Following up one of 2023’s very best hardcore albums was never going to be an easy task, but New Jersey’s almighty GEL have taken things to another level on next month’s Persona EP. Ahead of its release, spellbinding singer Sami Kaiser talks growth, finding empowerment in screaming your guts out, and why positivity is always the way…
Until recently, Sami Kaiser had never attended a festival. It’s a case of being short of both time and funds. They’re an expensive do, and what cash Sami has goes on what they deem essentials: “Bills, cigarettes, caffeine, food, weed.”
Over the past two months, though, the GEL vocalist has become something of a festival veteran. When Kerrang! first meets them, it’s at Barcelona’s Primavera, their first-ever European fest appearance, some 3,869 miles from home in New Jersey. On a line-up with more expected peers like Scowl, Mannequin Pussy, Militarie Gun, Deftones, The Armed and Chelsea Wolfe, as much as the weird jetlag of having just touched down on Catalan soil a few hours ago, what really fries the singer’s mind about the whole thing is sharing bill space with Lana Del Rey.
From here, GEL have bounced all over the place, traversing the continent, popping back and forth across the Channel to the UK as their schedule demands – not least for a dynamite show at Download. In Belgium, they played with Judas Priest at Graspop. In France, Foo Fighters at Hellfest. In Switzerland, they performed at “a farm with a crust-punk vibe”, at which other attractions included a zipline, strawberry picking, and Alpine scenery that Sami describes as “some of the most soul-nourishing views and experiences I’ve ever had".
Today, Sami is at bassist Mathew Bobko’s place in Jersey a week after the band – completed by guitarists Anthony Webster and Maddi Nave, and drummer Alex Salter – returned to the States. Ask them about the trip, and the answer remains one of a person who’s found themselves somewhere without quite understanding how.
“Our hardcore band that spawned from a New Jersey basement is all the way out in Spain and Portugal and all these other countries, playing with bands I’ve listened to on the radio since I was in middle school?” they laugh. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
This wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t even much of a dream. It is, however, the wage of being one of the most exciting and important hardcore bands on Earth right now. Last year’s Only Constant album was an electrifying riot, awarded full marks from K! upon release, and showed a band far too special not to do something bigger. In a few weeks, for new label Blue Grape, they’ll release Persona, a raging five-track EP that underlines how hard GEL go, while also shining a light on what else they can do.
“Everyone was trying to branch out beyond the traditional box that we’ve been in,” says Sami. “But not too far out. Now it’s a rhombus!”
Part of Sami’s surprise at how things have panned out recently comes from the nucleus of GEL having already spent the thick end of a decade playing music together. The band actually started as an offshoot of Sick Shit, the crazed New Jersey powerviolence outfit featuring Sami, Anthony and Bobko. In the underground they inhabited, being able to play shows and exist out of a van was pretty much all anyone wanted.
For the singer, the world of punk and hardcore they found in The Garden State, where restaurant basements became spaces for creativity and expression through people collectively making them so, had been something of an end in itself. Their upbringing was, they say, “very conservative”. Other than their mother taking them to see Jamaican dancehall legend Elephant Man at Radio City Music Hall, live music hadn’t been much of a feature in Sami’s youth. It was while living with a friend, aged 18 after things “didn’t end so well at home”, that they went, underage, to see their host’s band play in the basement of a restaurant in Trenton, and something clicked.
“I saw live music on a DIY level for the first time, and I just thought it was so cool,” they remember. “The fact that it was so accessible and my friends were doing it was great. It was so cool to have a means to express in that way, and an outlet.
“It was like a whole other world that I was unfamiliar with. It was awesome, debaucherous, very freaky. I’m so happy I have that as a baseline for my musical experience and life and career. That’s the shit we like: having a good time and it not being hinged on external standards for what makes a successful concert. It’s just people coming together. You don’t know what you're going to get, but there’s going to be something fun.”
“It was awesome, debaucherous, very freaky”
It wasn’t just hardcore and punk (“I’ve seen a lot of noise shows in my life...”). It wasn’t even just music. In all this was a world where art of all kinds could find a pocket in which to exist. As an art student with an interest in all kinds of painting and drawing (albeit one with three credits left to collect to finish their studies), it made this new world even more of a home for Sami.
And happy GEL were to exist within it, doing their thing. They noticed something was up and that their name was getting bigger than expected when they played their first show post-COVID. A friend had a farm out in Rhode Island, on which he hosted an outdoor gig. It was a riot.
