IN CONVERSATION WITH GOLDER

Drew Stier, 21, makes computerrock, his term for the kaleidoscopic blend of digital noise, frenzied guitar hooks and candy-sweet melodies that he releases under the name Golder. While the components of Stier’s music are as eclectic as they are chaotic, it’s the sheer strength of his songwriting, his ability to take a colorful maelstrom of digital and organic elements and alchemize them into bite-sized, endlessly replayable tracks that leaves the greatest impression on the listener.

I first met Stier in the summer of 2021 at a Junior Varsity “A F$*KING WEEKEND” show in Bushwick, where young musicians and music fans from across the city crowded a strip of sidewalk in Brooklyn’s industrial underbelly, ravenous for the electric atmosphere of a real-world gathering after a year of isolation. As we wrapped up our interview over Zoom, I got the sense that the forward-looking excitement of that summer hadn’t left him. “It’s really an exciting time because I think there’s a void right now for innovative rock bands,” he tells me, “The only ones I hear are out of London, for some reason. But I think New York is up next.”

For Struck Me Like A Chord’s first feature interview, I join Stier to discuss new old songs, the origins of Golder, finding inspiration in fashion, and much more. Read the full interview below.

To start, tell me about the new tracks that just came out. Where did those come from? Where do you see them fitting in with  the whole catalog?

So those tracks (“Please Pull Back” and “Shouldn’t b”, released 2/25/22) I actually made before anything I released on Spotify. I made them, I guess a year and a half ago, before I made the EP in early September 2020.

Before the Bike EP came out?

Yeah, like way before all of that. I made them and I always liked them, they were on  SoundCloud — and I always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to remix and re-master them and throw them up, and I just saw the opportunity because I pushed back my next album release a bit. I was just like, oh, this is the perfect time to, you know, remix/remaster that whole thing. So Griff (Ashburn, aka (printer friendly)) remixed all of the tracks and made them sound way fucking cooler, and then I just re-mastered them. I think they sound much better, and it’s cool to have them out.

Going back to older songs sometimes can be a weird thing. Did you get any new perspectives?

Yeah, I mean, these two tracks are definitely different, partially because they’re so old, and I was just sort of throwing stuff at the wall. I feel like the drums are really cool. I usually struggle with drums, but for some reason for these two tracks it just came together in a pretty cool way. So I probably will go back and borrow some of those ideas that I was just trying out for those ones. I like the drums especially on “Shouldn’t b”.

It’s cool because you can tell some of the Golder-isms are really embodied, and it’s like the songs are really focused on a couple of core good ideas.

They’re really simple, especially compared to the stuff I’ve been working on lately. I was just like, “Oh, what if I made a rock song?” which is not that common for me anymore. But I like them, they’re fun.

On that note, going back in time, when did you start getting into music? When did you start getting into songwriting and stuff in particular and what was your initial development like?

I think like a lot of people I started with guitar. I remember I was in this after school band thing and we played “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. And then at the end of the whole thing we all got to play at the House of Blues in LA and it was the biggest deal. We were, like, terrible. I could barely play that riff. But it was really fun. 

That band thing got me into playing guitar. Then I heard “Float On” by Modest Mouse and I was like, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard!” My dad was a guitarist and I was like “you have to teach me ‘Float On’ by Modest Mouse!” And then I think through that, like in middle school, I would just everyday spend two or three hours after school playing acoustic guitar. 

I feel like that’s the pipeline, you hear one cool riff and need to learn it, then you get into playing acoustic, and then writing songs naturally follows. So, I started writing I think when I was like 12.

On that stage of development, when after school you just obsess over going to practice guitar, what artists were you super eager to learn from? What type of things were pushing you in the beginning?

It was very much during the hipster folk era, and I wanted so badly to be a hipster. And of course, I lived in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, so all I had really to go off of was that very crass, consumerist, mildly condescending version of a hipster that you see on like a car commercial for a Subaru Impreza or something. But that’s what I wanted to be. 

I got this guitar for my 12th birthday, this acoustic. I would just learn Mumford and Sons, One Republic, I got really into the Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens really young. And then that opened the floodgates. I would play a lot of Arcade Fire and in the beginning like Imagine Dragons or all of those artists. Whoever I could hear on the radio that was sort of folk-y and would work on acoustic guitar. 

I think it was actually a really good era to start playing guitar. Because really simple, four chord folk music was actually very popular and cool. I feel like it’s at the height of its unpopularity right now, but for a beginner guitarist, a song that uses A-Minor, G and C — and that’s what you hear on the radio — that’s a really good thing to have.

