It was a classic Brooklyn evening. Greenpoint was misty. The streets were lined with black-clad concert goers. And Model/Actriz was lurking.
I had previously seen the New York-based purveyors of a delirious, hard-edged rock music at Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, under a harsh and open summer sky. This time, though, the quartet was performing in the intimate and murky club Good Room — a space which normally serves up blaring house and techno.
It was fitting, though, that Model/Actriz was playing there, given that their guiding light is dance music. Instead of WAVs and CDJs, though, they’re achieving the genre’s euphoria with bass, guitar, drums and singer Cole Haden’s theatrical vocal acrobatics. “We’re aspiring to make club music, but over the course of an hour, rather than over the course of a whole night,” Haden tells PAPER the day after Model/Actriz’s triumphant gig. “Can we get the room to the same place that would happen if someone was dancing from 10 to 2 AM? We have to find a way to shorten the amount of time it takes to reach that kind of euphoria or a trance state.”
The quartet catches up with PAPER at Brooklyn queer bar Singers. Haden, bassist Aaron Shapiro, guitarist Jack Wetmore and drummer Ruben Radlauer are reflecting on their whirlwind two years since they released their debut album, Dogsbody. It’s almost eerily quiet in the open backyard given the space’s usual hubbub, especially so soon after being thwacked and sacked in a whirlpool of Model/Actriz fans, all thrashing in celebration of the band’s new album, Pirouettes, released in early May.
Haden spent the bulk of the show roving through the crowd like a huntress, often finding himself in all sorts of surprising architectural nooks, crannies and platforms. “During sound check I’m like a cat checking out the space,” Haden hums. “When there is a barricade, I stand on it. When there is a platform, I stand on it. If it’s weight-bearing, I’ll be on it.” The result is a show that is propulsive and surprising.
The potential intensity of that experience has made their live shows must-see occasions for both die-hard fans and the curious alike. But the sweaty release of their concerts should not be mistaken for grave “hardcore” seriousness. “If I actually get to witness something Cole is doing, it’s so fucking hilarious,” says Shapiro. “Usually, I’ll look at Jack and Ruben and we’re all just laughing.”
“I’m laughing, too,” adds Haden. “What defines a successful show to me is one where it feels like by the end of the show there’s a shared sense of humor.”
Throughout a Model/Actriz show, Haden takes on the effect of a wryly sarcastic dom, commanding the crowd before twirling in literal Cinderella garb. That mix of intensity and laughs can be felt on record too, where Haden mines themes of queer adolescence, shame and embodiment alongside the highs and lows of being the stage-lit “Diva.”
A much more personal record, Pirouettes is littered with stories told plainly, like asking for a Cinderella-themed party in his youth on “Cinderella” or desiring a quietly “embodied” man who’s standing on the Dekalb Ave L subway station on “Departures.”
“I talk [on the album] about dancing in my room alone, and now I’m performing for an audience … It’s almost like I’ve always been rehearsing for a moment like this,” shares Haden, whose background is in theater, citing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as a major touchstone. “[My childhood dreams] never looked like this in my head. It was definitely a seated theater,” Haden says with a bare smirk. “But I’m very happy doing this.”
The band’s smartly crafted pop songs sit atop and amidst music that stretches towards post-verbal thrashing. Radlauer’s drums move with a near-mechanistic pulse. Wetmore’s guitar often sounds like anything but: pure texture and percussion. And Shapiro’s bass is a rumbling yet sturdy foundation for this whole house of chaos. When asked how his personalized, pop-format writing interacts with this ferocious instrumentally-rendered techno, Haden shares: “There’s always that idea of the dance chanteuse, you know, like Corona or [SNAP!’s] ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer.’ There’s that passionate female vocal over those [dance] tracks that feels almost anonymous,” Haden says. “I wanted to have that same attitude, but with more of a concrete tie to my personal autobiographical story.”
It’s Haden’s powerful pen that has earned him the attention of Miley Cyrus, who tapped Haden to write the “Prelude” on her new album, Something Beautiful. “She gave me prompts to write about for her album, but she gave me free reign,” says Haden of his time writing for Cyrus. “I was thinking about the music that she had written, but really, for myself… We’re cut from the same cloth in the sense that she wants authenticity.”
With the band reaching new heights commercially and artistically, they’re ready to share the new record with the world, though they hope this stretch of touring and sharing the music is a skosh more “fun.”
Below, the band explores their bold new album, their theory of dance music and their rare breed of live show.
Cole, you hurt yourself at the show yesterday?
Cole Haden: Minorly.
Don’t you hurt yourself a bit every night?
Cole: The goal is to not to, but it’s kind of inevitable. If I get caught in the mosh the mic might slam into my teeth. That hurts the most. I used to get a thrill from crawling through the mosh or putting the mic down my throat.
Is that safe?
Cole: No, because the mic will get ripped out by accident. It’s really all teeth-related injuries that I’m afraid of.
Usually when I go to shows, especially if I’m writing about it, I like to have a journalistic remove. I don’t like to get in the muck too much. At your show though, I had no choice.
