A conversation with Bradford Cox of Deerhunter from 2007

Prior to his band's first-ever Toronto show, the indie-rock provocateur talked about cross-dressing, Patti Smith vs. The Beach Boys, and the worst thing someone can say about a band

Feb 27, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Notes on this week’s new additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
- Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.
- The Men, “Charm”: This is your reminder that New York City’s finest aesthetically indecisive garage-punk band are releasing a new album, Buyer Beware, tomorrow, and it’s their most consistently satisfying set since their iconic early-2010s run.
- Change of Heart, “In the Wreckage”: This week in “didn’t have that on my 2025 bingo card” news—the title track from the first new album in 28 years from these ‘90s Toronto indie-scene linchpins sees them still striking an uncanny balance of new wave, prog, pop, and hard rock. And given that frontman Ian Blurton has spent the intervening decades rocking and raging with C’Mon, Public Animal, and Future Now, the experience of hearing him in these lustrous surrondings is like the musical equivalent of him shaving his legendary beard. (The full album drops March 7.)
- Miki Berenyi Trio, “Big I Am”: Speaking of ‘90s heroes on the comeback trail—the latest single from the former Lush leader sidesteps the current shoegaze revival to wage war on the manosphere with Madchester grooves.
- Kelora, “I Call to You”: A spectral torch song from the Glasgow-via-London duo to soundtrack your neverending David Lynch memorial.
- Brian D’Addario, “Till the Morning”: After worming his way to the front of the crowd at Paul McCartney’s secret Valentine’s Day show at the Bowery, the Lemon Twigs co-founder releases his debut solo single, a dose of good-day-sunshine pop that suggests his goal isn’t so much to be the new McCartney as the 21st-century Gilbert O’Sullivan.
- Lael Neale, “Tell Me How to Be Here”: This splendorous teaser from the L.A. indie-pop enigma’s upcoming Sub Pop release, Altogether Stranger (May 2), sounds like Jennifer Castle fronting Spacemen 3, slowly evolving from folk serenade to cosmic reverie like a time-lapsed video of a flower in bloom.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Bradford Cox

The date: sometime in April 2007

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: I was at the Eye Weekly office; Bradford was calling from “somewhere in the mountains”

Album being promoted: Cryptograms

The context: I started writing for Pitchfork in 2006, and when the time came to submit my first-ever year-end list for the site, I remember struggling to come up with a full slate of albums I truly loved. For me, 2006 was one of those weird transition years where a lot of the big waves I had been riding in the first half of the decade (the garage-rock renaissance, the electro/dance-punk revival, the Canadian indie explosion) seemed to have crested, while the internet was really starting to complicate the job of trying to stay on top of everything. So I felt like I was doing a lot of dabbling in mp3 blogs and MySpace pages as opposed to developing deep relationships with particular records.

Also, around this time, I got a subscription to eMusic (RIP), which allowed me to download something like 20 albums per month, so I was doing deep dives into older bands—like Sparks, The Gun Club, and Swell Maps—with whom I previously had more of a general, greatest-hits-level knowledge. But then, in early 2007, I found a new religion in the form of Deerhunter’s second album, Cryptograms. I loved the way the album gradually transitioned from its dark and droning first act into a brighter, more melodic second act, with the band using ambient interstitials to melt down and remold their sound on a song-by-song basis, like the cyborg in Terminator 2.

I didn’t really know anything about the band at the time, other than they were from Atlanta and were a rare rock-oriented band signed to avant-experimental label Kranky Records. But when I booked a phoner with Cox a few weeks prior to Deerhunter’s debut Toronto show at the Horseshoe, I got an early indication that he wasn’t some meek indie-rock wallflower, but a natural-born provocateur who’d soon become one of the internet’s most reliable sources of literal shitposting.

I recently saw a photo of you performing in a dress. Is that a nod to the Kurt Cobain tradition of punk cross-dressing to piss off the jocks?

It has to be fucking bunk. It has to be crunk. I don’t know. It just has to be… it has to go like a rock show. I just think it looks funny. It’s about having a sense of humour. Blood can be shed. Sometimes cum be shed. Shit can be taken. We’re a band of fluids.

So this is your first real North American tour. Is being on the road a major adjustment for you?

Me and [guitarists] Colin [Mee] and Locket [Pundt] all live together—we spend all our lives together. So we just ignore each other a lot. It’s kind of like a brotherhood.

Cryptograms is structured like a proper album, with all the tracks connected by these ambient interludes. What’s your approach to playing it live?

We definitely don’t try to duplicate it at all. It’s really not that sequenced live. We don’t usually have a set list. We do have songs we play off it, and we have songs that we don’t play. We don’t really play much of the ambient stuff… but I’m just as connected to the ambient side of the album as the other side.

When you were making the album, did you ever wonder, “how are all these pieces going to fit together”?

It all made perfect sense to me making the record. We recorded the album in sequence—it’s a linear record. So there was no question about the narrative sequence at all. I never wondered, “does this work?” In my head, it worked, so I figured anyone that can relate to the material, it would work for them. It just happened naturally. It was a stream-of-conscious thing, but we kept it that way instead of ever changing it up. It’s just an instinctual record—it’s pretty much about instinct.

