Think of LA and your brain might jump to green juices and sunshine streets, but post-punk rockers Sextile are injecting the landscape with a different kind of raw. In kicking off, Brady Keehn (vocals, guitar) and Melissa Scaduto (vocals, drums) left New York for options more in line with an artistic lifestyle. It’s not a musician’s misanthropy or conceit, instead simply the age-old tale of rent prices increasing, and the cost of living pushing boundaries. The scenario became more stereotypical of a rock ‘n’ roll windfall – but not by any means typical – when Kenny Elkin (bass guitar) and Eddie Wuebben (guitar, keyboard) joined the band, playing their first gig at The Echo before signing with Felte.

Sextile’s debut record, A Thousand Hands, oozes gritty, jugular tones that waver along the peak of the 70s, the underground of the 80s, and the 90s before primal rock became indolent. This throbbing punk sound may be uncommon in LA today, but Sextile are hoping to change that.

Clementine Zawadzki: You named the band after an astrological term, why was that?
Eddie Weubben: We were in a friends backyard reading about astrology, and we were talking about different adjectives to describe the relations to different elements, and one of our friends suggested, “that should be the band name,” when we mentioned Sextile, because it’s a creative, harmonious, ease of expression in astrology, and it pretty much just stuck. We’re all into astrology and occultism and all things weird, and basically with the music and our chemistry, we thought it was very fitting.

CZ: What does it mean to be into occultism and things like that?
EW: We just like learning about that stuff, I mean it’s just fascinating there’s been all of these secret societies of ritual magic, you know it’s really just the interest and learning about it and the fact there are all of these different people practicing things, and it’s hidden. It’s the curiosity of what they’re up to.

CZ: What is each of your star signs?
EW: Well, I’m a Gemini, Brady is a Libra, Kenny is Taurus, and Melissa is a Virgo.

CZ: The live footage I’ve seen of you guys suggests you’re a pretty visual band. Do you always have an idea in mind for how you want to showcase your music on that level?
Melissa Scaduto: I guess I’ll answer that question because I’m the one always harping on about what I want it to look like. I personally think just going in there with the idea of kind of fucking it up, where you don’t really know who you’re seeing at first, because when we come out there’s like a bunch of samples, a shit-tonne of fog, and a couple of lights. I wanted it to be as dark and as spooky as possible, ‘cause it seems kind of awkward to play to a bunch of bright lights with our type of music.

CZ: You seem really involved in every element of your work. How important is it to you to make the music about more than the band?
MS: I think the nature of music that helps shape different subcultures has always been and always will be DIY – that’s the formula that works. If you look at any good group of artists from any period of time, whether it’s from The Velvet Underground to even Sub Pop, that stuff was started with groups of a few people all making music together. You know, with the original LA punk scene, most of these people lived in one apartment building together. Scenes die, and new scenes come up. The Brooklyn music scene was booming in the mid-2000s and then a lot of venues closed, people moved in and bands broke up. I think that change is imperative in order to make something happen. We’re looking for a scene here, I’m constantly saying to people that we’re basically trying to start one.

“The nature of subcultural music has always been and always will be DIY because that’s the formula that works”

CZ: What track is the best introduction to Sextile?
BK: I think we’re all going to have different opinions on that one. And I guess it also depends on the mood of the day. I guess Flesh has got everything we were striving for in one song. It’s got very deep, in your face, marching, militaristic drums, the twangy guitar, the vocals, and just its energy.

MS: I think it depends on the audience too, because our music isn’t necessarily ‘pop’ music. I think the reason Flesh works is because we’re showing them to a certain type of person who likes a certain type of music, so it’s a general representation, however Can’t Take It seems to be the pop song, and seems to have grown on other people quicker.

CZ: You were talking about making a scene, any mates’ bands that we should be listening to?
BK: There’s this band we love and are very good friends with called Terminal A, and they put on an amazing live show. They’re very much in the scene we’re trying to create in LA with other bands we know.

EW: We also have some great friends in Seattle that go by the name SSDD, also known as Steal Shit Do Drugs.

‘A Thousand Hands’ by Sextile is out now on Felte