“We pull up and there were just so many kids, and, like, people in clown make-up and stuff. It was crazy. I was shocked,” remembers Sami. “I was like, ‘This is unreal. I can’t believe this is happening.’ It felt like zero to 100. There were people swinging from the trees and going crazy, it was such great fun. But it was also where shit clicked. ‘Oh, this is kind of different now. This is not what we were expecting at all.’”
Realising that this wind in their sails might carry them somewhere, GEL gamely embraced it. If it’s happening, it’s happening. It’s not like they changed to get here.
“We thought, ‘Let’s just keep going. Let’s just keep rocking,’” says Sami. “It’s pretty mind-boggling and perspective shifting. That doesn’t change the root of it, which is that we want to explore and have a good time, enjoy life, rock, and put on a great show. It was daunting at first, but we’ve got to embrace and move with it. So that’s where we’re at now. It’s pretty crazy.”
Considering the reasons why this might have happened, and why the kind of raw, heavy music GEL play is enjoying a deserved purple patch, Sami can’t put a finger on one thing. Maybe, they suggest, it’s something about the realness of emotion that such music contains that connects people to it.
“There’s an aggression and emotional vulnerability, which I think in one way or another, all these harder bands tap into. It makes sense to me that a broader audience would connect to something like that, because it is such a natural human expression.”
Such is the case on Persona, a record that boils with aggression, but is also a prism of emotional colour. For Sami, it’s also a release that ponders personal growth and reflection. Inspired by the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose writings on the human personality gave the world the concept of the shadow self – loosely, all the hidden bits in your past, personality and subconscious that aren’t on display to the world, intentionally or not – the songs speak to various elements of one’s persona.
“Everyone’s got the shadow which is specific to their context, their family, their history. [Then there’s] the persona, your outward representation, what you show the external world is based around that,” Sami explains. “All of these factors exist deep within, and a lot of the time people don’t even recognise that as a motivating force. But then things come out as projections through all the other layers of self.”
This school of thought, by its nature, requires you to actually grasp the less great parts of yourself, or the bits you’re not so fond of, in order to properly take stock of who you are. That’s the start, as Sami says, of knowing enough to know what needs attention.
“I think it’s very helpful when you’re trying to work on yourself, because the shadow, I think, shouldn’t be vilified in any way. I think it’s important to address negative tendencies and try to work through it. It kind of coincides with dialectical behavioural therapy, which I have experience of.”
On Persona, these thoughts are organised into songs that Sami hopes will broadly resonate, rather than be too specific. Thus, you have titles – Shame or Vanity, to pick two – that provide context. The singer admits to a level of scattiness and “not being a maths-brain”, to the point where even lyrical notes are spread across separate mediums. “I had a notebook, iPad, cellphone, someone else’s phone, different notebooks, scraps of paper, paper bags…” Most of it isn’t even proper lyrics, just words, like a moodboard, which eventually get pulled together. But when they come together, they build something they hope can be recognised by anyone who feels it.
“I want to project things into the world that can resonate with other people in a productive way, not a judgmental way. And don’t get me wrong, there’s certain lyrics where I am pointing a finger, but a lot of the time I point the finger towards myself. Even if I am saying something nasty, I'll say ‘you’ but I’m talking about me. It’s like a conversation.”
If you want to see this in practice, one might start with the fact that Sami is doing an interview at all. Hard as this might be to square with the funny, talkative, bubbly figure before us today, the singer says they’re naturally a very socially anxious person who’d normally prefer others in the band to take the wheel on such things. “I’m surprising myself even doing this with you right now. I’m bad with interviews. I don’t like hearing myself talk. It makes me cringe.”
As the singer, and therefore the face, of one of heavy music’s rising bands, it sounds like you’re embracing these things as a chance to break out of that, though…
“This has been something I would have been grappling with for a minute. All of my life, I have struggled with social anxiety. I had a very reserved upbringing. I wasn’t allowed the same sort of social comforts [as other kids]. I wasn’t really allowed to have many friends growing up. So, it’s never been something that I felt comfortable with, being an outwardly perceived individual. Even in Sick Shit, I wouldn’t face the audience at all. I would have my back turned the entire time and not even open my eyes.
