To start the new year, POST/WAR will debut its new album, Prize Money Songs, with a release show at the hi-dive on Saturday, January 27. Local bands Night Fishing and Team Nonexistent are also on the bill.
Without dropping any singles from Prize Money Songs before the release, the band felt it was best to share its third record from the stage first. “Honestly, what I’m most excited about is I think this is our most present-focused music,” says guitarist Max Murray.
“A lot of us grew up together; we have a lot of shared traumatic experiences,” he adds. For example, POST/WAR has helped the five members through “a lot of deconstruction from religion,” he says. “I think this is the first time the music has been focused on what it feels to be thirty right now as an adult. It feels more fun than it’s felt before.”
A followup to the band's 2021 release, Violet Light and a Hum, Prize Money Songs serves as more of a metaphor for the daily grind of real-world responsibilities and always pushing forward while still finding time and space to be creative, according to lead singer Stewart Gray. “The whole motif is this idea of this prizefighter who is stuck doing this thing over and over again that’s hazardous to his health, that he really doesn’t want to do, to make ends meet,” he explains. “You have to do these things every day. You have to go to work. You have to go to the voting booth. It’s grating on the human soul. Even with work, it can be pretty disastrous to the human soul and the body, but you have to do it. You have to take the punches. Otherwise, you’re not going to survive.”
In that vein, Gray admits to feeling a lot of “anger, anxiety and frustration," but POST/WAR was able to adapt and evolve as a unit during the recent writing process. It made the band stronger than ever.
This is exactly what you can expect to see whenever you go check out POST/WAR live.
Courtesy POST/WAR
“This record has been much more flexible in that it could be like, ‘I wrote this really cool bass line,’ and John [Anderson, the bassist] would be like, ‘Cool, I’ll play that,’” Gray continues. “We’ve really grown a lot with each other and trust each other a lot more to let that ego go and to trust that our value in the band is not determined by whether or not you wrote this or that part.”
There’s a sense of nostalgia to POST/WAR’s music and lyricism that has historically given the group a more sober-sounding tone. Both Gray and Murray recognize this and see their new work as a reflection of the band's maturing. “When you’re really young, you don’t really have total control over what your creative output is, because you don’t know enough or you’re too proud or arrogant,” Gray says. “You’re like, ‘This is the best song I've ever written because this is the fourth song I've ever written.’”
The sentiment draws nearly identical laughs from the longtime friends, as if they’re admitting to feeling that same way once upon a time. But now, POST/WAR is intentionally much “less sober,” Murray says. “We really worked hard to let loose on the playfulness and restrain the self-indulgence" on the new album.
Gray jumps in once Murray pauses, seemingly finishing his sentence. “This is more like, ‘Let’s fucking have fun. Let’s write songs that are going to be fun to dance to at shows,’” Gray says. “It’s almost a little bit less mature [musically], but more mature in execution.”
Murray agrees, explaining that there’s a “component of it that has to do with self-reflection and self-awareness.
“Stew said it more concisely,” he adds. “It feels more grounded in what we’re presently going through.”
“I think this body of music is reflective of that mentality,” Gray shares. “I think if we continue to do that, the quality of our music is just going to increase greatly.”
And why wouldn't it? Murray and Gray originally started writing music together when they were teenagers, before linking up with bassist Anderson, Cullen Petrey (guitar) and Daniel Paulin (drums and vocals) and forming POST/WAR in 2016. Their friendship, like their music, has only grown from there.
“I didn’t have any doubts that this was going to be going on for quite a long time,” Gray says of the band. “You just meet certain people, [and] when it just clicks and it’s right, it feels good. You can trust that. I never really had any doubts that this was going to result in something really awesome.”
Murray echoes that sentiment: “I also had no doubt that we would continue to make music as some sort of configuration of all of us,” he says. “With each other, we get looser, or more flexible. We’re all free and flexible participants in this creative community. It can look like anything.”
That can require a lot of trial and error, whether that’s picking up an unfamiliar instrument or expanding the scope of POST/WAR’s previously established genre boundaries. As Gray sees it, trying such new things only proves that he and his bandmates are still on the same page and are not afraid to explore uncharted territory together. “Musically, we’re definitely experimenting with a lot of new sounds, and in some cases, new instruments. Or incorporating other genres that we love in the sound that we already have,” Gray explains.
POST/WAR isn’t interested in coming off as repetitive. “It’s really easy to write multiple records that sound the same, but it’s really, really fun to write a record that every song sounds different,” Gray says. “In the past, we were listening to a lot more long-form, self-indulgent music. With this album, we very intentionally focused on making everything short and to the point.”
Influences can come from anywhere. When working on Prize Money Songs, the members were listening to everything from rap to folk (Murray was on more of a British post-hardcore kick and listened to a lot of IDLES). But that doesn’t mean POST/WAR has turned into a hip-hop or acoustic group. “Just because we do everything so democratically, from the writing process all the way down to selecting artwork and aesthetic, the influences tend to be super out of left field in a really cool way,” Gray explains, adding that the five-piece stripped “everything down to the bones.
“If one person is listening to a lot of hip-hop or somebody else is listening to a lot of folk or whatever it is, those influences end up finding their way onto the tracks in a really cool way, but it always ends up sounding like a POST/WAR song,” he adds.
Because at this point in the band's life, none of its members are "beholden to anyone other than ourselves for what we sound like and what we do," according to Gray.
“It’s been a really great experience to strip everything down to the bones and be like, ‘This album is going to be like this,’” he says. “This is our third record. It definitely doesn’t feel like we’ve done three records — it feels like more. But I’m really proud of this set of music and really excited to show that we can do more than what people expect from us.”
For anyone not in POST/WAR, that new sound is a mystery easily solved by attending the release show at the hi-dive.
“It’s going to be very interesting," Gray concludes. "It’s going to be very exciting."
POST/WAR, 8 p.m. Saturday, January 27, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $12-$15. Prize Money Songs will be available on all streaming platforms that same day.