Did you progress to getting more into electric guitar at some point?

Yeah, I was in a jazz band in high school. I maybe tried to start an alt rock band like eight times and it always would fall apart because very few people do unstructured activity where I’m from. Everything is like, if you play soccer, you’re going to practice. You’re not going to go kick a ball around with your friends. If you’re doing music, you do the music program. Because you can’t put a band on your college apps, but you can throw like, awarded jazz band soloist on your college apps. Convincing anybody to do anything other than something you could throw on a resume was nearly impossible. So I sort of got into playing jazz.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the genre, but I still love a couple records because I just love music so much. But I was actually quite good at jazz guitar. I won a bunch of awards and stuff and that was sort of my main music thing. I was in two smaller combos and two big band jazz bands, it was really fun. And I would take jazz guitar lessons.

You must have learned a ton of music theory and stuff that you wouldn’t have otherwise from that.

It was great, because I learned a ton of music theory up to the point where I was like 18, and now I don’t have to think about it at all anymore. Which I forget sometimes that other people don’t quite have, just because it was so long ago now for me. Learning all these things, and then forgetting them intellectually, just knowing intuitively—I think that was really good. 

I didn’t really pursue jazz further. So I didn’t become like one of those people that’s like “oh, look at this crazy chord…” I kind of got out of the pipeline.

At what point did you start to get into recording and producing? Because I feel like one of your strengths, in addition to being a songwriter, is your production.

I would call myself a producer because I had Logic on my laptop, but I was pretty terrible in high school. I think there’s like a level of pretension that you have, if you listen to a lot of indie rock in high school. I was insufferable, and I feel like there’s a couple times where I’d be hanging out with a rapper or whatever and they’d be like, “yeah, let’s cook up.” I’d be like, “yeah, sure, I can make rap music, that’s easy, beat making is nothing!” And then it would be time to make a beat and I’d just be staring at the DAW like “I have no idea what’s going on…”

So I sort of knew how to produce just from like “oh, I know, chords go here, you need a bass guitar…” Just the basic elements. And I knew how to write a song. So it was definitely trial and error. 

I think it wasn’t really until sophomore year of college, I was in this class with just the most incredible people and it was, you had to bring in something new every week. The teacher said, “oh, this is a songwriting course, don’t produce anything.” So of course I come in with my voice memo of me playing piano and singing, and then everybody else has a fully produced, fully realized track and it was just like “Holy shit…” From then on, I was just like “I need to learn how to produce.” So because I went to Clive Davis (Institute of recorded music) I would just wake up every morning, book out all the studio time that I could in between classes, and then just do that every day. 

So it was later than a lot of other people — I was like 19, 20 when I started figuring it out. But I feel like it’s my main thing now. Which is very funny, because I would not have expected that a few years ago.

When did singing and lyric writing come into play? Because that can be such a different challenge compared to just playing music.

I wanted to be a novelist growing up. I’ve always been obsessed with words. So I think pretty much as soon as I started playing guitar I was writing songs, just because it’s always been something that I wanted to do. It felt natural, because I always wrote lots of short stories and stuff growing up. Lots of the first three chapters of a novel, because I wanted to be like Christopher Paolini, he wrote like Eragon when he was like 16. So I would always start novels and then not finish them. 

So it came pretty naturally. I think the songwriting and the production sort of were separate at first. But the production, I think of it more as arrangement, and the arrangement is to back up the song. I think I’m pretty dated that way. I think of myself more like Phil Spector or one of those producers, where I feel like the song is first and the production is not a beat, but an arrangement built around the melody of the song and the structure of it.

Coming from, like you said, the three chords on the acoustic guitar, I can see how your whole mind framework would be built around “What is the core song as its own thing, and how does everything sprout out of that?”

Definitely. Nowadays, I sort of write and produce at the same time usually. I’ll start with the drum beat, do some bass stuff, do my chords and then I’ll write over that. But it’s very much at the same time, it sort of feels like the same thing as trying out chords and humming out a melody and playing guitar. I feel like it’s a different process than people who are just like, “Yeah, I make a beat. And then I have the beat, and then I sing on top of it,” and it’s this two-step process inside of one thing at the same time.

So when did Golder become a thing? What’s the origin behind taking on that title and becoming this project?

