Metal Contraband’s Chelsea spoke with Steve Zing about the new Mourning Noise record Screams/Dreams, the latest lineup, upcoming shows, and more. Check it out below:
Chelsea here on the phone with Steve Zing, excited to talk to you about your new Mourning Noise album Screams/Dreams. So you just released that last month on Cleopatra Records and it is honestly too good. Great sound and vibe, plenty of memorable songs and I definitely want to dig into what’s behind them. So, why don’t we start off with the latest single “Black Cadillac”, and the music video. Talk to me about what went into that as we dig into the new Mourning Noise.
Yeah, so “Black Cadillac” was one of the earlier songs we had written when we started writing new material for what would be this album. And it was just something that came to my mind and I kind of sang the chorus to Robby, our singer. And, you know, being that Robby’s the singer, we let him write the lyrics since, you have to really be convincing to sing lyrics, and it’s always best to have the singer write his own lyrics. But for that, I had the chorus in my head, the melody and everything, and it was just something after, you know, when you’re driving and you see one of these old black Cadillacs in the night. It was like one of these things where I passed it, it looked like something from the 60s, this car driving down the road. I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s pretty…mystique”.
Classic cars are always a good topic, and it fits, music and cars go together well, so it’s a smart connection there.
Absolutely!
Mourning Noise is a band that keeps coming back in a sense over the years, different lineups, some EPs and singles at different times, but lately it looks like you guys are really here to stay with the new material and a lot of shows. So tell me where you are with this right now.
Yeah, so, you know, after a very long hiatus, during COVID, Cleopatra, we had reached an agreement that had come across back in 2018, to put out all of our unreleased stuff from the 80s and they did that and it kind of got legs behind it. So we were like, let’s try this again. Let’s get together just to have fun. And it just kind of, it was steamrolling from there. We did the EP almost two years ago now, and Cleopatra wanted a full length, so we did it. We’re just excited to be doing this with new blood, like Robby, as the singer and guitar player. And then we have Tommy, our lead guitar player, and Chris, and both those guys are original from back in the day. We’ve been doing great shows. We got to open up for The Misfits, that was a year ago yesterday at the Prudential Center. And we released a video from that as well, for the song, “Misery Loves Me”. And we got to play a bunch of shows with Fear and we played the No Values Festival last month, which was incredible. To play in front of thousands of people, to give this band the…basically, the kick in the ass that it needs. And it’s been amazing ever since.
That’s awesome. Yes, I wanted to ask you about the No Values Fest, I saw that was last month with a ton of other punk and hardcore bands on the lineup. You had Iggy Pop, The Misfits, Social Distortion…that seemed like a really fun day for the genre.
It really was. And you know, the great thing about, you know, Punk and Metal have kind of crossed paths. You take bands like the Cro-Mags, and even Suicidal Tendencies, they cross that genre, which is great, right? I mean, music is music. If it’s good music, what does it matter, whatever we want to call it, whatever, whether you want to call punk rock, metal, hard rock, whatever. If it’s good music, it’s good music. And it was a day of really good music. Again, seeing somebody like Iggy Pop who’s almost 80 years old, you know, the energy that this guy has is unbelievable. It’s just so many of these bands that have been together for so long or have come back together, and it was just a great day. 43,000 people came out, so it was pretty cool.
Definitely, that’s a great experience for sure, and definitely good to get Mourning Noise back in front of people, like you said, because you know they may have heard some of the original 80s or 90s singles or EPs that you’ve released, but now it’s kind of like solidifying this era of Mourning Noise.
Yes, and you know, it’s great because we don’t really play much of what we did in the 80s. We’ve all grown musically. There’s no reason to. I’m not here to be a nostalgia band. We’re definitely capable of writing new songs that are great songs, and I’m not here to just relive 1982 again.
100%, and you know, no one’s asking you to, we love to hear new music from you and it’s great – I mean, you’ve been keeping up with the new music, last year you released The Waiting with Blak29 that was also on Cleopatra Records. Any updates on the front of that band?
