• 5 months ago
Punk alt group StrateJacket is finally stepping out and onto stages after forming the band in 2019, right before the breakout of the pandemic. The rock trio, which includes singer-guitarist Jackson Roemers, bassist Fabian Angel, and drummer Nate Mangold, found themselves limited in 2020 where they could play. But now, they are finally stretching their wings with appearances such as at the Welcome To Rockville Music Festival in Daytona Beach, Florida. We sat down virtually with the California Bay Area locals to hear all about their self-titled EP, touring, and what's next for the determined young band.
Transcript
00:00Hi, we're Straitjacket, and you're watching Live Minute TV. Yeah!
00:21It's our first EP and like our first release that has more than one song on it,
00:26and it's gonna have, I think, five in total, and we're really stoked for it. We all like
00:32different kinds of music and all different kinds of genres. I think we tried to incorporate that
00:36in this EP and the next EP that will come out after. We have a lot of influences and it was
00:41always hard for us to separate our sound from other bands because we all have different influences and
00:46whatnot, but alternate rock, punk rock. There's even some folk, some folky stuff in there, maybe
00:52a little new wavy. Ryan House produced it, which was so fun. We spent like a month in Canada and
00:59they put us up on a little house in like a field basically next to a forest. We were out there
01:04for about a month. We spent a week in Vancouver while we laid down the drums and the bed track
01:10for the entire album. Inspiration can kind of strike at any given point in time. When I go
01:17through hardships when I want to write, you know, personally I feel like I try to keep it real,
01:22and then when we all write together, you know, sometimes we'll just jam out and then pick a riff
01:27or someone will come up with an idea. Like the other day, Jack played like these really cool chords
01:31and I was just like noodling around on the bass. Nate was playing drums and it's very much
01:37like a cohesive thing. We kind of like came together, all three of us, during the pandemic. We met Nate
01:43at our very first show I think. Fabian and I were playing in a band before and Nate was in another
01:47band. Our drummer at the time needed to use like one of Nate's like things, like one of his...
01:53It was like a hi-hat clutch or something. So Nate like kind of had to like stick around for our set.
01:58We met there and during the pandemic we decided that we wanted to look for a different drummer
02:03and I remembered Nate from like the show that we played and so I asked him if he was interested in
02:08coming to play some songs with us and then he came to one of our practices and then we
02:13like pretty much just asked to join the band right there. And then we practiced throughout the entire
02:17pandemic not being able to play shows. Once the venue started opening up again we kind of hit the
02:22ground running. We're going to Nebraska in July to play with The Offspring and then October-ish
02:28we're doing Aftershock in Sacramento. We try to like make sure we connect with the crowd too, you
02:33know, like playing our music's pretty cool and all, but I mean at the end of the day we want to make
02:37sure every person feels like they're like 100% welcomed and a part of the band. We've never ever
02:43played shows like the shows that we have set up. We're so used to playing skate parks, small venues,
02:51or places around the bay, you know, because that's where you could play during the pandemic. So to
02:57have the opportunity to go down and play with some some of our heroes this year is very exciting and
03:04we're just really stoked for the year ahead. I hope that
03:08people who like like us and stuff will like join along for the ride and journey.