PART I

THE BELIEVER: Beach Fossils has been officially active for over fifteen years. How would you describe the original impetus behind the band’s sound?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: At first, the idea for the project was to do one specific sound with really specific influences. I was challenging myself to do something that was more focused, because I’m so ADHD—I always have been. In all my musical projects before I started Beach Fossils, every song sounded like it was from a completely different genre. When I started sending demos out to labels, I was like, This is just too all-over-the-place to make sense to anybody. So I tried to focus on a sound. I had the things that were influencing me at the time, which was mostly ’80s UK indie rock, and I started pulling from those and post-punk and seeing where I could take the sound. Somehow I was able to get away with not completely ripping that stuff off. I added my own spin to it—which I think is hard, but at the time I wasn’t even doing it on purpose.

PART II

THE BELIEVER: You’re a very eclectic listener, but Beach Fossils has maintained a relatively focused sound. How much intention goes into maintaining an aesthetic through line despite all the styles of music you listen to?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: Honestly, I see that less as a positive and more as a curse. I am inspired by so many different things, but I do have a project that is generally, you know, “a thing.” It’s a thing that you can expect when you put on an old song or a new song. I would honestly love to experiment with more genres and styles, but when I sit down to work on music, I try not to think too much about what’s going to happen.

PART III

THE BELIEVER: How do you approach writing lyrics that are focused and deeply personal to your own experience, while also trying to connect with a broader audience?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: I’ve found that the more specific I get, the more people connect with it. At first I thought I had to keep my lyrics vague because otherwise people wouldn’t connect. But I couldn’t help but start writing more and more specifically, and people were like, I know exactly what you’re talking about. 

BLVR: That reminds me of something you said about being inspired by New York School poets. People like Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman.

DP: I was reading Ted Berrigan almost every day while I was writing the lyrics for Bunny. That stuff is so real that it just never feels dated. You could pick up a book like that from the ’50s, and as long as they’re talking like a regular person and they’re being vulnerable, disturbingly explicit, you’re like, Wow, this is how people have always felt.

PART IV

THE BELIEVER: I’ve heard you talk about how, sonically, shoegaze music tends to be easily replicated. What are the more affective qualities of the genre that you try to tap into to avoid a generic approach?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: I think there are so many ways to take it. If you take all the reverb, delay, and distortion off it, playing it unplugged, singing in a room with just a guitar, what do those songs sound like? They’re like incandescent bulbs. They’re warm and amber and purple, really dreamy and romantic. No genre sounds more like what emotions feel like—which is usually multiple things at once. I think shoegaze a lot of times feels both heartbroken and in love. Happy and sad. It’s not afraid to be multiple emotions, where so many genres are just trying to be one thing. With shoegaze you’re like, How does this song sound like making out and crying at the same time? [Laughing]

PART V

THE BELIEVER: The new record, Bunny, feels like a return to minimalism after the maximalism of the preceding record, Somersault. How has this paring back opened up new possibilities in your songwriting?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: With Somersault, I wanted to prove that I could do more than write simple, minimal songs. So I was like, All right, I’m gonna go really big. I made a huge checklist of instruments I wanted to go on the record: harpsichord, pedal steel, saxophone. Everything’s going on this record—I’m going for Pet Sounds. [Laughs] And it was a fun challenge. But I didn’t want to go too far in that direction. I don’t think experimenting on a particular record should entirely change a band’s sound. Many times you see bands slowly change their sound to be a more and more extreme version of that one record they put out early on, which can be cool. Like the Beatles just kept getting more and more psychedelic; My Bloody Valentine kept getting louder. I think that’s neat, but I also think you should just go totally blank canvas with each new record. Bunny was a palate cleanser in a way.

PART VI

THE BELIEVER: You’ve mentioned how important it is for bands to stay connected to their roots. How else do you maintain a sense of continuity in your music between releases?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: I think a lot of bands lose their sound over the years because they just make a fuck ton of money, start playing arenas, and stop listening to cool music. They stop listening to the stuff that inspired them early on. I still love the music I was listening to when I first started writing Beach Fossils songs. I listen to it all the time, and it still inspires me to make new music. I think people get too rich and start listening to other famous people’s music because they’re friends with them, and they end up with bad taste. It becomes an echo chamber of rich people making boring music. Look what Coldplay has turned into. I used to listen to Parachutes. That’s a beautiful album. You listen to them now and they just sound like music from a Minions movie trailer.

PART VII

THE BELIEVER: There was a distinct energy to the 2000s indie scene in New York City, when Beach Fossils was forming. What were some of the defining features of that era, and how did they shape your early work?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: There was some cool stuff going on that was inspiring to me at the time: Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Woods, Blank Dogs. Those were the kind of shows I was going to. They were part of this new DIY indie scene that in a lot of ways captured that naive feeling of the ’70s and ’80s, when punk was transforming into indie. It had a punk energy to it, but the music wasn’t super aggressive—it was kind of chill. I loved that environment. But I think that scene was short-lived, and not that many people talk about it today. People talk about indie sleaze, which was happening around that time—but that was its own thing. But weirdly, I feel like that time period in New York is just forgotten in a way. So much of that music—if it were rediscovered, I think people would really like it.

 PART VIII

THE BELIEVER: What’s your sense of the younger music scene in New York City today? Is there still a community that you see as spiritually connected to the scene that existed when Beach Fossils was getting started?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: What I see people doing around the city is—it’s always something like: How can we mash these two genres together that have never been mashed together? That’s been happening forever; that’s kind of what creativity is. People are always combining multiple things from the past. But I think there are a lot of artists right now who are embracing music from the pop world, whereas the bands in the late 2000s and early 2010s were only listening to records that came out decades before. They weren’t trying to embrace anything that sounded new or contemporary. But right now a lot of these young artists are blending it all together in a weird way.

PART IX

THE BELIEVER: What do you think about the rise of AI, from a musician’s perspective?

DUSTIN PAYSEUR: I think that, as of right now, it’s an interesting tool. I got a subscription to Udio [an AI music-generating tool] recently because I wanted to see what it was about. I was putting in obscure post-punk artists who put out maybe like a 7-inch in 1982 or something. But the song that it spits out, you’re like, This is crazy—this is good. It’s even copying the fidelity of the music and the production techniques. I was kind of shook. It made songs that did make me feel something. I played one for the rest of the guys in the band and it made Jack upset. He was like, “I feel like crying because that song was so good, and I’m really mad that it made me feel an emotion.”

BLVR: So, be honest: Did you ask Udio to write a Beach Fossils song?

DP: I did! It made a really bad pop punk song about going to the beach and I was like, OK, I’m safe for now. [Laughs] It doesn’t know how to make a Beach Fossils song yet.