Today I'm talking with the French underground musician Chloe Grace Rose, who is also behind the queer musicians record label Dead Moon Records.
How long have you been doing music? What got you started?
Well, at this point I've been playing for about twelve years I'd say, I got my first guitar on christmas 2006 and quickly started making my own music, I recorded some solo stuff back in 2007 then a childhood friend joined on bass (which I actually taught him how to play) and my first band was born.
How do you describe your sound, and who or what are your biggest influences in your music?
That's a pretty difficult question honestly since I've got a few projects going on, when it comes to Crawl it's definitely influenced by 90s Swedish death metal bands like Entombed, my solo (Chloe Grace Rose) stuff is influenced by sludge bands like EyeHateGod and grindcore like Pig Destroyer along with some emo bands on the lyrical side, as for my folk music, it used to be heavily influenced by early Against Me! but has taken more of a turn towards The Mountain Goats in terms of style. Overall I'd say The Mountain Goats are probably one of my biggest influences accross all projects, John Darnielle is an incredible songwriter and lyricist.
What's the music scene like in your part of the world?
It's mostly teenagers playing Nirvana and pop punk covers in this region, it's pretty hard to find musicians for anything, I've tried a few times, it seems like nobody even knows what folk punk is aside from one band that were opening at a show where I played once. Other than music, what are some things that you really get into?
I am really HUGE into music but other than that and the whole label stuff I guess I usually like to unwind by playing video games, reading has become pretty difficult these days and I've got a huge backlog, mostly dystopian fiction because let's be honest we already live there.
Tell me about Dead Moon Records. What's the story with that?
Originally, I burned a few CDs of my first band Dead Moon Rising and figured it would make a cool label name (yeah real original right there), ten years later I thought to myself, well I know all these queer artists who don't have any label or promotion, and I'm a queer artist, so maybe I should just start a label to increase their exposure, because I believe minorities need representation, and a lot of people were on board, I didn't plan to be specific to one genre but it turns out almost everyone is a folk punk artist. It's a lot of work to try to keep everything balanced, upload new artists, keep the hype up, I'm really bad at this one actually. I got asked about physical releases, that's an extra cost to take into account since I'm not taking any cut from Bandcamp and only 10% off Spotify, but I think we might try. Who are some artists on that label people should be keeping their eye on? Any expected new releases?
Quitter Talk and Queen Deer are both recording new albums, Foxmud just released her debut, and I think Sama intends to re-record some of her material. We may have a couple of new artists coming soon too. What about upcoming projects of yours that you want people to look forward to?
Right now I'm working on a stripped-down, lo-fi acoustic tribute to The Mountain Goats, it'll be free, so there's that, it'll be followed by some original material later, I've also got a solo album that's mostly written since April but on hold at the moment and some other projects on the backburner that I'm not ready to announce just yet. I try to focus on one thing at a time right now.
Go check out the music now!