I was up in Carmel, New York, working with Chris Paraggio (aka Marcyline) on his record Treegiver that he actually just dropped on BandCamp. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all, but Chris was like, “Do you want to produce this project for me?” And then COVID happened so we were at his house for like three months. We just ended up making this record. 

Chris had recorded and released materials since high school. Everyone I knew I felt like had these artist projects that stretched back years and years and I was like, “I have nothing!” No music on streaming, two songs that were terrible under a different name. I was working with Chris — every night we would work from 8pm to 4am, sometimes until dawn — and I was like, “I need to do this but for myself.” 

So I was just trying to figure out how this should come together, what it should be. I was making a lot of music, but it was all like vault stuff and it wasn’t that great. I played one show as Drew Stier before that, and I decided I’m just not the type of artist that just goes by his name. So I picked Golder, just because I felt like the vibe was right. And it also has that deliberate ambiguity that I like, where it’s like, “Is it a person? Is it a band? Is it none of these things?” So I went with it because you have no clue as to what it is.

And then soon after that, was that when “Please Pull Back” and those couple of songs started to emerge?

That was a few months later. I actually made an entire five song EP that no one has heard. I shattered my collarbone skateboarding down a rural hill — I was pretty much bedridden for three weeks, and I was on a ton of painkillers. So I was like, “This is the time I’m going to make a record!” I had my arm in a sling. I was like, “Can I make an entire album with just my right hand?” So I did, actually. I programmed all the MIDI with my right hand and sang into my iPhone mic and then air dropped it in. And that was, I mean, I think that was the first Golder project, even though I’m pretty sure one of the songs has two streams and they’re all like, not that great. I was just ripping off Beach House songs, because it was the only music I could listen to.

So is that unreleased? 

Yeah, it’s private on SoundCloud but I sent it to a few of my friends. And then yeah, after that I was working on music over the summer. I got back to New York and then I started really focusing on releasing stuff.

Tell me about the Golder album. It’s such a consistent record and I feel like it has a lot of streams of ideas that are consistent throughout, whether it’s the atonal noise breakdowns or the kind of computery ear candy, or even the literary references dropped around. How was that conceptualized and what was that process like recording it?

I definitely go through a pretty long conceptual phase before making stuff. I need to sort of get the idea of it before making it, and I feel like that process I developed with Chris when he was making his record. He goes crazy. He’s like George R. R. Martin or something, constructing entire universes for these songs to live in. For me, I mostly just want a bit of a conceptual idea of what the thing is. 

I think the idea itself was sort of something that I developed with Griffin, and it was just, like: computerrock. 

There’s a lot of people that use Ableton as a tape recorder, you know, they’ll play stuff in and then record it. And then there’s a lot of people that make music sort of within the DAW — even if you record an external instrument, the point is getting the internal instruments to sort of fit in with the MIDI. I wanted to flip it on its head and say, “what if instead of seeing these roles as separate, the computer itself is controlling the external world?” So I used, other than drums, pretty much no MIDI. And every single element, instrument, all of that stuff was all recorded in, but super heavily warped in Ableton or pitched up or just like random computer processes to make it fit in and be part of this digital world. So, just the idea of the computer controlling me was the idea behind the record. It’s like rock music, but the computer is in charge.

I remember, we talked one time about the “Buy u something nice” hook line. And you were telling me that you just played one note on the guitar, and then used Ableton to pitch it around with some effect. Can you talk about that specific example of this whole concept?

Yeah, I think that’s a really good example of the whole thing. I just took the guitar, played one note over and over again. And then each note itself I re-pitched in Little Altar Boy. It took me like three hours to get the part down, because I was re-pitching each individual note.

Did you have the melody in mind or were you discovering the melody as you were pitching things around?

I think I was sort of discovering. I’m trying to remember — I don’t think I played it on guitar first. I think I might have had some idea of it. I know that I didn’t want it to do the same thing twice originally, I thought that was boring. And I tried a lot of other different ways, but it turned out that that was the only one that sounded good so I ended up sticking with it.  I’m very glad I did, because that’s probably my most recognizable instrumental part at this point.

Tell me a little bit about the I can put whatever I want here huh (WIW) collective.  

Yeah, so that was something we formed a little bit over a year ago now. And it was sort of just created as shit-posting Instagram, where we could just have a repository to post memes about each other as a joke.

But at the same time, Chris had already pretty much finished his record, Griffin was releasing a lot as Printer Friendly, I was releasing as Golder, and we were all coming together and realizing we were all making projects at the same time. And we were like, “We could probably band together, and instead of being a bunch of different artists all dropping separately, just having something more cohesive would probably be a bit nicer and more beneficial.”

