Interview: Weak Signal, best band in NYC contenders
it turns out this rock'n'roll thing is pretty serious after all
I first saw Weak Signal play in 2018, at Wonders of Nature, a DIY spot in Williamsburg that lasted for a single summer or so, remembered fondly by those who remember. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in June. Fast forward a few years and we’re on tour, dancing at a cleared-out bar after a gig in Cleveland, or jamming together at a former movie theater in Lancaster, where all nine of us packed onto a single stage to play for an audience of about three people. They’re good friends of mine now, but I didn’t know them then.
First impressions— Simple songs, with three or four compact chords. A guitar that sounds like a punk kid’s dream of a guitar: roaring, throaty, breaking up at the edges. But controlled, not feral, doing only what the guy wants it to do. For such a big, rich sound, the amp is impossibly tiny, like a joke. The rhythm section: all business. Bass mostly sticking to the root, snare on two and four or not at all, eighth notes on floor tom or closed hi-hat, other cymbals reserved for emergency use only. The two up front sing together often, and you can tell they’re in love. Sometimes the words get lost in the churn, but the ones you can make out are direct, archetypal, not fucking around: home, sorrow, lying, baby, no face, no case. They look like fashion models, or petty criminals. They are the coolest band I’ve seen in a long time.
—then something else happens, at the end of a song called “Miami.” Sasha sets down her bass and picks up a violin, bows long notes that accumulate gradually through a loop pedal into a shimmering chord. Tran exchanges her sticks for mallets and abandons her strict tempo, playing now with the rhythm of waves on the shore. Mike, it turns out, can do a lot more than play power chords. He begins improvising, first with brief fragments of melody, little sculptures unto themselves, then with long unbroken streams. I’m in a heavy Alice Coltrane phase in 2018, and that’s what it reminds me of first. It’s like religious music, like a window to some other place has opened in the middle of their set.
Eventually, the section ends, and it’s back to the first thing. Rock’n’roll, doomed lovers, sunglasses at night. But the window stays open. The sustain of every chord, from that point forward, suggests the possibility of that other place. I’m not bullshitting.
Weak Signal—Tran Huynh, Sasha Vine, Mike Bones—for me, are one of the best bands in New York, if not the world. I think a lot of people in our little scene feel the same way. They’ve gotten recognition since then, and some opening slots for artists you probably know: Pavement, Dry Cleaning, Cass McCombs, who used to employ Mike as a lead guitarist in his band, and with whom Weak Signal collaborated on a recent EP. Iggy Pop is a fan.
But I haven’t seen anything written about them that really captures their special thing, so here I am attempting it myself. A few quick and lazy comparisons to further interest the uninitiated: Leonard Cohen fronting the Velvet Underground. The Jesus and Mary Chain if they loved Albert Ayler as much as they did the Ronettes. Yo La Tengo, if Yo La Tengo gave you the vague sense that they might mug you with a butterfly knife after the show. Their new album, WAR&WAR, came out recently on 12XU. Consider giving them some money in exchange for a copy. They won’t really mug you. They’re very sweet.
A few weeks ago I dropped in on them at their practice space, in the basement of a pawn shop on the Lower East Side, crammed with books and art and instruments, a philosopher’s idea of a fallout bunker. I’m a tall guy, and I had to just about crawl my way down the stairs. From there, we walked a few blocks to a neighborhood bar to conduct an informal interview, which you’ll find below.
You guys all have broad, expansive taste in music, and the sound of Weak Signal is a pretty focused thing, it seems to me. How did you arrive at what this band was going to do, and was that a premeditated idea—
Sasha: Not at all.
— or was it something that evolved through playing together?
Sasha: Well, they’re Mike’s songs, and he came to practice with them, and then whatever happened after that was very natural in the way it came together. It wasn’t discussed or thought about.
Mike: We had to figure out how the three of us play together.
Tran: He was playing his music with another band, too, and I was kind of pissed.
Mike: I was playing with these other people: Brad Truax, Marc Razo, Miggy. I was trying these songs with both bands, both bands were starting up at the same time, and they just kept sounding better with Sasha and Tran. More focused, or something. More direct.
