On the Rise
Go Dark

“This music is feral, it's underground. It's for women, non-binary people, people like me who've been on the streets, done things on their own, had crazy life experiences and don't fit into those categories that we're are expected to fall into...”

Vocalist/producer Ashley ‘Crash’ Gallegos stops mid-flow as her cat clambers its way in front of the camera, bandmate Adam ‘Doseone’ Drucke shushing the shrill background barks of their chihuahua. The menagerie's invasion feels like an appropriate way to start our conversation: Go Dark – Skyping me from Santa Fe, though quick to flag their Oakland patriotism ('we miss home!'') – make music both anarchic and undeniably playful, a clash of bit-crushed samples, machine-gun drums and restless shifts in tone and form.

A seasoned MC, Doseone has been a wonderful anomaly in the world of alternative hip-hop, with his love of outlandish theatrics and nasal falsetto. In Crash, he's found an unlikely vocal twin – both sopranos veer between chattering, cheerleading and screaming, with the occasional interjection from Dose's 'serious rap voice'.

After two solid EPs released with no backing, their debut album Neon Young comes out on Bella Union in January. Its first single, "Violetest Red", is a kind of controlled chaos, beginning with uncharacteristic softness, then tearing into a chorus of manic call-and-response shouts and spitting sequencers. The band are super-stoked to be making something so off-the-wall.

“Our music tends to split people down the middle”, Crash says. “It's either too much – too many beats, too in your face, there's no pause – or they love it. Having a label willing to back us, to see a future in us, is a pleasant surprise every time I realise it. They're creating a 'box' for Go Dark that I can fall into, that wasn't there before. I'm also shocked [to have their backing] because I still feel like such an amateur!” She laughs.

It's true that the duos' artistic CVs are a curious match. For Crash, Go Dark was her first formal musical project, having met Dose “on the street in Oakland - I'd just come back from hitch-hiking for a couple of years, so I was all transient and didn't know what the fuck was going on.” A Chicago native, her musical experience was primarily as a busker looking to fund herself around the world. “When we made the first EP, I kinda went into the Doseone school of recording, learning Ableton – the horrifying lessons of figuring out what you sound like... and don't sound like.” She rolls her eyes. “It's a small circle of hell but you get used to it. For three years, I was waitressing at night and going over to the studio in the day to work on things.”

"Go Dark was one of the first things in a million years where I could just let the music be what it needs to be"

For Dose, the project came at a time when he was looking to shake off the weight of his experience. Possibly best known as one of the founding fathers of US alt-rap label anticon., he has spent the last two decades fronting numerous left-field hip hop/other outfits, from nerd rap outliers Clouddead and Sublte, to supergroup The Nevermen with fellow eccentrics Mike Patton and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. He says birthing something new and fundamentally DIY has been liberating

“Over the last few years, I've started to return to the ways that I made my first music – it was just therapeutic. It wasn't on a schedule, I didn't need to finish it by April so I could tour by June. And that was very freeing. Go Dark [was one of the] first things in a million years where I could just let the music be what it needs to be, not concerned with expectations or all that other shit. It's been nice to be … dumb in this band, and enjoy myself, experiment...” he grins, “Be the 'back-up bitch'.”

One of the stand-out components of Go Dark's music is an abundance of 8-bit sampling, the bleep-bloops of singles like WannaBeast reflecting the sounds of old Sega platformers. Dose cites this as a symptom of where he was, both socially and creatively, when the project started. “I was around [a lot of game designers] when I was making the first Go Dark record, and they're such fun, fucking amazing people. Producing music for games is where I learned my production chops – and Go Dark has been the thing that I've been using those chops to explore.” The band even released their first two EPs alongside playable Flash games, where your arcade expertise could earn you track downloads. “I was like 'hey guys, we're doing this music, you wanna do a game?' and they were like, 'Yeah!'. We would love to do it again.”

"We’re making everything ourselves and not doing what's popular"

In contrast, punk is Crash's first love, a spirit she's keen to ignite in the project. At Go Dark’s only UK performance earlier this year, the band stoked the front rows of London’s Birthdays, Dalston into an unlikely mosh pit, Crash regularly demitting her post behind the buttons and wires to dance and shout among the throng. “When people grab me by my face at gigs and yell 'yesssss! thank you so much"... I love being handled like that. It's a contact sport... It's cardio.”

She’s also punk in her desire to distance Go Dark from anything ‘mainstream’. “This album is a resistance album – the songs are very art-ivist.” She explains. “We’re making everything ourselves and not doing what's popular – the whole old school punk rock vibe, you find your own lane and you do that. It couldn't just be something to get hits.”

As we close our conversation, I ask the band whether they’re nervous to feed themselves into the music industry, given their obvious love for doing it all themselves. Dose smiles. “Simon [Raymonde, label head] is amazing at Bella.” He says. “And I guess one of the things about how I've behaved as an artist over the years is that people see me coming, and they welcome an open-endedness. Together, we're just aligned in getting more people to like Go Dark.

"This record is its own animal. Letting that loose is important.”