Artist Profile: Black Beach

For Black Beach, the Boston-based post-punk and noise rock band, their ability to bend the lines between genres (and shift sounds between projects) is only a natural result of the creative chemistry they’ve steadily built since their time spent jamming as teenagers in Massachusetts basements. Their sound, built initially from a vague idea of a “doom-y surf rock”, has taken on a plethora of forms over the years, with their recent project Mail Thief assuming a tighter, more regimented and intentional approach over the soaring guitars and direct lyricism that is their trademark.

It is a sign of their continued creative unison— a lockstep that is audible in every note and tangible across the entirety of Mail Thief’s eight-track run.

For Black Beach’s vocalist and guitarist, Steve Instasi, rock music goes back as far as he can remember. Both of his parents were passionate about various forms of the genre, with his father finding a distinct joy in the blues-guitar musings of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his mother holding hair metal bands such as Poison and Motley Cruë close to her heart. 

Although Instasi’s tastes would later digress from his parents’, falling into the more intense menageries of post-punk and hardcore music, that development was something that, in a way, was prefigured in his childhood.

“I have a very wide range of interests now, but growing up, whatever radio hits were going on at the time on rock stations, an artist would kind of have their ballad or softer song and then they'd have their kind of a heavier one. I always leaned  towards the heavier one. I don't know why– maybe it's just so ingrained [from] early childhood or something– but it's definitely something I gravitate towards.”

From the time his hands could hold a child-sized guitar, Instasi was playing and experimenting with the instrument. As he got older, and replaced the guitar with a regular-sized one, he began to actually refine his knowledge– going on the complete tour of barre and open chords, hammer-ons, solos and pentatonic scales, and every foundational aspect of guitar-playing at a blazing pace. He had a strong desire to learn that stemmed from a hunger to play— to emulate the artists he had grown up loving.

At around the age of 12, he began practicing and jamming with a neighbor and friend of his who had a drum kit in his basement. They quickly enlisted another friend, Ben Semeta, as their bassist. Throughout their teens, that trio formed the core of a number of different bands, helping Istasa and Semeta earn their performing chops on the local circuit.

When that band broke up, they enlisted another childhood friend, Ryan Nicholson, as their new drummer. Although Ryan was not a drummer at the time, Instasi knew that a friend had left their drum kit in his basement and that he had been messing around with the instrument in his spare time. That was enough.

It began as a hardcore band, but, when their original singer left and Istasi and Semeta took over vocal duties, the project took its final form as Black Beach, announcing its arrival with the release of their first, four-track EP, which was quickly followed by the release of their first full-length— Shallow Creatures.

Recorded in a single day with studio time provided by Converse’s “Rubber Tracks” program, Shallow Creatures is a blistering affair, leaning into a fuzzed-out punk zeitgeist with the earnestness of a band who, despite their extensive time together, was just truly getting started. 

“We just did… a lot of first takes on [Shallow Creatures], so I'm really proud of the instrumentation. I think Ryan really became a drummer at that time, and Ben became a bassist. We're all guitarists, honestly,… so I think they kind of figured out what they wanted to do on their instruments and just crushed it.”

While their first full-length was heavily inspired by their shared love of The Stooges, the distance between that and their second project, Tapeworm, left ample space for new collective influences to creep in. When the trio spends time together outside of their rehearsal space, they’re often listening to all sorts of music. Whatever music is played during that time, and whatever the group as a whole is getting into, often has a direct influence on the sound of whatever project they’re working on.

Tapeworm, therefore, takes on more of the space-filling, suffocating aspects of noise rock– it is more brash and infinitely more unyielding than its predecessor.

“I think there is kind of a common theme usually in our history where we all get into a band at the same time together. and that usually informs a bit of what we do in the studio. So Shallow Creatures was definitely, we all just fell in love with the Stooges together. We were listening to Fun House a lot… [With] Tapeworm, I just tried to start writing differently, not really consciously, aside from the tone aspect of it. But I think we're listening to more like The Jesus Lizard, stuff like that together— just kind of that touch-and-go, eighties, nineties, noise- rock thing… It's kind of different every time.”

The foundations of Mail Thief, however, were written in isolation. The band didn’t practice or rehearse for several months during the Pandemic, and during that time, Instasi felt inspired to explore a set of sounds that had intrigued him since the time they were recording Shallow Creatures: some of the odder, more esoteric dimensions of post-punk. 

“During that time, I started writing more stuff, kind of [inspired by] bands I'd always liked since Shallow Creatures, but I didn't think  we could write like that… I was like, ‘OK, I'm just going to do this.’”

When he came to Semeta and Nicholson with a new series of riffs and lyrics, they adapted immediately to the fresh demands that were placed upon them by the band’s tweak in sonic direction. The result is enamoring. From the deeply disorienting swings of “Dream Shake” to the coiled, embittered emotion of tracks like “Parking Garage” and the title track, “Mail Thief”, the project is as strange and out-there as it is deeply appealing to the open-minded listener.

As Black Beach has undergone another creative shift, it is a testament to their connectedness, and the time and energy they’ve spent together dating back to their adolescence, that their recognizable energy and sonic bent has stayed intact. As different as Mail Thief is from their previous works, it is inescapably Black Beach in its foundations— a triumph of the band’s ongoing explorations and continued desire to expand their sound into new territories.