Montreal Punk Buds Solids Don't Want to Be Anyone Else, Even If They Are Kind of Metal

Photo By Hugo Jeanson

Solids

used to be a duo; rocking the shit out of their drum kit and their guitar with a raw punk energy. Despite only being a two-piece, they created a wall of sound on par with any full band, while blowing the collective minds and eardrums of listeners. They’ve recently welcomed a third member,

Ponctuation’s

Guillaume Chiasson, and the crew recently released a new EP called

Else

, via Dine Alone Records, with a louder and fuzzier sound than ever. With echoes of cult ‘90s bands such as Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth, Montreal’s Solids’ sound takes on a modern twist. Montrealers Xavier Germain Poitras and Louis Guillemette left their day jobs to focus on music since their buzzworthy debut,

Blame Confusion,

in 2014. After touring both dive bars and big festivals propelled the scrappy pair forward, they quickly got the attention of the label Fat Possum, who signed them up for an international distribution deal and a new release.

Else

is a succinct, blistering piece of work. We met up with them at a local skate park to talk about the beauty of their EP, metal and skating, and touring woes as they got ready to hit the road for a weeks-long tour through the United States and Canada.

Noisey: You guys used to play hardcore music in Expectorated Sequence. At the time, the scene of skateboard and punk rock were pretty blended. Did skate influence your music?

Louis Guillemette

: Well, skateboard really brought me into punk music and hardcore, that's for sure. My soundtrack at the time was Punk-O-Rama III. Bad Religion, Millencolin, and all that type of stuff, just skating in my backyard, listening to these guys… I guess it shaped my future music venture. And I just started skating again since we got this new park in Verdun but I only ride. I don’t do tricks.

Germain Poitras: I skated for like two summers, way back when I was a teenager, but it wasn't for me. All my friends became really good, but I sucked. So, I hung out with them at the skatepark, smoking weed and taking pictures.

And there is a new member in Solids!
Poitras: Yeah, the metalhead, Guillaume Chiasson!
Guillaume Chiasson: I was more into metal stuff in high-school and skating wasn’t really associated with metal.
Guillemette: You can actually skate really hard on Megadeth, Anthrax or Slayer…. Rip through the bowl.
Chiasson: In Donnacona [close to Quebec City], where I’m from, metalheads don't skate!

How did Guillaume join the band?
Poitras: When we started composing for Else, the plan was still to play as a duo. But while we writing, we were also doing pre-production, and I started "cheating" with my guitar and adding more tracks to the songs. Eventually, I started having fun with it and just found out that there was no way I could possibly pull it off all by myself. And it’s more fun to jam when you’re three people. So, we talked about who could be a good member for Solids.
Chiasson: And they hired me!

Photo by Michael Bardier

And with this new EP you're still compared to music from the 90s. What’s it like always being compared to Pavement or Dinosaur Jr.?
Poitras: They're all good bands at least, so I guess it's flattering in some way. But we also think we're pretty much like dudes from the Now Era. So… I think our music is pretty actual. We're from now. I guess I can see how some people can find similarities in our sound, but ultimately I feel like it's just our subconscious at work. Now, we try to distantiate ourselves from that label because we sound like a lot more different stuff.
Guillemette: Yeah, when we first started, we didn’t decide to have a band who sound like the nineties. There are a lot of people who used to compare us like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., all these types of bands, but I started listening to these bands probably five or six years ago.
Poitras: We weren’t like, "OK. Let's do grunge." It was more just like, "Let's write some riffs and try to come up with some lyrics."
Chiasson: I don’t know why people never compare us to Limp Bizkit or Korn. They are also from the nineties!

It’s not your first EP: you also have a couple of 7''. Do you like the short formats?
Chiasson: You don’t consume an EP the same way as an LP. It’s like reading short stories or a novel, or a short and a long movie. It’s another approach.
Guillemette: Also, it’s just the urgency of putting stuff out. I’ve always liked it. Maybe because I’m a collector.
Poitras: And when we came back from [our last tour] Blame Confusion, we just found out that we didn't have any new songs to play. So we were like, “Okay. Let's just write some new songs and record them as soon as possible and do it in the quickest way possible.” We like EPs because it's just a more immediate way to send your music out in the world. And it still took us a year and something to put the EP out, but it could've been way longer.
Guillemette: Yeah, 'cause we were just drowning into doing nothing. 'Cause we got back from touring and we were really tired—I slept for weeks—and when we got back together we were just like… It was kind of hard to get the wheel going again.

So it was hard to restart the machine?
Poitras: I think what blocked us the most was that we came back from the tour and we had not even a riff to work on.
Guillemette: It's kind of weird too, because when Blame Confusion came out we all quit our jobs. So when we got back from touring we just had to play music. It was kind of weird to get into that.
Poitras: Yeah, music for a living kind of thing. Usually, it was more an outlet for us to relax after our jobs. And now our job is to play music so we have to find a way to make it work in a "work" kind of way.

Is it hard to find a routine?
Guillemette: You don't want to have a routine. That magic spark doesn't come out of a routine.
Poitras: Because you know you won’t get anything from that. You won't get inspiration. So we're going to try and write more on the road on the next tour so we don't come home to nothing to work on. Simon Coutu is a writer living in Montreal. Follow him on Twitter.