“One of the reasons why I’m so grateful for what we’re doing is that, by GEL’s growth, I’ve personally been able to push myself outside of those limits, and I feel way more socially comfortable. I still struggle. I barely do any interviews. I don’t like doing interviews because I don’t really like talking about myself. I find talking to other people way more interesting. But it’s something I’ve had to deal with and try to work through.”
Again, if you want to see the themes of Persona in practice, when Sami talks about how they approach band stuff – and touring, particularly touring across Europe in a van, isn’t always a picnic – it’s with a sense of having reflected and recalibrated with a view to problem solving. Because that’s how things get better.
“Instead of letting the anxiety become its own voice, focus on the positives,” they say. “You rewire a little bit, and it just becomes self-fulfilling in a way where that’s where your focus lies. Shit sometimes gets hard. That’s inevitable. Obstacles come. It’s about working through. Conflict is always a means to resolution in the end. Conflict is an inciter of growth a lot of the time. I’m not a quitter. I want to work through whatever comes our way in life and keep it rolling for everyone’s sake, because what’s the point? I don't want to spend energy on negative things. I've done that for years of my life. I don't want to anymore
“This tour especially has been very expansive for me. I felt so connected with those closest to me, but then also meeting people and talking with new people and making friends and seeing old friends. I feel the most present and my best self that I can be like. It’s a constant ebb and flow. I’m surprising myself daily.”
“How I view being in the band is how I work through a lot of things”
GEL’s rise is cause for celebration, and richly deserved. Brilliant as they are, they also, excitingly, feel like a band still getting up to full-pelt. Talking to Sami, it’s very welcome to meet someone for whom all this has been such a positive path of growth and learning. There’s a natural positivity that isn’t the usual hollow BS so often heard online, but of someone loving life, and are aware of how fortunate they are to be doing what they are. And, also, that what they’re doing is real.
“Obstacles and challenges are inevitable. How I view being in the band is how I work through a lot of things. Lyric writing, performing, just the act of screaming your feelings or your words, it can be an empowering experience. I want GEL to stand for a healthy outlet for that, for myself, for other people. I want it to be a means for people to find some solace. Yeah, you can be upset. Yeah, you can be mad. You can feel negative emotions, but channel it in an artful way which is healthy and can lead to such positivity and opportunity. I wish that for everyone, no matter what platform it is, whether that be music or visual art or writing, whatever.”
This is where we come back to the root of GEL – the idea of having a place to go for art, for expression. Doesn’t matter if it’s ‘good’ or not, just go and do you.
“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sound how you want it to sound, or you think it sounds bad at first, you’ve just got to keep trying. I thought I sounded bad for the first few years of being in a band, you know? But you’ve just got to keep trying and find what works for you. And sometimes that’s different to what you’ve heard before, but just embrace the outlet. I want everyone to embrace any sort of creative outlet. I think that’s one of the most positive things you could do.”
On one of GEL’s recent UK stops, in Guildford, Sami recalls meeting a group of young fans who had a band of their own, and were asking for advice. As they say about so many things, hearing their music has made an impact on people in a place so far from the Jersey basements “was mind-melting”, but they’re happy to be part of it.
“I want to keep encouraging that forever”
“Seeing the youth involved or interested in any way, I think is very positive, especially if it’s girls, or non-binary, or trans people or queer people. I always want to encourage that, especially in this genre of music. The kids, the femmes, the queers, the gays, when any of those people speak with me about musical influence, or how they resonate with us, it makes my heart sing. It makes my heart soar. I want to keep encouraging that forever.”
So, are you comfortable with being one of hardcore’s rising stars?
“I don’t consider myself a star by any means,” they laugh. “I don’t want to be a star. I just want to stoke the flames. I want to be something that’s a starter, an insider, but I don’t think that I am the flame itself.”
Again, this isn’t BS. It’s simply what Sami, and GEL, are about. As a vehicle for life and unlocking the adventure and experience it can hold, the band are a very good one. As the band’s name continues to rise, it seems to be something that’s only doing good for their singer, and being paid back into the world.
“I got no ceiling with [what I want to do]. I'm not trying to be like, ‘My life hasn’t been easy,’ but I’ve had some struggles. And I think they’ve only made me stronger and more appreciative of the temperance of life, and how the moment and these experiences should be savoured.”
They smile.
“I just want to leave a positive impact and enjoy. That’s it.”
GEL’s Persona EP is released on August 16 via Blue Grape Music
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