These Arms Are Snakes on New Home

For more than five years, Seattle natives These Arms are Snakes have been packing basements and big name venues alike with their genre-defying brand of sweat-drenched post-hardcore spazz rock. This past week, Suicide Squeeze, a label most recently well-known for its support of Northwest heroes Minus The Bear, announced it had signed the band and would be releasing their new full-length in October. Sound caught up with vocalist Steve Snere yesterday to talk a little about the new label and the new record that the band starts recording today.

SEATTLE SOUND: You guys are going into the studio tomorrow, are you nervous?
STEVE SNERE: Well I’m always a little bit nervous because I want it to all go pretty smoothly and come out well, but mainly I’m just so excited because it’s been so long since we’ve gone to record a proper full-length. So, I’m just excited to present a fresh new idea of what our band is with all these songs we’ve been working on for-like-fucking-ever, just trying to get that out there. So I’m more excited than anything I suppose.

SOUND: Obviously it must help having your drummer [Chris Common] recording the album.
SNERE: Yeah, yeah, it totally does. It kind of frees everything up and he has an insider’s perspective of what we want. It can be a bit more democratic that way because he’s going to do it and produce it, but we’re involved and because he’s our drummer we can say no. It’s totally cool.

SOUND: Has your voice ever gone out from screaming so much while you’re in the studio? How do you prevent that from happening?
SNERE: Knock on wood. Every time we’ve recorded it’s been a couple days before that I end up getting sick. On our first EP, the first thing we put out, I couldn’t speak, it just couldn’t happen. We recorded with Matt Bayles at the time. So we had to actually push the release date back because I just lost my voice. It must be nerves or something because we’ll go on a tour for months and that never happens, but I guess you can hear it a lot more when you’re recording and everything’s being paid attention to with how your voice sounds. It might be nerves, I don’t know. I’m just hoping it doesn’t happen. I’m just going to try and pace it a little bit more and maybe just do some vocals then have the guys do guitar for a couple days then go back to do some more vocals to try and not wear it out. So yeah, that does happen and I hope it doesn’t happen this time.

SOUND: It was recently announced that the band was signed to Suicide Squeeze. You went from an East Coast label, Jade Tree, to Suicide Squeeze, a label that has always had a strong Northwest focus. Did this have any influence on signing with the label?
SNERE: Yeah, I think it definitely did. We talked to (Suicide Squeeze owner David Dickenson) before we signed with Jade Tree and he had just started working with Minus The Bear so he didn’t really have the means to do both projects and do the best with what he had at the time. Now that the label’s grown, it’s kind of perfect. Having a local label is definitely a strong point, because if we need anything he’s just here and it’s so much more convenient than having to deal with the East Coast, where Jade Tree is from. It’s all here and it’s nice to be a part of the Northwest scene a bit more and establishing that. I think it had a lot to do with it, for sure. It’s nice to be on a label that cares about the band. By the end of the Jade Tree thing, it was just like those guys didn’t give a shit anymore. They don’t even have any bands on their label. It’s just nice to be with people who care.

SOUND: Do you think Suicide Squeeze will be a breath of fresh air for the band?
SNERE: Oh yeah. Without a doubt. Everything was feeling pretty stagnant there for a good five months it felt like. So we were just trying to focus on writing and not worrying about touring. We needed something to bring a new life into our group. Things were getting a little dismal for a moment there and this just sparked everything and our creativity is back. Having somebody behind you that’s just like “Dude you guys are awesome, go do it,” is great. It’s nice to hear someone give some encouragement sometimes. I think it’s going to be a great little marriage.

PHOTO: These Arms Are Snakes, courtesy of TAASSpace