Sasha: But also a bit more loose.
Mike: Marc, Miggy, Brad, they’re ringers. They’re major league.
Sasha: It sounded like your songs with session musicians, or something.
Mike: Yeah. And this immediately felt like, “Are we even going to make it through this song?” We kept them short because it was dangerous to put a bridge in. It would all fall apart.
Sasha: Me and Tran could barely play. For the first few years, we were just trying to figure out how to play the songs. Getting through a song was an achievement. We had to really simplify everything, and I think that made it special. It’s no frills.
Now, it feels like you could put frills on the songs if you wanted to. Is there any sort of feeling of, we had this special quality when we started, which we should now try to stay faithful to?
Sasha: We can still barely get through a song. Me and Tran are both working on our little frills. It’s a minimal amount of frills. You might hear a drum roll on the next record. Keep an ear out.
Mike: It still takes us a long time, with new songs, to play them well, or find a way to play them that works.
Tran: Also, there are mad new songs all the time. You have to keep learning them.
Mike: With new songs, you’re both pretty merciless with what songs are good, what you want to play and what you don’t.
Sasha: We have opinions.
You could hear one Weak Signal song and not necessarily know that there’s this whole improvised part of what you guys do. And then a set will suddenly open up into this other thing that’s very different from what you were just doing, but somehow still makes sense as part of the same band. How do you know when a song might lend itself to opening in that way?
Tran: Well, I think every song could be opened up.
Mike: I do, too. I don’t know why we decide to do what we do. I always think that the free part is like a symbol of all music: a music world, where all music exists all the time. And that the songs are like little—
—distillations of that?
Mike: Or, like, failures. Failures to play all music, you know? So you have to pick a piece of it. It’s like the free part is what the songs come out of. It’s like the unconscious.
Sasha: It just sort of happens in practice, the free parts. It’s a very spontaneous thing.
Mike: There’s a harmonic sense that’s like, oh, this would be fun to fuck around with.
Tran: I can barely keep a beat, so the improv is the easy part. I want to push to it. If we’re doing a free part, then I’m good.
Mike, I remember talking to you once after you were coming off of Endless Boogie tour [Mike plays bass in EB–ed.], and you were like, “Well, the first few shows, we were still figuring stuff out, but by week two, we were playing music.” I always thought that was funny. I immediately knew what you meant, but I had never put it in those binary terms: this is either music or it isn’t. I get the sense that you guys all take music very seriously, and there is maybe even this spiritual dimension to what you are doing, if you want to call it that. Is there a certain something that you’re searching for when you’re improvising together, and if so could you talk about what that thing is?
Tran: I’m just there for the party.
Sasha: It feels like a meditative thing. I’m not trying to reach new highs or anything, it’s just about listening to what’s around you and getting into some kind of a zone. It always feels like a break, for me, the freer sections, to not worry about what you’re playing so much. I’m almost trying not to think about it. And it’s a nice relief to not think about, oh, what note? You’re just taking it where it goes. But it’s probably different for you, Mike. You’re trying to reach new highs of shredding.
Mike: No, no, not at all.
I guess I’m asking more about what you’re talking about, Sasha. Not like, oh I just did this sick shredding that I didn’t do before—
Mike: You could be playing music and also doing all sorts of other things besides playing music. You’re showing people something, you’re performing. Performing is part of it, but it’s not making music. We know when we’re making music and when we’re not. And in those improv sections, that’s all I’m concerned about. Making music, not showing off, not trying to figure out new zones that I can get to, new harmonic things that I can do. I just want to get something truthful, something real, across. I don’t want to lie to people. I don’t want to fake it.
Sasha: You always taught me that the most important thing about improvising is just listening. It’s such an obvious thing, but so many people don’t do that. Give room, give space, and just listen to what other people are playing—taking the ego out of it and making music together.
Tran: You can’t do improv if you don’t like each other, that’s for sure.
Obviously, this is not a very financially remunerative thing to be doing, being in a rock band, especially now. Why do you do it?
Tran: Well, I drink way cheaper. You hang out with your friends, you entertain people, you drink, and you have fun.
