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Surrounded by vinyls and polaroids at Kingston’s Banquet Records, Dream Nails played a set of unnerving riffs and stomping rhythms, all taken from their latest LP, You Wish (which I reviewed last week). After the long record-signing queue dissipated, I got the chance to chat to Mimi Jasson (vocals, bass) and Lucy Katz (drums) – Dream Nails sans guitarist Anya Pearson – about their new album and upcoming tour, as well as Nirvana, Geese, Shakespeare, Charli XCX and Serbian performance art.

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This was the first show on the tour. Are you looking forward to the full thing? 

Lucy: Yes, absolutely. After tonight, so much because we’re self-managed, we do literally everything ourselves. For the last few months slash nine years, it’s an admin slog. And you forget that what we’re here to do is play shows. So, I’m very excited now. 

I suppose with that as well, there’s a lot of promoting that you have to do as well. How do you find the social media management side of it? 

Mimi: I mean, we have to make our TikToks…

I have to do that; it can be excruciating.

Mimi: No, I feel like it’s good, though. I feel like we have a rhythm because Anya says, ‘we need to make these videos, let’s just make them now.’ And it’s more you don’t think about it too much. You’re not thinking that it has to be the best video ever, and it’s just you talking. 

But it can be a lot. It’s a lot of work to promote yourself. And to make sure your gigs are being promoted, too. Because it’s the whole thing. We’re writing our music, we’re recording it, we’re putting it out. But then the promotion has to happen, too. 

Lucy: Honestly, it makes sense that we have to help promote, but industry-wide, I do think there is too much pressure on the artists to promote their own shows and work. It’s quite a lot of energy that I would rather be practicing, or we’d rather be writing or just, like, doing something else.

So, when you do find the time for writing, how is that process? Is it just one of you as songwriters, or do you all contribute?

Mimi: This album is different because, in the past, it was one songwriter, but now, we all wrote it together.

We had a free-writing session every practice. We were doing three writing sessions a week for, I don’t know, five hours, six-hour writing sessions. Spitballing ideas, working through what we wanted to do, free writing on a subject, you know, just playing riffs, sharing our inspiration. We curated it together.

Lucy: It was a good way of doing it. I feel like we all have more ownership over it than previous records because we all wrote everything in the same room together. At least, the foundations, the fundamentals.

As you mentioned earlier during the gig, the theme of the album has a lot to do with tech anxiety. Did that come quite early in the writing process? 

Lucy: That’s interesting. It wasn’t our initial focus, actually. It was definitely something that came a bit later, but it came quite organically. We wanted to write an album about resilience and about finding strength in a world that does not want you to be strong and resilient.

And I think when we started thinking about the things that are getting in the way of us being strong and resilient, it’s tech. It’s the way that tech feudalists are destroying all of our lives and our connections and our relationships. So that came organically at that point.

Mimi: Yeah, a lot of the ideas were related to that, because that’s what’s on our minds. 

It’s on everyone’s minds at the moment as well, isn’t it? In terms of the cover art, do you want to explain how you came to sort of a horse and water image? 

Mimi: We were interested in having a horse on the cover, and we tried to explore a few options. There was one photographer, but it just didn’t work out because you have to license the photos.

And then we found like a horse sanctuary, and we were going to do a photo shoot with an actual golden horse. But that didn’t work out. Luckily, Anya found this photographer, Kurt Arrigo, and he had these amazing pictures of swimming horses. When we contacted him, he was so nice. We loved it.

Lucy: We have a song about a horse, and we have a song about swimming, or being a fish, being free. 

Mimi: It was very animal-like, animal themed. 

Lucy: And obviously, shout out to Nirvana. [To me] Is that what you think of when you look at it? Do you think of the baby? 

I was thinking more of the Geese album cover with the sunlight. 

Lucy: We only realized that today. It’s very similar. They have it here, actually. Many people will buy our album accidentally, though, which is cool, because they’ll think it’s Geese. 

We spent a couple of minutes poring over the artwork, with touring member Alex Mackenzie joining the conversation. Some controversial opinions (very mild criticisms) were thrown around about the album as a whole, but to avoid a fistfight between Cameron Winter and Katz, they’ve been left out.

Lucy: …I haven’t even had a beer – imagine! I’ve only had Coke Zero.

Blimey, must be all of them sweeteners.

Alex: Geese/Dream Nails beef!

Mimi: That’ll get us into the press.

Lucy: They’ll be like, ‘who are these fucking randoms?’

Once the laughter died down, I hit them with a couple of Argus Far classics.

If you could cover any song, and this could be individually, or you can decide between yourselves, which song would you cover, and why? 

Lucy: That’s such a good question. 

Mimi: Shit. I’ve literally never… Well, we’ve covered some songs, but I wouldn’t cover them again. The Buffy theme song was a fun cover, but I wouldn’t say that’s my ultimate cover. 

Lucy: Oh, that was really fun. I think I love… actually, I always go back to hip-hop beats, so I would like to do some classic hip-hop. Digable Planets is my favourite hip-hop group, so maybe something like that would be very cool.

Mimi: I’m going to say Charli XCX, because she’s right here. She points to a polaroid of Charli on the Banquet Records counter, dated from an in-store gig she played there around 2013. I’m going to say ‘Von Dutch’, that song saved my life.

And last question, what is your biggest non-music influence? 

Lucy: Honestly, there was actually a lot of extracurricular art inspiration. The song ‘The Spirit Does Not Burn’ is based on Marina Abramović, a Serbian performance artist, absolute crazy legend.

She’s actually a big inspiration on me. She’s done a lot of insane things, like walking the Great Wall of China with her at one end and her ex-husband at the other. And when they met in the middle, they hugged and said their last goodbye and carried on walking.

It took them like six months. These big, dramatic, sweeping performances and ideas, that’s definitely an influence for me and influenced that song specifically. 

Mimi: It’s so hard to say what has influenced you. I watch so many films.

Who’s your favourite director? I mean, that’s a difficult question too. 

Mimi: At the moment, I’m really into Shakespeare.

Lucy: He’s pretty good. That director. 

Mimi: That director we all love. I’ll just say William Shakespeare. 

Lucy: You English-lit bitch.

Any particular play?

Mimi: I’ll say Hamlet, because I watched Hamnet, and I watched the Laurence Olivier Hamlet.

Oh, classic. Proper classic.

Lucy: She went deep. 

Mimi: I went deep. And I’m going to go deeper. Believe me. I will go deeper. 

We believe you, Mimi. And if you want to catch Dream Nails on their current UK and European tour, maybe even question Mimi about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or Lucy about Geese, you can find tickets here: https://dreamnailsband.co.uk

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