Interview by Ali Williams
LATEX GRENADE have heard the question before: are they punk or are they metal? Apparently, asking them to choose has achieved very little.
The San Diego outfit has spent years allowing both sides of its musical personality to coexist, despite record labels once suggesting the concept of a band playing whatever the hell it wanted was unnecessarily complicated. Now, after an extended gap between substantial releases, they have returned to the studio for their second full-length album, and the time away has given them plenty to write about.
Lead guitarist and vocalist, Geoff Davis sat down with HEAVY’s Ali Williams to chat about their latest release “It’s been a pretty biblical couple months,” Davis tells HEAVY, with the new record arriving after a period in which LATEX GRENADE largely disappeared from the release cycle. A single surfaced a few years ago, but Davis estimates it has been around five years since the band delivered an EP or album.
For a band that has been operating since its self-titled five-track release in 2010, that is a sizeable silence. LATEX GRENADE’s catalogue has never followed a particularly conventional path anyway. There was 2012 full-length Going Green, FDR Part 1 in 2013 and FDR Part 2 in 2016, followed by one of the stranger and more rewarding chapters in the band’s history with The Cage.
That chapter began when Davis met Theo, producer and member of South African band SPRINGBOK NUDE GIRLS, through Lurssen Mastering. What followed was an invitation to head to South Africa, tour with the band and record The Cage while they were there. There was just one small detail Davis had neglected to investigate before boarding the plane: exactly how big SPRINGBOK NUDE GIRLS were in their homeland.
“I did no research on Theo’s band at all,” he freely admits.
Arrival in South Africa involved chauffeurs, rather luxurious accommodation and an increasingly confused LATEX GRENADE wondering why their supposed little run of shows involved venues holding thousands of people. Then came the answer. They had unknowingly signed themselves up to support one of South Africa’s most significant rock bands. Seven or eight huge sold-out shows later, nobody was complaining. The Cage was tracked during that 2017 trip, after which the world eventually wandered into 2020 and gave musicians everywhere rather more spare time than requested.
LATEX GRENADE responded in one particularly sensible fashion: by recording metal versions of pop songs while drinking. Davis says a six-song covers record was put together during that period, including reworked versions of Bad Romance and Livin’ La Vida Loca. Whether anyone will ever hear it remains unresolved.
“We haven’t released it yet, technically,” he laughs. “I don’t know if we ever will.”
The material currently occupying the band, however, came from a very different place. Davis describes the forthcoming album as being shaped by “post-pandemic darkness”, with much of its material written between 2021 and 2023. Rather than attempting to politely file that period away and move along, LATEX GRENADE used it. One song, Your Pretty Life, confronts one of the cruellest realities of those years: elderly people reaching the end of their lives isolated from family. It is an unusually direct subject, but Davis sees little value in dodging uncomfortable material when it is precisely the material that demands somewhere to go.
“Some of our best work is on this album from this darkness,” he says.
There is nothing performatively miserable about the way Davis discusses it. The point is not to remain buried in the period, but to acknowledge what happened and use the tools available to process it. For a musician, sometimes that tool happens to be a guitar, a lyric and several minutes in which nobody is required to pretend everything was fine. Musically, the new record also continues LATEX GRENADE’s long-running refusal to become easily classifiable.
In 2012, the band had discussions with Metal Blade Records and received the assessment that, while they were good, they were not quite metal enough. Around the same period Epitaph had almost the opposite issue, asking why the band couldn’t simply pick a genre because some songs were metal and others were punk.
Going Green represented an attempt to lean firmly towards metal, with longer songs and extended sections, but Davis says LATEX GRENADE eventually stopped worrying quite so much about satisfying a category. The FDR era brought them back towards their roots, while later material allowed the heavier elements to turn up whenever required. As Davis puts it, The Cage was “more punk rock, but metal when we felt like it.”
Asked to define the LATEX GRENADE sound today, he eventually lands somewhere around Pennywise and Rise Against punk riffs with Metallica-style thrash in the equation. His own influences explain why any neater answer is probably a waste of everybody’s time. AFI, The Offspring, Lamb Of God, Killswitch Engage, Bad Religion and Iron Maiden all enter the conversation without anyone feeling the need to call the Genre Police. There has, however, been some refinement. Songs became shorter. Arrangements became more direct. The band learned what advice was useful and what could safely be shown the door.
They also retained one wonderfully practical production philosophy: the car test.Davis remembers receiving the master of Going Green while he was in Byron Bay in 2012 and blasting it through a rental Mazda. Studio monitors are one thing, but ultimately people need to hear the record where people actually listen to records.
“You gotta listen to it like the people, man,” he says. “It needs to sound amazing in the car.”
It is difficult to argue with that. Millions of dollars in studio equipment are terrific, but if the song collapses the minute somebody connects their phone while sitting at a red light, there may still be work to do. For Davis, that connection between music and the person hearing it becomes even more important live.
The conversation turns repeatedly towards the current state of touring, streaming and festivals, with Davis pointing to live music as one area of the industry that remains enormously powerful despite streaming stripping significant revenue from recorded music. More importantly, he still believes an actual band standing in front of an audience offers something technology cannot manufacture. That belief is about to become increasingly relevant for LATEX GRENADE. The band intends to get back on the road after years without a substantial US tour, and South Africa is already in the plans for 2027. Australia is also very definitely occupying Davis’ thoughts.
“I would love to explore a little mini journey out to Australia,” he says.
Given his existing affection for the Gold Coast, Byron Bay and the surrounding region, convincing him to board the flight may not be the difficult part. Convincing a band from California that 15 plus hours in an aircraft counts as a “mini journey” could require slightly more creativity. For now, the immediate business is getting the album properly released after a wait Davis readily admits has gone on long enough.
That wait has at least produced a LATEX GRENADE record with something substantial behind it: years of disruption, loss, changing priorities, musical experimentation and a band now less interested than ever in explaining which shelf its records belong on. Punk when they want it. Metal when they feel like it. That has served them perfectly well so far.
