A year to the day after the release of their debut album, Serenity, New York punk types Sharkswimmer have released a video for its opening song “Eraser.” It’s a blisteringly fast track, clocking in at just over a minute, but that didn’t dissuade the band and video director Johnny Komar from making a disturbing and dystopian film to accompany it (it feels like you’re actually watching a movie with a plot, which is super impressive given the incredibly short run time). The song is a very welcome reintroduction to the band’s debut, which Sharkswimmer had to release on their own after the label that was meant to release it suffered a huge warehouse fire and lost all the original copies.
The record itself features guest appearances from two frontmen of the New York punk/post-hardcore scene, Thursday and No Devotion’s Geoff Rickly and The Movielife/I Am the Avalanche’s Vinnie Caruana, both of whom became friends with guitarist/lead vocalist Justin Buschardt when he moved to New York from Austin a few years ago. The video also comes as the band is readying to release a compilation of their early output, and just after they put out a brand new song, “Open Hand,” toward the end of September.
We sat down with Buschardt in a Brooklyn coffee shop to find out a little bit more about Sharkswimmer’s past, present, and future. Read the interview and watch the video below.
Why did you decide to release this video for “Eraser” for the year anniversary of the record?
We’re a very DIY band, so doing things takes time. Johnny Komar, who also shot the video for “Demolition of a Childhood Home,” had a very specific concept for this video, which we didn’t get to make at the time because of money and all that stuff. But a year later, “Eraser” has just hit over 100,000 plays—which is a lot for us—and he was like, “Let’s just do that video now, we all have the time and funds to.” So we decided to make it for the year anniversary in the hope it’ll breathe more life into the record. Because of everything that happened with the label, it didn’t quite catch as hard as we hoped it would, so we just wanted to give it as much life as we could as a goodbye from that record into the new one, to keep some momentum going.
The video has a pretty involved storyline and plot, given that the song is just over a minute. How did that come together?
It’s sort of the same reason we made it the first song on the record: It’s just this one-two punch—it’s very quick. It’s like the heaviest, fastest, hardest song we have, and it brings you in with its energy. And then it drops you into the rest of the sound that we have, which is a little bit more subdued. The whole record is about a divorce I went through, so that song was from a very dark and sad time for me. But it was also very revelatory. I was healing in my first solo apartment in New York, and at the time I was feeling very dramatic—it’s like getting rid of every memory you have of that person so that you can survive.
How do you feel about the song a year on? Do you still feel as closely connected to that time?
I feel like I’m having to sort of face it again a little bit, because we’re putting out a collection of old songs, and my ex is on them. We were together for 10 years, and she played bass and sang in Sharkswimmer. Because we’re putting out that collection, I had to listen to all those songs which we recorded in the middle of lockdown right before we split—it’s all leading up to our demise. But we didn’t even know it. We loved each other, but we grew apart. And so when I listen to “Eraser” now, I feel like I’ve had a lifetime after that.
So you have this new video for an old song, collection of old songs on the way, and a brand new song as well. What happens next?
Hopefully it’ll all serve as a kind of introduction to us and where we’re headed now. We have six or seven other new songs that we’ve recorded demos for. We thought about releasing them, but we want to record them properly. It’s just tough financially, even to shop around labels with what we’ve done. We poured all of our money into Serenity, which made it easier to shop around, so we need to bite the bullet financially with this one and go in and record it the way we made the other one. We aren’t a band that really cares about numbers, but it feels like some kind of vindication that “Eraser” has done so well, and we really hope that people enjoy this video for it.
