Crushed on CDs, Elden Ring, Portishead, and Beating the Shoegaze Allegations

This is a free installment of Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get a Baker's Dozen every Friday with a playlist of music I've been listening to alongside some criticism around it—and in April, I'm running a month-long 25% off sale on annual subscriptions. That's $22.50/year instead of the usual $30. Grab it here.

I really enjoyed Crushed's Extra Life EP from last year, and Bre Morell and Shaun Durkan's alt-pop band has since signed to Ghostly, which just reissued Extra Life on vinyl as the pair work on their debut LP. They'd been on my list to talk to for the newsletter since the EP's initial release, so I'm glad we got a chance to chat about their sound and some other stray concerns as well.

Tell me about how you guys came together.
Bre: We met online—Twitter.com. I received a tag one day that Shaun had played my band Temple of Angels on a radio show he had. When I checked his page out, I realized that he played in Weekend, which is a band that I've loved for a long time. It was really cool that he liked my band too, so I just messaged him and thanked him for that. We didn't start talking for maybe a year or so after that. We were both in L.A. at the same time recording different records, and we started talking about music that we liked and both had in common—'90s alternative pop stuff—and how nobody seemed to be doing it in that kind of way right now. Both of our bands are on the heavier side, so we thought it would be fun to write some pop songs.

We had a huge list going of potential band names. We had one that we were using for a while that we decided we hated. We were trying to think of something better, and I'd had the name Crushed saved for forever as a band name that I wanted to use at some point. For some reason I was like, "I don't think he'll like this," so I never even brought it to Shaun. Then, when we were getting desperate to the point where we needed to pick something, I was like, "What about Crushed?" It's one of my favorite Cocteau Twins songs. That's where I pulled it from.

Tell me specifically about the sound you're trying to achieve with Crushed. It's very specific to my ears.  
Shaun: Before we'd ever written a song or worked on a demo, we put together a collaborative playlist of inspiration—an audio mood board. There was a lot of the things you might expect from listening to the EP—Portishead.

Bre: Sneaker Pimps.

Shaun: The Sundays. 

Bre: But, also, like, Sheryl Crow. 

Shaun: Primitive Radio Gods. Duncan Sheik is on there. The reason I relate to that stuff is because I wasn't even a teen yet when that stuff was all over the radio. Those songs have a way of worming their way inside your head, especially during that period of your life. They seem to be always bubbling in the back of my head, and I never had a project where I could really go for that, you know? Weekend had elements of pop, but it was so fucked up and distorted and noisy that even the poppiest songs came off abrasive. The Tamaryn record that I worked on [2015's Cranekiss] definitely had pop moments, but it was still very rooted in cool music—Cocteau Twins and Simple Minds. It wasn't so much overtly pop like some of the things that Crushed references.

Bre: A lot of people who like this kind of music tend to take it in a more noisier, abrasive route. We were like, fuck it, let's make some pop songs—but, you know, pop music nowadays doesn't sound like this anymore. It's a totally different thing. So we went somewhere in the middle, which we felt like wasn't really being done right now.

Shaun: People in bands that do this thing where they say that whatever new song or album they're working on sounds like something, and it just never sounds like that. Maybe they were aiming for something and they fall short of it, or maybe the reference is more interesting than what they're actually doing. But I also think there's this other layer that comes from insecurity, where you're nervous about leaning into the things that you really like so you present it as something else—something cooler, more obscure, a little more amorphous—to protect yourself from scrutiny. We were just so uninterested and unconcerned with that, because we never really expected anyone to hear this music. We were able to lean fully into it and make something that we really wanted to hear, and we didn't really care whether or not anyone heard it beyond us.

You mentioned Primitive Radio Gods, which came up for me almost immediately when I heard the EP, especially in terms of how that music appealed to me when it was on the radio and how that connects with what I'm into now. It's breakbeats! I'm curious to hear you guys talk about your relationship with breakbeats and electronic music in general. 
Bre: I've been obsessed with trip-hop for as long as I can remember. Hearing Portishead for the first time permanently changed the course of my life. I don't know why breakbeats are so addictive. Maybe it's because I also grew up with them. It's kind of a nostalgia thing, but it also still feels so current. There's something familiar and comforting about it. It's always been a part of a lot of my favorite music—and obviously as a through line through most trip-hop, which was a huge inspiration for this project.

Shaun: It has something to do with the fact that it's played by a real drummer, right? There's a human element to it, but it also has the rhythmic accuracy of being looped. It's predictable but human at the same time.

I'm not gonna lie and say I was listening to Portishead in the '90s, because I wasn't. Honestly, I hadn't really gotten too far into Portishead until we started making these songs. The inspiration comes from these bands in the '90s that were probably ripping off Portishead and making it making it way bigger than Portishead—bands that were on the radio. Sneaker Pimps are a good example, because they went very poppy and radio with it.

Bre: Also, just to clarify, I was not listening to Portishead in the '90s. It was the 2000s.

Just so we're all on the same page, I also was not listening to Portishead in the '90s.
Bre: It started around 2008 for me, when Third came out.

Shaun: 2022 for me.

One thing I'm really curious about is stylistic gestures that you both consciously avoid while making music.
Bre: Shoegaze. 

