The Carrion Crawlers S/T

2022 | Rock

— track 3: “Land of Nothing”

William Thunder Horse: This is like early March [2022], our school was having a talent show. And I just said to the guys, "We got to enter this. We're gonna win it. I guarantee it." We played a few of our original songs, but the one that really got them going was when we played "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It honestly felt like we were in the Nirvana music video: We were in a gym, there was three of us, there's a left-handed singer/guitar player and he's wearing a flannel just like Kurt, and right when the song kicked into the chorus, people jumped down from the bleachers and started jumping around and stuff. They went wild. So that's when we became a big deal on the rez. Dawson Dane — he's a rapper and he's my cousin — he filmed the video of us playing and got somewhere around 2,000 views, got a shit ton of shares. He’s like, "You guys are blowing up, man! This is like two hours, there's already a thousand views!" I was like, "There's no way." Then [drummer] Lesaine's dad, he was like, "I was in work and your video was getting shared around by all my co-workers." [laughs] I was like, "We blew up, oh my god!" So I made the announcement that the album's coming out, and I released the first song,

I'm a senior, I'm about to graduate high school this week. Our drummer, Lesaine Little White Man, he’s a junior. And our buddy [bass player] Troy Janis, he goes to a different school but he's a sophomore.

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I thought about playing in a band for a while, but I always wanted to be the drums because I never thought I could be a guitarist. I never thought I could just stand in front of a bunch of people and play. I thought being a drummer was cooler because they're in the back so nobody gets to see them [laughs]. But during my 13th birthday I was gifted a guitar. It was a pretty cheap Strat copy, but it was one of those left-handed ones, because I'm left-handed. And I'd say the people who inspire me are all the left-handed guitars like Jimi, Zacky Vengeance, there’s another dude from this band called Car Seat Headrest, he's also a left-handed dude. He's pretty wicked. In middle school, one of my buddies showed me Black Flag, and that got me into punk rock. So originally The Carrion Crawlers were going to be a straightforward punk band. The end of 2019 I started getting into a lot of garage punk bands, like I listened to The Osees and Ty Segall. I decided, "Alright, I guess The Carrion Crawlers are going to be a garage band." The lineup at the time was actually different too. Like, our singer had to drop out because he just couldn't make it to practice — he lives an hour away from us, he can't come down every weekend to jam for four hours. And we're on the [Pine Ridge] rez, so it's kind of hard to get gas. Towns are almost thirty to an hour away. Yeah, so distance is a real killer.

And then 2020, you know, the big pandemic, I was like, "Okay, maybe I can use this to work on some demos." Believe it or not, I used GarageBand on my iPad [to record the self-titled album]. I got one of those iPad interfaces, it’s called the Focusrite iTrack Dock, or something like that. Pretty basic setup. So, quarantine, locked-in, came up with the first few demos, that's when the rest of the band quit out on us [laughs]. It was just me and Lesaine. And then 2021, at the start of my senior year, I said, "Alright we're going to practice now." Lesaine brought his kit down, and he actually leaves it here because he doesn't want to go through the hassle of taking it back. So, yeah, every weekend he would just come down and practice and jam. By a month and a half we learned almost all the songs that were on the album and the EP. Then he brought Troy in.

That's when Ryott Glayzer and Ti Murphee from Rapid City — Ti plays in that band Mud the Cosmonaut, and Ryott has her own project called Crust After Curfew — they both contacted me and they asked if we wanted to play a show at a house party. We went there, played it, it was really good, people loved us. A video got posted on our Instagram and it got shared around, so that's when NaTasha, from the Cave Collective saw it, and she asked if we wanted to come play a set. So on December 17th, we played Cave Fest 11. Then on February 27, that was when we got booked for another show. We opened for Blind Tiger from Florida. I saw on the Blind Tiger page, "Joined by local legends The Carrion Crawlers!" And I was like, “We've only played three shows!” [laughs] So we were already known up there in Rapid as a pretty cool band to see, but on the rez we never played a show here before.

[After the talent show] we got all the Natives supporting us. Everybody who's big on the reservation in music was sharing us around. And then I remember Ti was like, "Hey, you guys want to play an April 1st show? And no, I'm not joking." So then we played that, and a lot of people showed up for us, some people I saw from our school, mostly a bunch of Native people who came to see us. We played the song "NDN Kars” [by Keith Secola], and it was really funny, got everybody hyped up. I was ready to play "Come and Get Your Love" [by Redbone] too just for fun. That show went really well. Like, I remember near the end I screamed, "Can I get a hoka hey?" [laughs] Like, all the guys were war hooping, and all the women were leelee-ing, and all that stuff. It was a great show.

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A few of the songs [on the self-titled album] like "Adrenaline," "Land of Nothing," "Dead in the Head," those were the songs that [I wrote]. And then [the band] wrote the rest of them ourselves, and then I recorded it. I recorded every instrument [on the self-titled album]. The guys didn't want to because — I don't know, they just never really sat down and recorded their parts, so I recorded it for them. I taught myself every instrument I play. I started drumming right when Lesaine brought his kit down. The minute he left it at my house, I hopped on and started playing. I'd never played drums before in my life, but then after, what, five months I got the basics down. I did that, like, every day. I'm surprised my parents were cool with it, because during that time I was playing for three hours every day on that drumset [laughs]. When I was first playing, what inspired me was Zach Hill from Death Grips and early Wavves. I was like, "I want to learn how to drum like that, because that guy’s crazy." Our buddy Daynen Brings Plenty, he makes a lot of art — [like] our album cover with the big old Carrion Crawler on it. He helped us write a few songs too.

"Land of Nothing" was one of the first songs I really wanted to write about. We went on a rant one day about how we don't like living on the rez. And one of the main things that was brought up in our little rant was how it's such a big land, and yet, there's nothing. There's nothing around it, just small towns, but nothing, just distance, and miles and miles of roads. So then that's when I started writing "Land of Nothing." Like, the first lyrics, "I got nowhere to go. I got nowhere to be." Because everything I do is in my town, I don't need to be anywhere else. And yeah, "I ain't got a car. I ain’t got a phone." That's a lie, I do have a phone, just doesn't have service [laughs]. Near the end I say, "In the land of nothing, fuck it, I'll be fine." Like, “Yeah, it sucks. But hey, I have to live with it. I'll be alright.”

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What’s next? Recording the next album. If we're gonna be technical, it's our third album, we had the Covers album. We've already got started on it. One of my friends told us we're basically the King Gizzard of the reservation. Just pushing and pushing the music out, man. That's the thing, it's garage rock, it's not that hard to make. The only really hard part is making a catchy chorus. Of course, we're gonna keep it DIY again, everything's self-recorded, we're making our own shirts making our own merch. Next time I go to Rapid, I'm gonna buy a bunch of CDs and burn them and sell them at shows. It's gonna be like a double album, like two EPs combined into one. The first side is going to be all garage rock, so we're basically going to write the most catchy stuff we can. But then the second half is gonna slowly shift, and then near the end it's going to be all hardcore punk. That's the concept. I'm thinking of calling it Double Death.

Ti wanted to bring us into the KTEQ studios and have us play live. KTEQ is a radio station in the School of Mines. Ti's got his [show], it’s called "Studs and Spikes," he plays from like 9 p.m. until 12. I remember them telling us we're gonna play on a radio station, and I just said to the guys, "Holy fuck. How did we get here?" And in the radio station, when we were singing the songs, I was in my mind going, "How did I go from playing in my basement to being on a radio station?" It was a pretty wild moment. It all happened kind of fast. It's barely been a year since we felt like we officially started playing music, and we've already done a lot.