Cole: I didn’t see where you were standing last night.
You were close to me, but I was feeling shy. I had to avert my gaze because I was intimidated. I think you kissed my friend.
Cole: I was doing [gestures kissing people on the cheek]. There was a rumor going around once that I would go up to the crowd and do open mouth kisses on everyone. I was like, “I don’t remember doing that.”
How conscious are you when you’re navigating the space during shows? I was curious about what’s instinct versus strategy?
Cole: During sound check, I’m like a cat checking out the space. But as far as how I utilize it, I don’t practice blocking. But when there is a barricade, I stand on it. When there is a platform, I stand on it. If it’s weight-bearing, I’ll be on it.
I kept noticing there were presumably straight couples where the guy locks in on you. Do you notice this phenomenon?
Cole: It’s not the first time. If they’re a straight couple, I spend some time with the girl and then the guy, and then let them argue about it later.
Congrats on the album. It’s moving and energizing. What’s it been like performing this material after living with the last record for so long?
Cole: Our sets are longer, but they feel shorter. We’ve only been performing it for a month, so we’re still finding all the emotional nooks and crannies. Maybe what was most surprising to me is that “Departures” became this song that is going to be a staple for when I go out into the crowd. That really wasn’t my decision to make, but that one is connecting in a visceral way. I love all the songs. You never know what’s going to be received.
Ruben: “Departures” has the biggest gap between if we play it poorly and if we play it well. The first couple times we played it, we hadn’t figured it out yet. It definitely felt like, “Oh shit, this one needs to be unlocked.” When we really lock into it and play it with groove, intention and intensity, it really goes off in a way that I didn’t realize it could when we recorded it. It’s been really rewarding to see people moving to it.
What’s your own metric for success when you’re playing live?
Aaron: Probably some sort of unanimous feeling of forgetting where you are. A lot of the older material was more actionable, like we were losing ourselves in a bit of a frenzy. My favorite show [this tour] was Seattle. That wasn’t a crazy show. It just felt really good musically and emotionally and in terms of the crowd participation. Everything was meshing.
Cole: It’s not that bigger antics make a show better. The challenge for us is that we’re aspiring to make club music, but over the course of an hour, rather than over the course of a whole night. Can we get the room to the same place that would happen if someone was dancing from 10 to 2 AM? We have to find a way to shorten the amount of time it takes to reach that kind of euphoria or a trance state.
When did an aspiration towards dance music become the mission statement of the band?
Jack: Since the beginning. We’re just aiming closer to the mark. There was a relationship between hardcore punk music and the hard music that was coming out of Berlin, and we’re trying to cross that boundary and pull it together. Now we’re honing in on actually dancing.
Aaron: We’re also caring less and less about guitar music, not from any sort of distaste or dislike, but really just not caring about what that has to do with this project. But at the same time, I definitely feel like instrumentally, the three of us care more and more about our instruments. I think for a while there was a feeling of “Fuck guitar, but I have to use guitar in this band.” And now we’re more excited to do whatever with the instrument and just [accepting] that there’s people making all kinds of stuff with all kinds of instruments. Everything doesn’t need to harken back to the most obvious source.
Ruben: Jack and I at least are coming from a punk music background. I really hadn’t listened to that much dance music, since being into dubstep at 14 — which we’ve all come back around to. Once we figured out we wanted to make dance music, we were like, “What’s dance music?” We had to learn a little bit and then just get more immersed in it. And then had to make ourselves not play into the heavy music idioms, because those were becoming a safety blanket, like, “If it’s heavy people will mosh and move to it, right?”
What is dance music to you guys?
Ruben: Repetition. Music that is felt first in the body and then in the head.
Cole: The best dance music to me is where your body fills in rhythmic holes that are not in the music. It’s almost like your body is necessary to make the music complete.
On this album, pop music is both a trope and also a subject. Cole, you explore specifically diva-ness and being the star. How are you thinking about the relationship between dance music and pop music on this album?
Cole: There’s always that idea of the dance chanteuse, you know, like Corona or “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” There’s that passionate female vocal over those [dance] tracks that feels almost anonymous. I wanted to have that same attitude, but with more of a concrete tie to my personal autobiographical story.
You recently worked with one of our few true pop divas, Miley Cyrus. Did that work transmute anything to Pirouette?
Cole: [Miley] gave me prompts to write about for her album, but she gave me free reign. I treated it like a writing exercise. I was thinking about the music that she had written, but really, for myself. She is a rare breed, but we’re cut from the same cloth in the sense that she wants authenticity. I trusted myself a lot more by the end of the process of writing for her, because in the end, I just read it like I was writing for myself.
Was it immediately clear that you were going to be much more autobiographical and explicit about your life on this record when you began to write?
Cole: No, I was avoiding committing [to that] because it made me uncomfortable at the start. And then my challenge to myself was to be as transparent as possible. Once I decided that that was the route that I was going to take, that became the challenge.
Was that a personal challenge, or did that feel like a shared question as a band?