Shaun: It's funny—people still use shoegaze when they talk about our music, and I understand why. It's the production choices, and the atmosphere. We consciously try to avoid doing the shoegaze guitar thing—I don't even think it's because it's everywhere. It's just, Weekend was shoegaze, and we did that for a long time. This project was about exploring things that we couldn't have done in other bands that we've been in, and I've explored shoegaze thoroughly, I guess.

Bre: We just can't beat the shoegaze allegations.

You guys have mentioned a few times now the idea of achieving a sound that you couldn't previously achieve. Tell me about the technical aspects of that.
Shaun: I've always been interested in home recording, but it wasn't until this project that I really felt comfortable doing it and releasing the results. I've always made home demos for projects, and that's fine, because no one ever hears those. Even these songs started as demos, and in the back of my head, I was like, "I'll re-record all this stuff once the structures are nailed down. I never got to do that. Luckily, I guess my recording skill was at a level where the demos could be used on a record.

This whole thing was just recorded in my living room, sitting at a dinner table. It was mixed by Nick Bassett from Whirr, and a lot of the finishing touches that makes it sound like it does came from him. He really elevated what I recorded at home. Bre came up to Portland and recorded her vocals in a studio in a day.

 Bre: We had no budget, by the way.

 Shaun: Yeah, I think we spent $1,500 on the whole thing, and then we had my friend Patrick Brown master it for free. So we really made it on no budget, which makes me really proud, because I think it's one of the best-sounding things I've ever been involved with.

The sound of this EP makes me think about the CD, as a physical object.
Bre: Yes! Thank you.

Tell me about the first CD you guys remember buying. As somebody who bought a lot of CDs in the '90s and 2000s, it feels very personal to hold recorded music in your hands for the first time and be like, "This is mine to listen to."
Bre: I keep vinyl of records that I've been a part of, but I don't have any other records anymore. I only buy CDs. It's always been my dream to put out music on a CD, which still hasn't happened yet, but maybe, hopefully, it will with Crushed. I think we owe it to ourselves to put it on a CD. I just love CD booklets, you know There's something so specific about it, and it's different from vinyl and cassette tapes, obviously. I've always wanted to have fun with CD artwork.

My first CDs that I remember were given to me before I could buy them myself were, like, Spice Girls. I think was probably the first CD I had. Dixie Chicks was another one—I'm from Texas. As I got older, I remember stealing CDs from my dad, which would've been, like, Oasis, and my first Radiohead CD. As soon as I had my first job when I was 15, the first CDs I was buying were all the Radiohead CDs and just obsessing over those for years.

Shaun: When I was a kid, I spent whatever money I had—$10 a week for allowance or something like that—and I spent it on CDs. I'd go to the local music store—Watts Music in Novato—and I'd have them order me whatever I wanted, because they didn't have a lot of the stuff I wanted. It would always be some strange stuff that they never expected me to order. I was nine, walking in and asking him to order me New Order, the Smiths, and Gang of Four. They were like, "What is going on with this kid?" The very first CD I ever bought with my own money was Soundgarden's Superunknown. I listened to that again last year, and it rocks.

Tell me about the ups and downs of collaborating.
Bre: I feel pretty lucky about this project, and maybe its a good thing that we're just a two-piece. We set out with intent before we even started writing the music, finding common ground through the music we wanted to write together. We share the same vision, and when you're dealing with more people in your band, that's much harder. We're just lucky.

Shaun: The creative process has been really smooth. I'm kind of shocked we haven't butted heads over something. I think it's because we both know our strengths.

Bre: Sean obviously knows production really well—which I wish I knew about, but I don't really know anything. He's a great songwriter, and I feel pretty good about my vocals and lyric writing. We play to each other's strengths.

You guys have a song called "Respawn." Let's talk about video games.
Shaun: We play a lot of games.

Bre: It's what we started talking about before music, actually. We were talking about Stardew Valley, which is a game that we both really love. It's probably my favorite game ever. Around the time that we started writing the songs was when Elden Ring was released. So that consumed our lives. Finishing the songs took a while, because we were spending so much time playing Elden Ring. I just saw that the Elden Ring DLC was finally announced, so now we have some more samples to pull from for our new record.

Shaun: Yeah, we're gonna have to delay the new record now. Sorry Ghostly, we have some DLC to catch up on.

What are you guys playing right now?
Bre: Unfortunately or fortunately—I mean, I love it, so I don't care—but I play a lot of Fortnite. But I've also been playing Lethal Company. I thought it was gonna be a straight-up horror game, which I don't like. But my brother and sister-in-law and some of their friends played it a lot and were really begging me to pledge to give it a chance. It's honestly just really goofy and funny. It is kind of scary, but it's very fun. You get, like, dropped on a planet and you're exploring a building, but it's pitch dark and there's monsters, so chaos ensues—lots of jump scares, lots of funny, stupid ways to die. It's been pretty fun to play.

Shaun: After my Elden Ring depression went away, I did Bloodborne for a while. Then I got Diablo 4, which was kind of short-lived for me.

Oh, yeah? Why was that?
Shaun: They're all about online play, and I just prefer the way Diablo 3 was run offline. There's too many mechanics in games these days, and I get overwhelmed. I gotta feed myself, and then I gotta go check in with the general, and then I gotta go back to my job. It's like real life, you know? I don't wanna be worrying about all this shit when I play a game. I wanna be trying to find the wizard on top of the mountain—something that I don't do in everyday life.