Mike: I think it’s probably good to have one totally irrational thing that you just commit to doing. I don’t know why I do it. I just always have. I’m just a musician. There is a bit of a middle finger thing, to me, to just keep doing it. Because it is so stupid. We always say: It’s fucking silly. It’s really silly, being a band, especially an American band. It’s the silliest fucking thing.
Sasha: It can be very humiliating, being in a band now. You make such little money.
Mike: But I also think that it’s very high-stakes. It’s silly, but also—
Sasha: It’s silly, but it’s really not. It’s also the realest thing you could do, too.
Mike: It’s very real. That’s what I mean.
That question has been on my mind recently because I feel like I’ve sacrificed a certain stability in my life in order to play more music. And sometimes I’m like, why did I do that? On the other hand, it’s very obvious that I had to. But getting to the root of that “I had to” can sometimes be a very difficult question for me. Sometimes it just feels like a leap of faith. It’s like, well, it just feels like this is the thing I should be doing.
Mike: I know I’m really unhappy if music doesn’t occupy an outsized part of my life. And in addition to doing something totally irrational, sacrificing to something totally irrational is even more silly. It’s just piling silliness on top of silliness.
But on the other hand, as you say, it’s not silly. It’s completely profound.
Mike: Yeah, it’s really not. Because you see what happens to certain people because of music. It’s fucking wild.
Sasha: My mom really nailed it into me that music is a very important thing to have in your life. She thinks it’s silly that I have a real job. It’s not silly, because I need to put a roof over my head. And the flip side is that I’m also happy for music to not take over my life, too. I’m fine to work a day job. The thought of just being on tour all of the time and making not that much money, I don’t know how appealing that is either.
Mike, that makes me think of something that you did on Twitter and I thought was admirable, which was to say, “If you’re a booking agent and you want to offer us $200 a show for a tour, don’t even send the email.” You guys seem to have a certain sense of the worth of what you’re doing and an unwillingness to accept less. A lot of us musicians are willing to debase ourselves to some degree in order to be successful, and you guys don’t have that. Where do you think that resolve comes from?
Mike: [long laughter] Tran.
Tran: Well, we all have jobs.
Mike: Yeah, but I had so little confidence at the beginning of this band, and you had so much. From the jump, you were like, “We’re dope.”
Tran: It’s just because I’m not a musician. I don’t have that stress or that chip on my shoulder.
But you are a musician.
Tran: I can play a beat throughout a song, but I’m not like Bones. I take it kind of lightly, so I don’t think there’s anything that worries me at all about the band, other than have fun and play some cool music.
Mike: But we do know what we’re worth. I know that we’re really good.
Sasha: I just don’t want it to turn into a grind in the same way that work can be a grind. I don’t want to get paid shit and have to be on the road all the time. Sure, if we got offered loads of money to go tour in Europe, fine. We’ve done a couple of tours like that, where the guarantees weren’t that great, but it was with a good band, and it was like, OK, we’ll do it. And it was fine and fun, but I don’t want to be doing that all the time.
Mike: It’s dangerous to professionalize the thing that you love in life, at least for me. There should always be an amateurish quality to it. Professionalism in music, I don’t like it. We go on tour with these bands, and there’s guys with headsets and shit, walkie talkies, and there’s all this stuff going on backstage, and it’s just like—I don’t know.
Sasha: But it has to be like that, at that level.
Mike: Sure. But there’s all this stuff in the way of playing music. I imagine it must be a hard environment to really make music in.
Say that there was a genie that popped out of this Pellegrino bottle and was like, you could have a level of success where you wouldn’t have to bartend, you wouldn’t have to do your day job, and music could be the thing that you’re focused on, but it’s going to happen at this level where there are guys with walkie talkies at your shows, and you’re going to have to do press stuff that you don’t really want to do. This level of professionalism is going to creep in. Would you take that, or stay on the path that you’re on now?
Tran: How much would we get paid? Give me a number!
Let’s say you make the same money that you make now.
Tran: No. It would have to be way more. Way more. I would do anything for the right price. That’s my final answer.
Sasha: 200k a year, for Tran.