Cole: We all pushed ourselves on this record. The lyrics are one aspect of it that fulfilled that thing for me.
Aaron: There was a three-part thing of Cole trusting himself, having to trust each other and ourselves, and as a collective having to trust that the music even deserved to exist, especially with what was weighing on us the past couple years.
Can you say more about what was weighing on you as a band?
Aaron: There are definitely some days going into writing where you realize there’s so much going on that this really has nothing to do with. At the very least, this is taking up space in ourselves when we at times felt like we didn’t have emotional bandwidth to do these songs justice. And then on the flip side: sometimes it’s hard to give a shit about playing guitar, right?
Cole: And on the only beautiful day of the week, we’ve decided we’re gonna go sit in a dark room right for four hours.
Have you convinced yourselves that it is ultimately worth it?
Cole: We learned through the first album that you have to make the journey fun, so that you can look back on it and laugh and smile about it. The first journey we went on wasn’t super fun.
Define fun?
Cole: We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It was indicative that we felt a responsibility to make something that we’re proud of, but that can look a million different ways. On this album, there were times going into the creative zone that we took care to make this process not as much of a chore.
Aaron: We had to come to the realization that shit can be falling apart, but the only thing that we have power over is the community that we participate in. If nothing else, that is valuable. On our second show on this tour, our tour manager was at the merch booth and goes, “Damn, there are so many trans women here. Has it always been like this?” Last album cycle there wasn’t. Cole wanted to make an album that was more queer. The people who are coming to our shows are recognizing that and commenting on it, and it means a lot to them. That has nothing to do with what we were freaking out about in the world a year and a half ago when writing some of these songs, but that matters. That’s where this project is best positioned to make a difference: that sort of community-building, holding hands through horrible shit.
It’s quite a meta record about the experience of becoming a rock star, but also about feelings surrounding queer adolescence and shame. I’m curious about how this deep childhood stuff came up for you, Cole, amidst this wave of validation from the band’s success?
Cole: These themes are not things that arose for the first time in between the records. But when I’m talking about dancing in my room alone and now, I’m performing for an audience… It’s almost like I’ve always been rehearsing for a moment like this. It felt very poignant to reflect on how I perceived myself as a child and thinking about how I thought about my future self and now being that future self.
How does the reality of enacting your dreams measure up against your childhood fantasy?
Cole: It never looked like this in my head. It was definitely a seated theater. But I’m very happy doing this. But that’s my job: to bring that energy to a standing room-only show.
Was there a moment you had to let go of a more traditional fantasy?
Cole: Once I became too tall to play Billy Elliot on Broadway, I let go. I would love to do Broadway one day, but especially through doing this, I learned that my limit doesn’t even come close to playing eight shows a week. I have to really get into a different kind of head space to perform like that. Those are Olympic athletes on Broadway. And also, this [music now] is the right thing for me, because I realized that the kind of material that I want to perform would be things that I had a creative role in writing.
Was there a song that clarified what this album was about?
Cole: “Doves.” It was the first song with a finished form. And the allegory in that song is a coming out story. And then that became the most poeticized story on the album. And then it just gets more specific and literal from there.
When did you write the interlude, “Headlights”?
Cole: That was the last thing. It felt like I had been keeping that to myself for 15 years and I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore. It felt like what I had been emotionally preparing myself to say up until that point. It was a release for me. I had left the studio early to see Oh, Mary!… this album is gay, through and through. I just recorded it alone as a voice memo and sent it to the band, 30 minutes before the album was finished. I shed a tear. I turned my phone on airplane mode and took the train to see Cole Escola in Oh, Mary!
Aaron: We listened back to it and it was really quiet. We were like, “Well, that was really fucking intense.” [band laughs]
I’m curious about you as a band, as a collective, holding these very personal stories that are directly from Cole’s life. What’s that experience like for all of you while on stage?
Aaron: I only look down the whole time.
Cole: They’ve seen it enough. They pretty much “get” the Cole show.
Aaron: If I actually get to witness something Cole is doing, it’s so fucking hilarious. Usually, I’ll look at Jack and Ruben, we’re all just laughing, I like the idea of someone watching the show being like, “This is so fucking intense and serious.” And then they see Cole doing some bullshit and see us all, smiling and laughing, like, “Oh, they’re having fun.”
Cole: I’m laughing, too. People can come as they are to our shows. A misconception about our shows is that people need to prepare themselves to come. Don’t come expecting an intense experience. Going back to what defines a successful show: to me, it’s one where it feels like by the end of the show there’s a shared sense of humor. There are certainly a lot of sincere and important moments to the performance and the music. But what is unique to each show is that specific winking sense of humor that comes from just the cohort of people being different every night, and then all of us finding an inside joke by the end of the night.
I mean, ultimately, Cole, you’re domming the crowd. There’s a humor to that.
Ruben: When he has to.
Cole: If you don’t dom them, it’s easy to be taken over. They will certainly take the reins if you don’t keep your eye on the road.
Photography: Matthew Wille
Location: Singers