, but I've never really listened to him that much. I just haven't gone that deep into it. But that remix is so crazy—it turns a metal band into straight up gabber. It's one of the coolest pieces of electronic music I've literally ever heard. We don't know those guys at all, but my goal is to talk to that dude about that remix, because it's one of my favorite pieces of music ever.

I'm not extremely familiar with their catalogue, but I do know they were one of those bands in the 2000s with mainstream visibility that seemed to directly challenge what heavy music could "sound" like. It doesn't seem like people are as provincial about the rules of heavy music anymore. Would you guys agree?
Michael: That's something we think about a lot. When we all got into hardcore, it was very much like that yeah. From the time I went to my first hardcore show to now, the provincial mindset has decreased, no question. But I have to be honest—I've found myself guilty, at times, of looking at Reddit comments about our band on r/hardcore, and it's the same shit you would expect to hear from people in 2008. So I think, to some degree, that's always going to be there—and it's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a double-edged sword.

Our mindset is that we've been into hardcore for more than half of our entire lives, and we can do it however we want. Most of the gatekeeper-type people? We've toured more than them. We've made more music than them. They can have their definition of it, but it does not like outweigh our definition of it. Every single one of us has a lot of music that we like, and none of us think that our music can't be hardcore if it also flirts with anything else.

Zak: I don't think there's many limitations on what we think hardcore can be.

I do feel like it's almost become the other way around now, where when I hear a band doing a very straightforward version of hardcore, I'm like, "Oh, I don't really hear this that much anymore," which is interesting. The last couple of years have been exciting for heavy music in general.
Michael: I agree, It was almost feeling stagnant before the pandemic. People talk about "TikTok techno," and I think "TikTok hardcore" is happening too. I wouldn't call myself a purist or elitist really about anything. It can get really fucking stagnant being in a niche underground extreme music scene. So if people are coming in, even what they're making is bad or their interests are not refined according to someone's standard definition, I don't think that's bad at all.

I've had so many relatives that ask me about our band, and the range of what they compare us to is hilarious. They'll be like, "Ohm you guys sound like exactly like Metallica, or Linkin Park." I just realized at a certain point that anybody that is not 0.0001% of the population that's into actual hardcore music all thinks that anyone yelling over guitars is the same thing. Once you realize that, it's almost like we're weird for thinking that it's different.