Tran: That’s not a rock star price. I need more.
Sasha: If it’s just like, OK, snap and you’re getting that level of money, I would do it. There would be a lot of things that were cool about it, and there would be a lot of shit that sucks. We always fantasize about what it is to get on top. And it’s always amazing. But the reality of what it means to be up there is just as grueling as anything else. I would do it. but the situation you’re talking about with a band, I just don’t think there’s usually much longevity in it. So do it for a year, or whatever, and then go back.
Mike: Longevity, with this band—I always think about setting it up in a way that you can do it for a long time. I always idolize a band like Dead Moon, or Sun City Girls. I saw Antietam at work the other day. They’ve been a band for 40 years. That’s really admirable to me. And I think that kind of longevity tunes you into something. The music gets deeper. Making the music gets very far out. I don’t know how to say it.
Do you see the music changing over time? Even in the short term, are there things that you’re aiming for?
Tran: I’d like one or two drum fills on each record. That’s success.
Mike: Incrementally, one more fill per record.
Sasha: I don’t think you can ever predict what it’s going to manifest into. With this band, there’s certainly no sitting down, like, OK, let’s get our notes about what we’re going to do next. It will just be what it’s going to be, and it will either change or not change. I guess it’s always going to change a little bit. I don’t know if it will progressively change.
Mike: The music we make is like the only music we can make. We can’t make anything else.
Sasha: It would be fun to do one dance song.
Mike: With Weak Signal music, there’s always been a dance music thing, a repetitive, four-on-the-floor kind of thing. We joke about a techno record.
Sasha: It would be nice to play one show, one time, where everybody’s dancing.
Tran: I just want to program a drum machine, push a button, and go and get a drink.
Mike, do you feel like there are recurring themes that you’re trying to get at in the lyrics? And have they changed over time?
Mike: No, it’s the same shit, always.
And what’s the shit?
Mike: Let’s see. Drugs, sure… what else?
Tran: Craziness, drugs…
Sasha: Psychosis.
Mike: Yeah, the edge between psychosis and deep spirituality.
William Blake sort of stuff.
Mike: Of course. William Blake, or some maniac on the subway. Extremity, in whichever direction, as long as it’s…
Tran: He works at Union Pool, so he suffers a lot as a bartender. There’s a lot of suffering. That’s a strong theme throughout.
Mike: There’s always God shit.
Sasha: Love.
Mike: Yeah, love and God. Love is the big thing.
Mike gathers all of the bottles and glasses on the table into the center.
Mike: All the songs are like, all of this stuff, and love is the…
He gestures to make an invisible outline around the bottles and glasses.
Do you guys see there being a relationship between the thematic material of the writing and the way that it comes out as music?
Mike: I do a little bit, in the intensity, the directness of the music, the no-frills-ness, the immediacy of it. Let’s get this shit out now, kind of thing.
Tran: You’re inspired by trap music a lot, right?
Mike: Oh, sure. Always. I take a lot of words and ideas from trap shit. I love that stuff.
Sasha: “Bitch, I’m Your Baby.”
Tran: Short songs, simple lyrics…
Mike: The way we make records—that’s something I really like about trap music shit, is like, you can tell, lyrically or whatever, that they recorded it last week. They reference something that just happened. In our indie world, there’s something more like, “Here’s my masterpiece album. I went to the cabin in the woods.”
Tran: They marinate it for years and years.
Do you guys always just put it on Bandcamp and go, OK we’ll find a label later? That’s the way all three albums have worked, right?
Mike: Yeah, but I don’t ever want to do it like that again. It’s just circumstance. First record, no one knew who we were, and people heard it that way, like it was a demo, and that’s cool. BIANCA, COVID happened when we were finishing it up. OK, put it on Bandcamp. And then COVID was still happening when we finished up WAR&WAR. I don’t want to do it like that anymore.
Sasha: Hopefully this next one won’t be that way.
Mike: Professional.
Sasha: We’re trying to be a little professional. Not too professional.
awesome interview!
Good to read a bit about this band I've just discovered and will be playing a cut or two on my WPKN radio show Thursday 3/20/2025