Interview: Chris Natividad of Marbled Eye On The Band’s New Album ‘Read The Air’

Photo by Jeremy Chiu

If patience is a virtue, then Marbled Eye have mastered it in the creative form. In the past five years alone as a band since releasing their debut album, the Bay Area punks have had to put aspirations on hold thanks to contending with a global pandemic, losing their bassist and in-house recording engineer along the way, and figuring out next steps with everything else life has to throw at you when you’re merely trying to survive.

The Oakland four-piece of of guitarists and vocalists Chris Natividad and Michael Lucero, drummer Alex Shen, and new bassist Ronnie Portugal have lived to play another day, however, and are at a most incisive craft with the release of their long-awaited sophomore follow-up, Read the Air. It’s an album that defies what modern post-punk music prefers to do in staying indoors and hiding itself in the dark by instead opting for open sky views and oxygen, although the dredges of post-capitalist existentialism are omnipresent in sucking the life out of them.

+rcmndedlisten connected with Chris Natividad through e-mail to discuss the upsides to taking time out as a band, tackling the self-recorded learning curve and sound behind Read The Air, coming up in the Bay Area scene, their upcoming Sound & Fury kickoff show with Chat Pile, and if there’s a possibility that his other buzzy projects will ever converge on the same bill someday.

+rl: Five years is a long ass time between releasing your debut album and sophomore followup by 2024 standards. In listening to Read the Air, there’s a clear delineation between your past and present selves presented in more dimensions to your sound that makes a great case for artists taking their time before their next move. Granted, daily circumstances keeping members apart greatly impacted that, but did you actively communicate during those years as to what the next phase of Marbled Eye would sound like once you were able to hit record?

Chris Natividad: It’s cliché but life moves fast sometimes, and I think it was necessary to put the band on the backburner for a while. We all have a good idea of what is and what isn’t a Marbled Eye song so once we picked it back up again, the album and vision came naturally. We’re always sending each other albums, so I think we could all pick up on the references. The main thing was just making something different than the first record.

+rl: You also produced the album yourselves — a first since former bassist and recording engineer, Andrew Oswald, exited the band. I don’t think many would pick up on the fact that Read the Air was built DIY style inside bedrooms and practice spaces because it sounds, much like its title suggests, like an album designed with aerodynamic properties. How did the learning curve of self-producing inform creative decisions?

CN: Haha I love thinking about our album as aerodynamic, but maybe “stripped down” would be more accurate. We got some mics and started demoing everything at home and in our practice space. We initially sent our mix engineer (Grace Colman of Different Fur) two songs to mix and were happy with the results, so we decided to record the rest of the record the same way. Tracking ourselves gave us a lot of freedom to slowly chip away at the songs and marinate on the decisions a bit more. Not having to worry about using up studio time also gave us the opportunity to re-work a couple older ideas into new versions that ended up going on the record. 

+rl: You talked about some of the music that influenced the sound of Read the Air with BrooklynVegan, citing Sonic Youth, Cindy Lee, Psychic TV, and Arca as touchpoints. It’s probably fair to say enough people are fatigued by boilerplate post-punk, but you’ve very much escaped that here in etching in your own details through a bright, guitar-driven morbidity that lends some heat to your sound. Fittingly, the album is out on Summer Shade as well, the new-ish bi-coastal boutique label by Run for Cover Records that spotlights new music. I personally heard hints of departed Bay Area punks, Creative Adult, throughout the listen, too, who also happened to be on RFC’s flagship label back in the day. Is there something in the waves of west coast post-punk that gives it that different energy?

CN: The Bay Area is special in that the local scene is really diverse and bands are happy to have really mixed genre bills. When we first started the band, San Francisco was just coming out of the garage rock era and the Oakland punk warehouse scene was in full force. I think that’s the wave we rode in on. I don’t think any of us are purists of any kind and its kinda funny how vague the term “post punk” has become, but I can understand that it’s probably the easiest way to describe our sound. Who knows, maybe we’ll ditch the guitars for synths on the next record haha (probably not though.) 

+rl: Speaking of different energy, you’ve got a very cool show coming up later this summer as part of the Sound & Fury’s kickoff series before the weekend’s fest, opening for noise rockers Chat Pile alongside Los Angeles shoegazers Luster. That’s a pretty impressive lineup of varying degrees of loud riffs. What are you looking forward to most heading into that?

CN: We love to play varied bills and the Lodge Room is great. It’s definitely an eclectic line up, but I think there’s a lil’ something for everyone. We always have a good time in LA.

+rl: Finally, an obligatory shout out to Aluminum, the buzzy new shoegaze pop band which Chris plays drums in, who are set to release their debut album, Fully Beat. Do you think Marbled Eye and Aluminum will link for some dates as well soon?

CN: Thanks for the shout! It never crossed my mind but I wouldn’t be opposed. For now, Aluminum will be doing a west coast tour in July and Marbled Eye will be hitting the east coast and the Midwest at the end of September.

Marbled Eye’s Read The Air is available now on Summer Shade / Digital Regress.