Well, you know, it’s kinda like, I’m one person, and of course, Danzig is my priority and…everything’s a priority, but when everything is a priority, then nothing’s a priority. So you have to kind of put it in line as to where it’s going to fit, and I’m hoping to be doing shows sometime this year with Blak29, because it’s way overdue, and it’s a great project of myself and my best friend Dan, my writing partner, it’s been long overdue.
Have you thought about taking any of the original Mourning Noise songs and maybe bringing them back, re-recording them for a different vibe today?
Well, we definitely do a few of them, because it would be silly not to. But we also, again, don’t wanna live on that because, it’s one thing if we were not able to write new songs. It’s another thing if, again, we do a few of the old songs, but I think our impact is best off of our new material.
Mourning Noise is also coming along with a bit of a tagline of a “Horror Punk” band, and it fits, but what do you personally think about that term, Horror Punk, and what would you say makes something Horror Punk?
You know, I think it’s a little corny. I mean, I don’t know who put that phrase. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into a genre, because I don’t think that really…you know, it would suit some stuff. But in other cases, we’re just a rock band, you know? I think we offer a little bit of everything. We kind of paint this picture and take you on a ride of – it’s like a roller coaster ride of music. And, you know, they’re swayed to it. So, you know, if they want to call it horror, they can call it horror. If they want to call it punk, they want to call it hard rock, so be it. As long as it makes its point to the end user, to the consumer, and makes them feel good, that’s what I’m about.
For sure, that’s a good attitude for it too. You guys recorded and produced the albums at Trick or Treat Studios, which, first of all, love the name of the studio, super cool. Was it all done within the band, or did you have anyone else involved in the production side? How did that all come about?
We produced it ourselves, it’s my studio. I built the studio during COVID. I moved into this new house a few months before COVID, and I wasn’t even really set up to do anything, and the first thing I did during COVID was record the Cro-Mags’ last EP. So, I just had set my gear up and wasn’t even ready to have a studio going, but at the time Harley Flanagan was looking to record, and we couldn’t find a studio, everything had shut down. So I’m like, yeah, throw everything up, let’s see what sounds we can get out of it, and we had a great time doing it. We don’t have to pay anything, the only thing that we have to pay is our own time, so it’s great. We can do whatever we want when we want.
Absolutely, having your own studio is the ideal setup, because you can spend as much time as you want in there, not worrying about hours, and clocking in and out of it.
Exactly. But for instance, we’re also open – a very good friend of mine owns a studio called Crossway Studios and we were there last night recording and it was owned by Whitney Houston. It was her former home and studio. And he bought it a few years ago, and he updated the studio. We were there last night recording a new song for whenever that’ll come out, it’s great. So the fact that we have a lot of technology behind us, and a lot of good positiveness going on, we just try to keep moving forward.
Absolutely, and you are moving forward with a lot of unique sounds that you’re including in this too. I mean, I noticed a theremin, the choice to feature a theremin on “Angel Lounge”, and it’s one of those instruments that people have heard that, even if they don’t know what it is, they know how cool it sounds, and I feel like you don’t hear it often enough. So that was a unique touch to throw onto the album.
Yeah, so there’s a girl by the name of Thea Faulds, and she’s from Canada. I’ve met her, obviously, before at Danzig shows and she’s been using this theremin, and she would post these videos online, and we asked her if she wanted to be part of it, and she’s like, “Yeah, of course”. The part she put in was just perfect for that song. You hear a theremin, you’re like, is this really a musical instrument? But she made it really, really feel well.
Yeah, it’s such a…honestly, a strange sound to many people’s ears. And sometimes I feel like you might guess, “Oh, is it maybe a synthesizer making that noise?” You can’t always distinguish it if you’ve never seen a theremin before, but it just adds that really cool touch.
Yeah, no, I would love to do a video and actually have her in it playing, because it’s a pretty unique instrument that very few could actually…you know, they use it as a novelty, but she’s able to use it as an actual musical instrument.
