AMERICAN SONGWRITER

AMERICAN SONGWRITER INTERVIEW WITH BYSTS

HOMETOWN: Salt Lake City, Utah / Recife, Brazil

CURRENT LOCATION: Salt Lake City, Utah

AMBITIONS: Hopefully making great music that resonates with people.

TURN-OFFS: Popsicle sticks.

TURN-ONS: Popsicles.

DREAM GIG: Playing with Primal Scream & Spiritualized.

FAVORITE LYRIC: “Shoot speed / kill light.”

SONG I WISH I WROTE: “Heroes” by David Bowie. I tear up every time I hear that song.

5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: Brian Eno, Ray Davies, Bobby Gillespie, David Bowie, Jason Pierce.

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: Seeing The Jesus and Mary Chain play PsychoCandy at Levitation last year. That was pretty moving.

I WROTE THIS SONG BECAUSE… I feel like the song mostly wrote itself. I just tried to stay open enough to let it happen.

CMW TORONTO CANADA 2016

CMW Toronto Canada 2016: BYSTS Headline their night!

Following their debut singles, BYSTS, were invited to headline their night at the internationally respected music festival Canadian Music Week 2016 in Toronto. Featuring other great artists such as Tegan and Sara, Eagles of Death Metal, The Black Lips, Wild Nothing, Dilly Dally, No Joy, Fat White Family, Baroness and many others.

BYSTS - Killer On The Road

Get Me Free #127: BYSTS - Killer On The Road

By this point in the day you're probably bored to the back teeth of Christmas TV or drunk on booze, so let's take a break to darken the mood for the seventh of our twelve downloads of Christmas. This one comes from Salt Lake City's BYSTS (which is pronounced "beasts", or "beests" as they spell it), a duo who manufacture electro-rock that's designed to blend the darker side of shoegaze with the darker side of trip-hop. So it's a a bit like A Place To Bury Strangers interrupting a Tricky recording session, and actually ends up sounding not unlike something from 'XTRMNTR'-era Primal Scream.

That's a lot of good reference points, and they manage to live up to them with this pummeling industrial monster. You could call it coldwave, you could call it darkwave, but if anyone's invented a genre called post-apocalypticwave then this must be what it sounds like. The noise they make is huge and feels like brute force combined with a certain dexterity that's needed to give the attention to detail that prevents 'Killer On The Road' being just a hollow statement. There's depth and there are ideas, and there's a lot of groaning instruments and effects that will have your speakers quaking in terror.

SOUNDS BETTER WITH REVERB

SOUNDS BETTER WITH REVEB FEATURE BYSTS

"BYSTS deliver ‘Taste’, an explosive noise rocker with sonic bombs and loads of attitude!"

BYSTS deliver ‘Taste’, an explosive noise rocker with sonic bombs and loads of attitude! The Utah duo (Bryan Holbrook and Stefanie Marlow) only formed a few months back but have already posted a handful of singles on Bandcamp that fringe several genres; psych, darkwave, shoegaze and beyond. Keep an ear out for BYSTS debut EP, slated for Spring 2016.

SYFFAL

SYFFAL FEATURES BYSTS VIDEO "SPEED"

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude, put this on loud in a dark room and don't fucking blink. This shit from BYSTS is like a highlight film of every desktop computer and smart phone wallpaper ever made, and it's fucking chilling. The scenes with the different colored smoke in slow motion looks like the shit is almost being poured out of whatever the fuck is creating said colored smoke.

I love when a rhythm is perfectly suited for the music played on top of it, and "Speed" is fucking tits. BYSTS have somehow created an alternate soundtrack for that one scene in Ghostbusters after that asshole Peck opens up the captured ghosts storage device and all the shits stream up out the roof of HQ and all over the Manhattan skyline. Oozing evil like a motherfucker, that's BYSTS.

And for the record, I pronounce BYSTS as "bists", and no I don't know what it means either. And yes, I don't care.