Interview: Sara Gregory of ENTRY On The Band’s Latest EP ‘Exit Interview’

Photo by Mike Owyang

Among the takeaways from hardcore’s best of 2023, it was that the world needs to hear and see more of Entry. The Los Angeles four-piece of vocalist Sara Gregory, guitarist Clayton Stevens (also of Touché Amoré,) bassist Sean Sakamoto, and drummer Chris Dwyer put out one of the year’s most impressive extended plays in their latest release, Exit Interview, a listen which combats the many hellscapes of our current existence, socially and politically, in a head-on collision made all the more cataclysmic by Gregory’s caustic confrontation with it all and the band’s demon-speed presence. If you were lucky enough to catch the band on the road — in some instances, for the first time in years, due to the pandemic — you were treated to a thriller that left you feeling more alive in spite of all of this dread spinning around us on the daily.

+rcmndedlisten was very fortunate to get in touch with Sara Gregory to discuss the heart of the listen, the feral nature of their style of hardcore punk, and their experience as a DIY band hitting the road this day in age playing alongside some the scene’s most exciting new sounds, opening for their heroes, and who to watch out for next.

+rl: Exit Interview is touted as a release with songs that “don’t have an ounce of fat” — all true considering the six tracks that make up the EP clock in at less than eight minutes in length. How do your collective instincts know when you’ve hit just the right speed and velocity there?

Sara Gregory: We like making short and to the point songs for the most part. If it’s short but it sounds done, then why not just let it be done? We can use another part for another song. We all have a say in what goes into a song so if someone really wants to add a part, we consider it and figure out if it works or not.

Your vocals are straight up nasty like a scourge throughout the EP because of that energy. If someone’s life depended on it, I’m not sure anyone could pick out each word, but there’s definitely ire aimed at the elite burning throughout. You cover a lot of ground in short order, but what are some favorite choice lyrics you really want listeners to take away here?

SG: I appreciate that. I think probably “You are doing nothing except killing us all slowly” which is pretty much aimed at the people who are supposed to be in charge of making our lives sustainable. Everything they say is for show while most of us continue to struggle in some way.

I would also say “Greed only grows” because honestly, it just seems obvious. People can have billions and billions of dollars and still try to find ways to make more and keep more from everyone else.

+rl: Brevity isn’t really atypical in the world of hardcore punk, but right now, with the scene experiencing a fever pitch in interest from more ears, it’s refreshing to hear something getting to the guts of it all with an ugly, fast, and heavy visceral display without any flashiness or genre-pushing ascribed to the narrative, which is happening to a lot of the music deemed as its next big things. In a sense, it’s almost like the latter needed to happen so that bands like ENTRY, Gel and SPY could be the counterbalance to that in showing the scene’s other new sounds are also tearing it up just by accentuating its tried and true core ethos…

SG: Entry is what it is and we try to pretty much stick to our methods. We all have other bands where we can experiment and get weird. This is a punk hardcore band and we like to keep it straight forward.

+rl: Speaking of which, in the past year, you headed out to the east coast for the first time since 2018 with one of those bands in San Diego’s Bayonet. Your label, Convulse Records, has also been great at shining a light onto that gnarly kind of hardcore punk with recent releases from Tennessee’s Gumm and Kansas City’s SPINE. How does playing live feel out there right now compared to five years ago, and who do you want to shout out as ones to keep an eye across the map?

SG: Tour with Bayonet was awesome. A few shows flopped, so at least I know that some things don’t change haha. The real difference between playing live right now and five years ago are the people at the shows. I feel like for the most part the crowds are younger, and also places that were not seemingly that exciting before have flourishing scenes. Columbus, OH and Bloomington, IN are hot spots for punk/hardcore right now. Kids who didn’t even really know who we are came out and had a lot of energy and bought merch, etc. The one con is that there are also so, so many shows happening all the time now and some places are just harder to book as a DIY band. I have to really give a lot of props to the promoters out there keeping the scenes alive. Columbus, Rochester, Bloomington, Providence, and NYC were definitely the best ones. Also Bayonet are so awesome and I encourage everyone to check them out or go see them live.

The west coast tour with Converge was our first “real” tour. It was pretty amazing. They’re musical heroes of mine and a reason I do what I do so that was pretty intimidating at first, but it was really fun. We got to do most of the dates with King Yosef, who blew my mind live, and Deaf Club who put on a wild show every night. I discovered an awesome band in the PNW called Filth Is Eternal when we played an off show in Eugene, OR with them.

Check out Bayonet from San Diego, Filth Is Eternal from Seattle, Cosmic Joke from LA, and Bad Beat from Detroit.

Entry’s Exit Interview is available now on Convulse Records.