Local surf punk band GROMS started mid 2014 and are already make big waves in the burgeoning surf rock scene. Get to know the “ween bags” better below with an interview from Elias Aliva, lead singer, and pre-order their new cassette tape DROWNING dropping February 15th.
How did GROMS meet?
Joey and Wes (our bassist and drummer), had been in a few bands together playing black metal and worshiping the jesus. Their old band Seminole and my old band played a show together at SOMA and just kind of made plans to have a jam session (whatever that meant) in the future. I just bought a guitar a few weeks after that and us three met up and immediately hit it off. We wrote maybe 10 songs in that week and booked a show two weeks after that at Che Cafe. A fan of ours, Aaron Ween, who was just a kid who came to our shows, ended up playing guitar in GROMS and became one of the ride or die homeboys. The rest was history.
What’s your favorite part of being involved in the San Diego music scene? What do you wish was different?
In San Diego, a lot of kids in our scene live in suburbs where we can book shows in their yards every other week, which is great! We get to play music with just homies and then get to party with them after.
What I don’t really like is the whole “pay to play” thing because we don’t know about 90% of our fans who show up to our shows, so we can’t really sell pre-sales to them. They just show up, really. We’d much rather just play free shows or shows where were just charging at the door. The struggle is real, but what comes out of that is we get pretty close with other bands (The Whig Whams, Shady Francos, Sandy Cheeks, etc.) so we can kind of tag team shows and help each other out with the whole booking thing.
What other bands and artists inspire your sound?
Death Grips is our biggest mutual influence. We also listen to Twin Peaks (the band and the show), Vaporwave, Mac DeMarco, Sun Araw, Dirty Beaches, Surf Cactus. You know all that hipster bullshit.
If you could open for any band, who would it be?
Probably opening for Teen Suicide on tour.
What city/venue is your dream show location?
A rooftop of an apartment complex in Ireland with lots of puppies present.
What’s next for your band? Where do you hope to be in a year?
We have shows coming up: No Friends Fest at The Stronghold Collective on February 21st, some house shows that will be announced, and our cassette release show that I think is taking place at M-Theory Records. Were trying to get a tour lined up for this upcoming summer up the coast. We have some other big stuff that we can’t really announce right now, BUT we are dropping a cassette tape that can be preorder on our bandcamp (GROMS.bandcamp.com) and it’s gonna be released on February 15th.