And it’s so hard to even get a straight melody out of that, especially with the movement of the hands and everything, so it takes a special talent to make it happen.
Absolutely.
Another thing that stood out to me, just as a unique touch on the album, is the intro to “Stranger Hearts”. I thought the piano really stood out there, especially when you’re coming out of the order of the tracks with “Island of Unknown”, which just feels so straightforward Punk, and then you just get hit by this piano intro, it takes you by surprise a little bit. I thought that was a cool choice too.
Yeah, you know, again, as I said, to get stuck from your past is not a good thing. And we always try to think of some unique ways just to make music, and not just stay in using this the same old guitar-bass-drums. What else can we throw in there? It’s like a palette, right? And you have this palette, and you just start picking from different things and going, “You know what, this is cool”. If you listen to the song “Sin”, in the beginning of that song with the guitars and everything, there’s actually real violin on there. So it’s like, we just pull from different things. And it’s great because it allows us to be spontaneous, and it allows us to just be able to pretty much do whatever we want.
Well, we love to hear it. That’s awesome. Are there any – because I’ve been talking about the tracks that really stand out to me – are there any tracks you want to talk about that really stood out to you during the recording process, that you found to be a really unique thing to put together?
I think a song like “Frozen Fever” is one of those things, where it started in one aspect where we were looking to write a real fast song, but this song also took a turn where it became a different beginning, and a different middle part, and then all of a sudden we decided to layer the vocals to have so much harmony. So what could started out as what I thought was going to be a kind of Hardcore song, really turned around, so that was kind of interesting. And like you said, “Stranger Hearts” is another one of those songs, where the ebb and flow of it is wild, and “Street Of Dreams”. When it hits me a certain way, and it touches me, then I’m really happy with it. There are songs that we don’t come out with, because it doesn’t hit the nerves that I feel it should hit. So, you know, every song is kind of unique, and the way we approach it is unique, because we don’t sit there, write songs, and then rehearse them. We kind of write on the fly and record at the same time.
And that way it has kind of more of a live jam feel to it too. Which probably translates well when you’re actually playing the shows, because you’re like, “That’s how we started it, so we’re going to continue with this tone”.
Yeah, exactly.
So tell me a little more about the current lineup as well. I know you mentioned you have two original members besides yourself, and then of course Robby, who’s a newer member, and it’s been the four of you for a couple years now, so how did all the pieces fall into place of getting the originals back together and getting someone new on board?
Myself and Chris, the bass player, we’ve been friends for…man, 44 years. And I’ve known Tommy since 1981. With Tommy, I mean, I probably hadn’t talked to him for maybe seven, eight years. But you know, I’d seen him on Facebook or whatever. And when it was time to start this whole thing, I called him up, I said, “Hey, let’s get together, this thing’s growing some legs”. So we had tried getting back with the original singer, but that wasn’t going to work for many different reasons. And so we held auditions, and we had gotten some tapes and stuff. Robby came down, and I’ve known Robby since he was a little kid, because his dad was bringing him to Danzig shows when he was young. So he sang one song, and we kind of looked at each other, and he sang two more…we knew right there it was the perfect match. So, we did a show and then we decided, “let’s write some songs”, and that’s where it took us today.
Perfect, well we’re glad to hear where it took you today, because again, Screams/Dreams is such an awesome record. I’ve listened to it a couple times now and can’t get over how good it is. So you’re doing good stuff out here, Steve. Thank you so much for sharing some of the background and the stories behind it with me. Can you give us a look on what’s coming up on the horizon for you?
Shows, shows, and more shows. We just signed with a new booking agent, so they’re in the midst of booking us some shows, and we’ll be heading out to the West Coast in a few months. So yeah, we’re looking forward to it.
Awesome. Well again, thank you so much for your time today. This has been really cool and I wish you the best of luck with everything. Have fun with shows and more music!
You got it, thanks so much.