On the outside, you think you know what you’re in store for. Three self-professed mod-punks donning fitted striped shirts and sunglasses and black pants. Cue the assumptions of a familiar sound of garage band revivalism, but to assume of Perennial would be to to get it all wrong.

The trio of vocalist and guitarist Chad Jewitt, vocalist and multi-instrumental electric organist Chelsea Hahn, and drummer Ceej Wolf have been making a lot of noise throughout the New England underground over the last decade by mining through the vintage rock rack and reviving it through a modern day lens of DIY punk with its own subversive slant on the political and cultural. It’s on their latest and best album yet, Modernism, where everything clicks, and clicks loudly at that.

High voltage electrical currents, spirited shout-alongs, inked-and-daggering riffs bent into abstract angles, fuzzed out bass lines, and a vintage Mellotron made violent, the album excels in capturing the band’s live show through the soundboards. It’s also something for the punks to dance to, all while flexing a sharp fashion and flair for art.

This is to say the vision here has a lot going on for it. To scrape the surface, +rcmndedlisten connected with Chad Jewitt over the retro medium of e-mail to discuss some of them, from Perennial’s signature tone, their taste for the Blood Brothers, to the listen’s undying spooky season theatrics.

+rl: If there’s one thing that stands out the most about your music, it’s how you are relentless in your ecstatic energy in shouting the lyrics. Aside from the interlude of “The Shadow”, it’s like the band is right there punctuating every word in every song into our ears. Here on Modernism, you’ve solidified the aesthetic in its cadence and pattern work as an integral part to the Perennial sound. Was that an intentional goal or just something that happened over the years?

Chad Jewitt: I definitely think it’s something we really solidified on Modernism. Chelsey and I have always sung in that sort of sneakily melodic shouted cadence, but there is certainly a specific way we consistently do it across the new record that clicked very early on. We tend to think of vocals / melodies in instrumental terms, so the vocals are treated as riffs in a sense, and so there was a real effort at crafting every vocal like a hook, shouted to match the energy. Aggressive but clean and punchy.

+rl: You cite everything from free jazz, Motown and Otis Redding to MC5 and Le Tigre as influences, but one name that caught my eye the most before listening to the album was the Blood Brothers. I very much hear it in the nearly-post-hardcore knife-edge riffs of “Cloak & Dagger”, “Me & Magpie”, and “Emma Peel”. Throw in some Mellotron and organ trickery, and we are getting weird and heavy here in a way that would make the Seattle art-punks proud. Did you lean into any of their work in particular to pull in this vibe?

CJ: The Blood Brothers are probably the influence on Perennial. If I had to boil down the roots of what we do to one artist, it’d be them. The way that band managed to have all this attack and all this ferocity without being stereotypically “heavy” really impressed me. My approach to guitar is definitely shaped by Cody Votolato. Cody’s riffs are really sharp and barbed and sinewy — he rarely uses power chords — and so there’s always this garage rock / beat / surf accent to what The Blood Brothers are doing that definitely informed the way we make punk music. Then you get the really impressionistic, studio-as-instrument stuff on Young Machetes, post-hardcore as a headphone album, which also meant a lot to us.

+rl: I could be wrong, but I counted two references to haunted houses and on the aforementioned ’60s Avengers homage, “Emma Peel”, you emphatically spell out the word “HALLOWEEN”. You’ve also released tracks in the past celebrating the classic Silly Symphony “The Skeleton Dance” as well as the Wolfman, and there’s a “Halloween orange” variant of your 2024 album, Art History, available. You aren’t an externally goth band, but you sure do give off enough goth energy. Where does that come from?

CJ: That is definitely a key theme for us. I think perhaps it’s less “goth” per se and more us being enamored with mid-century pop horror stuff; the campier aesthetics of ’50s B-movies or the Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe flicks or ’60s garage rock horror-themed novelty songs (check out Halloween Nuggets: Monster Sixties a Go‐Go; it’s a huge record for us). It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown is a top 5 movie for me. One of the rules for Perennial is if it’s something we dig, it’s eligible for being thrown in the recipe. I like when artists really dig into the things they’re obsessed with. I also just think that imagery/aesthetic is really catchy and compelling. Everyone has a mental image of a haunted house or midnight on Halloween, etc…

+rl: You’ll be escaping your New England haunts for o.g. England during October’s peak this year nonetheless. Are there any spooky seasonably astute explorations you’re looking forward to while you’re out there traveling the road a world over?

CJ: That’s a great question! We’re very open to suggestions! We’ll be in the United Kingdom for much of October; maybe we can sneak into Stonehenge some night or check out the Tower of London or something.

Perennial’s Modernism is available now on Ernest Jenning Co.