So you’re firm believers in the sanctity of the album in an mp3 age?

I love albums. Definitely. I think that it has gotten a bit lost in the whole iPod thing. Like, I’m sure most people leave our ambient stuff off their iPods, and just put on the pop songs. Or I’m sure some people think the pop songs are pretentious and corny and contrived so they only listen to the ambient part. I prefer people listen to it all the way through.

There’s been a lot written about the physical and mental struggles you endured while making this record, and I feel like music critics can’t help but romanticize albums made by artists on the verge of a psychological breakdown…

Fuck yeah. You know how some people learn how to speak a foreign language? I spent years learning how to speak that kind of language that would translate into that kind of [psychological breakdown] record.

So it’s like acting for you?

Yeah, but there was no acting involved. I would never fake that shit. But I never really reveal what it’s about. It’s not something anybody is going to be able to figure out or that I’m exploiting or that I’m trying to self-mythologize. I’m not fucking giving it up. I know what it’s about—and it doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s whatever anybody takes from it.

You have a new EP coming out—are those leftovers from the Cryptograms sessions?

It’s brand new, totally unrelated. The songs are all about death and corpses. Post-death.

Cryptograms begins in a noisy/experimental space, but then you get to these beautiful pop songs like “Strange Lights” and “Hazel St.” Is it more challenging for you to sing those sorts of songs, where you don't have the safety net of hiding behind the noise?

“Strange Lights” is a great song to sing, I don’t feel weird about that song. There is less hiding in the mix… that’s a song about friendship, and if anything it makes me feel pretty free-spirited. “Hazel St.” is like a fantasy kind of thing—it’s about being fucked up and sick physically when you’re a kid and fantasizing about not being that way. It’s the street where happy little rich kids live in Marietta, where I grew up partially. It’s about wishing you were someone you want to be, or wishing you were healthy, or wishing you were straight. It is about my own experiences. Those are the songs where you do have second thoughts about: “am I being too hokey or emo?” I’m not into that shit at all; at the same time, I’m into telling stories directly and I’m not shy at all, ever. Sometimes I want to be really ambiguous, like on the first half of the record, but at the same time I always thought it was pretty faggy—and by that I mean fucking pretentious—to hide. Like the whole Michael Stipe thing of making no sense, and hiding behind incoherent obscurest lyrics… I like playing with words sometimes aesthetically, but other times, if I want to say something, I’ll just say it. I don’t have a problem making that transition.

Do you think of yourselves as psychedelic pop songwriters or would you like Deerhunter to be seen as an avant-garde entity?

I get really tired of genres. I also get really tired of people mining the same five records as influences—like the Beach Boys, the sunshiney psychedelic shit, I fucking hate that. I’m much more influenced by darker shit, like Patti Smith—more fucked up kind of things. I hate psychedelic hippie shit—I identify way more with punk rock than psychedelic culture.

Do you bemoan the rise of beardo folk music in indie rock, then?

I don’t bemoan anything, because everybody does what they want to do and everybody comes from where they’re coming from. I don’t really like heterosexual culture, but I don’t bemoan it every five minutes. There are a lot of things I don’t like or don’t relate to, but that’s just where they come from… it’s not my scene, and I don’t expect them to relate to what I’m doing. I also don’t expect them to attack me or tell me that I suck when they have no context to relate to what I’m doing. I don’t say “hippie psychedelic bands suck,” because they have every right to be that—I’m sure a lot of people think they’re awesome.

Did you always have aspirations to be the lead singer in a band?

I don’t really think about being the centre of attention. If anything, I challenge that by burying the vocals and burying the lyrics underneath the music, and turning the vocals into music. I don’t consider myself any different than any of the rest of the musicians in the band. I might be more recognizable or loud… but I’m not trying to distract anyone from anything.

You’ve been posting negative reviews of the band to your MySpace blog. What’s the motivation behind that?

I’m really lazy and haven’t changed it in a long time. One night, I had all these negative reviews in front of me and I thought it would be funny to put it up there. I mean, it’s fucking MySpace, I don’t really spend too much time considering it, it’s just a fun thing to kill time with when you’re on tour. I just put that up there, and I’m too lazy to figure out something to replace it with. But yeah, when I see stuff like that, and it happens all the time, I don’t know if I’m proud of it, but I’d rather be in a polarizing band than a mediocre band. I’d rather people just say we fucking suck and try to explain it in a usually pretty pathetic way. The worst thing someone can say about you is: “I don’t remember them.”

ENCORES

Deerhunter haven’t released an album since 2019’s somewhat prophetically titled Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, and I miss them dearly. Here’s a reminder that the last song on their last album to date was also one of their greatest:
If you’ve never seen Bradford Cox’s cinema-themed Over/Under segment for Pitchfork, you’ll learn a lot more about him beyond his taste in film:
Great moments in Deerhunter TV, Part 1: a 2011 performance of “Memory Boy” on Letterman where they stretch the song out into a Stereolab jam:
Great moments in Deerhunter TV, Part 2: Bradford singing “Monomania” in Johnny Thunders drag on Fallon and then using the hallways of 30 Rock as his own personal catwalk: