"Belonging" - An Interview with Bad Light

Bad Light are a four piece band from Los Angeles that blend elements of shoegaze, indie rock, post hardcore and psychedelia.

I caught up with Guitarist/Vocalist Ryan Barnes, Guitarist Julian Fernandez-Vina, Bassist/Vocalist Nick Bottomley and Drummer Trent Tanzi to talk about their early musical experiences, how they got together and the making of their latest release “Mortal Wounds”.

CMM: What was the first music that really made an impact on you all as kids and what artists or bands did you enjoy the most?

Nick: The first bands I really remember being inspired by were bands like Foo Fighters and My Chemical Romance. They were on mainstays on the alternative rock station my dad would listen to while driving me and my brother to school in like 2006, which then became mainstays on my iPod Mini. I think a lot of their influence still comes through in the ways I think about music, especially tones and dynamics. I still listen to tracks on The Colour and the Shape or The Black Parade as mix references for guitars and drums especially. I think they both do that “wall of sound” style of production without losing their clarity, which is a tricky balance.

Trent: There were a bunch of bands that I liked growing up, but I think the ones that left the biggest lasting impact on me were Tool, Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. I also was listening to a lot of T.I. because my parents had one of the early on-demand TV services and T.I. had a lot of music videos on there.

Julian: My earliest memory of being obsessed with a band is Soundgarden; my brother bought “Superunknown” and we’d play Zelda and rock out. I quickly found myself borrowing the CD and trying to learn the songs on guitar and bass. Once I developed my own taste, I was really into At the Drive-in, Mogwai, Soda Stereo, Botch and Cocteau Twins.

Ryan: My first instrument was the drums, and that was because my dad got me into Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and the sort of first wave punk bands when I was in grade school. He showed me The Song Remains The Same and the drum solo sequence was the coolest thing I had ever seen. When I was a little older and first started playing in bands, my friends got me into hardcore and midwest emo. Fugazi and Jawbreaker were the two bands that really, really stuck with me and still inform a lot of my songwriting inclinations. That and the Deftones record White Pony, which I think is kind of a hallmark for all four of us.

CMM: How did the band get together and start crafting your sound?

Julian: In 2015, I was obsessed with shoegaze, Midwest emo, Hum, and the DIY spirit of bands like Have A Nice Life. I decided to try my hand at writing my own music and bought a cheap interface, midi controller and production software and began recording.

While living in Argentina in 2017, I spent a lot of time thinking about what a cohesive music project would sound like. I wrote a 5 song demo which was the first coherent expression of music I was interested in sharing with others. Some of those early demos ended up being the bones to some of our current songs.

When I moved to LA in 2019, I found Trent’s post on Craigslist looking for people to start a shoegaze band. I responded with a link to my SoundCloud and thankfully he liked what he heard and we started jamming.

Trent: I met Julian in December 2019 when he responded to my Craigslist ad looking to start a band. We jammed a bit with another friend of mine that did only harsh vocals, but then COVID happened pretty soon after. That almost ended our relationship before it really began – Julian had a ton of crazy unfortunate life events and we fell out of contact until late 2021. At that point, we started working in a more traditional format with a bassist and a female singer. We recorded a demo under the name Bad Light, and you were actually one of the first people we heard from after we released it. By the time the demo came out, the lineup had turned over and it was just me and Julian again, so we never played any shows. At the time we didn’t really know anybody else who played this kind of music, so we went back on Craigslist in 2023 to put a new lineup together and met Ryan and Nick. We aren’t sponsored by Craigslist or anything, but against all odds it has been an extremely important contributor to the history of this band. This lineup stuck and the four of us have been playing shows and releasing music ever since.

From our earliest days jamming, Julian has had a unique writing and playing style. It’s kind of shreddy and tremolo picked at times, but that’s always accompanied by another part that’s shimmery and pretty. Ryan and Nick have helped us add onto that in a cohesive way, in terms of both writing music and lyrics. Both of them sing, and their vocal ranges complement each other really well. I also have a metal background as a drummer – I’m not doing blast beats or anything, but I think a lot of shoegaze-adjacent bands keep the drums pretty simple and I try to spice things up where I can. All of this combines into the Bad Light sound, which, hopefully sounds both good and a little different.

CMM: I’ve really been enjoying the group’s new record “Mortal Wounds”. What was the writing and recording process for those tracks like? Any particular gear or instruments you all used during the recording sessions that helped inspire the group?

Nick: I think this release is one where each of our creative voices are highlighted more than prior releases. We’ve been working on these songs for a long time as a band, and each one kind of came about in their way starting from ideas old and new.

We began recording with Alex Estrada at Pale Moon Ranch, who captured some incredible drum, bass, and vocal tracks, and then we did our own guitar tracking in my apartment to give ourselves the time to really nail down the tones we were after. We relied heavily on the Line 6 Helix for our amp tones, which meant we could have a huge range of sounds we could recall without needing to set up a whole bunch of gear in a studio, and it made it much easier to experiment with ways to blend dense guitar parts without getting lost. We were thinking a lot about bands like Hum and their approach of quad-tracking guitar parts, which is the approach we took for our rhythm guitar tracks especially. Some of these songs have 8 guitar layers for a single part, so the flexibility of using a modeler made that much more feasible to record.

CMM: If the band could score any film director’s movie who would it be and what would the film be about?

Ryan: Funnily enough, I actually scored a horror movie called Recovery like, 9 years ago. It’s a slasher film set in a remote rehab facility that’s been snowed in and my dear friend John Liang directed it.

That said, our songs tend to be preoccupied with loss and the end of the world…so it would probably be a movie about the end of the world. Wong Kar-Wai has been a bit of a thematic influence (on my lyrics anyway) so he’d be my pick.