I’ve definitely noticed that. I feel like if I do things for myself, something might work out, but generally not really. Like I was trying to get us “fans also like” on Spotify forever and it just wasn’t happening, because “Hard to Breathe” was on indie chill playlists all over. The vast majority of my listeners were just people who heard it on some dream pop playlist. But then after I made the Whatever I Want playlist, immediately Spotify is like, “Oh, we know who you are.” 

It’s really important in person too, obviously, and we want to organize a lot more events. We’re all starting to perform a lot more, so that’s going to be a really big shift. But digitally, creating this web to other people who are releasing is so weirdly beneficial — algorithmically and all of these other ways — and it’s been super helpful. 

Could you tell me about any conceptual ideas for the new album — where you’re going with that and what some of the reference points are?

I wanted to make a psychedelic pop album. I hate throwback, that’s not what I want to be at all, but I think everyone is sort of inevitably looped into the 20 year cycle. So for me it’s a lot of Deerhoof, The Microphones, Broadcast. Those sorts of really colorful indie bands that have this just irrepressible joy to them. I wanted to essentially do that, but more modern sounding and with full use of digital tools. 

I think it essentially takes everything that was in the last record, and just polarizes it, and then puts it all right next to each other. So when it gets noisy, it gets really noisy. And when it gets pop, I’m doing like the most sugary, candy coated melodies I could think of. Like Britney Spears or some pop act where it’s just the most repetitive little thing that will stick in your head. I wanted to just mash all of these polar extremes together and go back and forth between them. So, that’s sort of the idea behind the album. 

I also got this Moog sub-harmonicon, and it makes a lot of really fun noises. So maybe half of the record involves this modular synth doing repetitive patterns, randomness, or some type of squealing, crazy noise. That was sort of how I wanted to include synth looping in the style of a hyper pop or a hyper pop adjacent rap artist without feeling too uncomfortable.

I have a couple rapid fire-esque questions just before we wrap things up. Are there any instruments or plugins that you feel are part of your style or habits, and that just feeds into everything you create? 

All of my instruments are from like five things. Essentially I have my Strat, my acoustic, my Sub-Harmonicon and my MicroFreak, a shaker, and then my voice. That’s pretty much every noise. 

When it comes to plugins, I feel like it’s a two-step process because Griff mixed this record, but he went super hard with the mixing so there’s massive amounts of panning and the album’s constantly moving between left and right, which is fun. I don’t quite know what he did for that. 

For me, the Decapitator by SoundToys is my go to distortion. I love the Glue compressor. And probably OTT, on this new record is really important. It’s a multiband compressor. So if you hear in EDM or hyper pop they have these really glowy, crispy high ends, it’s through upward expansion. I feel like people more and more have just been throwing it on everything, because it just makes it sound better. I’ve been using it on vocals a lot to get a more digicore, crispier hyper pop sound.

What art or artists, whether it’s musical or any kind of artist, is inspiring you most recently?

I was at The Met last night and there was a super sick, I don’t know what to call it but like all of the parts of Black Country New Road that aren’t rock music — it’s organic, minimalist, sort of Steve Reich-y and it always has saxophones in it. I feel like I hear it a lot at museums, these looping saxophone riffs and all these interlocking textures. I went to The Met and me and my girlfriend, we went to the fashion exhibit — she used to work for this designer Yoli who just makes the coolest no-waste clothing — and it just had this really cool looping minimalist music in the background. And then some of the coolest dresses I’ve ever seen. I think increasingly fashion has been a big influence on me.

That’s awesome, I’ve got to check that out. 

It’s on exhibit until September, I highly recommend it. The Met hasn been on their shit. They’ve modernized a lot since the last time I went there. I feel like usually when places are like “We’re appealing to a younger audience!” they just get worse, but The Met — I would totally go right now even if you’ve been many times because it’s in such a different state. 

Is there a single book, an interview with an artist that you saw or just a general mindset that you would recommend to someone who’s trying to develop as a musician or a songwriter?

I love Camus. So maybe The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s just a really cool book on radical freedom and trying to make sense of the world, and then also free yourself from the bounds that we’re sort of all put in. Just one of those big point-of-life essays. I think it’s a really good thing for every artist to read. I know a lot of people have told me that they got super depressed after reading it, but for me it was really exhilarating — I always feel like it frees you, which is nice.