MEMBERS: Joe Sampson (guitar/vocals), Ben Odering (bass), James Sullivan (drums)
FOUNDED: The group came together at the tail end of 2012 as a side project, but now it’s their main gig
FROM: Born, bred, and based in the New Zealand city of Christchurch—where, yes, hobbits also reside
YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Their gigs opening for Parquet Courts and Sebadoh
NOW: Taking Metalmania, their debut LP, to North America for the first time
Joe Sampson has unkempt hair, a scraggly beard, and a lip ring. But if your hipster alarm is sounding, turn it off: the singer is refreshingly disinterested in irony. “In fact, I can’t stand it,” he confesses.
The topic arises during a chat about the misleading title of Salad Boys’ first full-fledged album, Metalmania. The singer admits that the moniker has no relation whatsoever to the genre associated with Black Sabbath, Metallica, and Mastodon. In fact, Sampson came up with the name after seeing an advertisement for a scrap-metal buyer. “I purposely put little thought into it as a contrast to how obsessed I became over the recording and mixing of the album,” he reveals. “At least one aspect of it had to be on the fly.”
Sampson’s tinkering ended up taking three years—practically an eternity for a young band working on their debut, especially considering that five of Metalmania’s ten songs previously appeared on a collection of demos that Salad Boys self-released as a limited-run cassette in 2013.
The band’s go-to spot for rehearsing and recording is on Christchurch’s London Street. It’s a beige, low-ceilinged building that has a great sound and shares walls with laid-back neighbors. It used to be Sullivan’s living room and is now Sampson’s. The setting sounds like a typical chilled-out band space, though Sampson is quick to point out that the members of Salad Boys are anything but laid back. “We’re really quite highly strung individuals, and we’re loud and clanging live,” he says. That presentation has drawn the band some notoriety, according to the singer.
But Salad Boys aren’t ones to stir up trouble on social media. In fact, they’re virtually absent from it. As Sampson—who isn’t on Facebook—shares, “It’s neither our thing nor not our thing. I suppose we just don’t really pay too much attention to it. Social media doesn’t really feature in my life, although I’d be crazy not to acknowledge its importance.” He adds, though: “I don’t care much for mystique either. I’d just rather try and give an honest presentation of what it is we’re doing, but even that can be pretentious.”
“We’re really quite highly strung individuals.”
Don’t get Sampson wrong. Salad Boys, like any other living and breathing band, want attention.
“Like most people, I’ve felt disheartened by indifference from people,” he says. “If people are paying attention to us and it’s obvious they understand what the hell it is we’re trying to achieve, then that’s genuinely the best compliment one can get.”
That attention has drawn inevitable comparisons to bands on New Zealand’s iconic underground-rock label Flying Nun, but Sampson would much rather they be likened to R.E.M., Crowded House, and The Replacements. Indeed, the exhilarating jangle, shimmer, and hook that characterizes Salad Boys songs is kindred in spirit to the sounds those college bands pioneered. Which makes it all the more unexpected that Salad Boys conjured none other than Taylor Swift for their video for “Dream Date.”
Throughout the video, shot DIY-style in the woods, Sampson tries to mimic facial expressions that Swift makes in her “Shake It Off” video. When asked if he’s anticipating a phone call from T-Swizzle, he replies: “Well, I feel like we’ve had such good fortune so far this year that I’m pretty much waiting for the phone to ring.” FL
