Interview: Peter Helmis of Algernon Cadwallader
I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Algernon Cadwallader’s bassist/vocalist Peter Helmis to talk about the band’s reunion, influences, new record, and the odd government atrocity. Read more below!
RT: I always start out by asking, how did you get into this kind of music? What was your gateway into this niche of the music world?
Peter: Growing up outside of Philly and right outside New Jersey, I feel like the music that we were seeing a lot of bands play was a lot of pop punk and a lot of hardcore and metalcore, so when three fourths of us started our first band together in high school called Halfway to Holland, it was a sort of mix of all of the bands that we were hearing. It’s like Jersey pop punk meets hardcore and it’s got chugging and stuff like that. Slowly other influences started creeping in on top after finding stuff like Piebald. That became more important with the direction that the vocals were going and stuff. Then I remember one incident that really changed our whole trajectory was getting a mixtape from Anthony Green, who was in a local band called Audience of One and now plays with Circa Survive and a bunch of other bands, and the tape had Cap’n Jazz on one side and Braid on the other side. It was our first time hearing both of those bands. This was probably like… late ‘98 or early ‘99 or something like that. We all shared this tape with each other and were listening to this tape side after side, back and forth, and we were like “This is fucking crazy.” It just blew our minds. We didn’t even think about starting to play stuff like that though. It just seemed so impossible, which I think was part of the draw. We were just like “How are they doing this?”
RT: I get kind of the same thing when I listen to Algernon! I always wonder “How do they write this stuff?” I would just never think to put notes and riffs together the way you do. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’m glad it’s coming from somewhere.
Peter: That’s one of the best things about being a fucking music nerd! You hear stuff that blows your mind and it’s like a paradigm shift. And it takes a while to process that kind of stuff, you know? Anyway, Halfway to Holland dissolved as people went off to college and stuff like that. We kept it going for a while and we had a whole record worth of songs that we were trying to record. We were coming home on weekends to work on it, but the recording got totally botched and things just got a lot harder to keep it going, so we just kind of called it quits on that band. Plus we all had other projects going. About a year later, Joe (Reinhart) and Colin (Mahoney) ran into Nick (Tazza) at a party and talked about jamming sometime and wanted to do something fresh and new. That was the first time Joe and Colin started messing with different tunings, as far as I’m aware, but I think they got together to jam in the American Football tuning.
RT: Good ol’ FACGCE
Image via Pitchfork
Peter: They did it while I was away on tour, but we had one jam with another drummer, Matt, where me, Joe, and Colin were all back together again. I went on tour for two months, got back, and they had been hanging out with Tazza and had started writing some riffs. They came to me and showed me the stuff and it was super pretty — these are mostly the songs that are on our demo — but they were playing them with no bass. It was just the twinkly guitars and the drums, so everything was pretty mild. I got in there with the bass and things started picking up a little more, rocking a little harder, and then when it came time to add vocals, I didn’t really know exactly what I was going for, but we knew we wanted to make it different than what the music sounded like already. That’s when I started pushing the vocals a little harder. We had listened to the kind of music we were making for a while, but once we started getting together to actually play it, I don’t think any of us really knew how it was going to work. We were all figuring it out as we went, which is cool because I think it kept us from pushing it in any hard direction. We weren’t trying to sound exactly like this or that. If anything it was the opposite — we’d say “Now that we’ve got a little bit of this, let’s do a little bit of that.” We definitely wanted to stretch it out in terms of influence.
RT: Do you have a term that you use to describe your music genre-wise? Is there one that you do or don’t prefer?
Peter: That’s always been the hardest thing! I’m down for whatever people want to call it.
RT: So the term “Midwest emo” doesn’t bother you, given that you’re from Pennsylvania?
Peter: It doesn’t bother me at all. Nothing quite seems right to describe it though. I almost want to go a little more broad and call it post-hardcore, you know?
RT: Interesting!
Peter: Post-hardcore based on our influences though not necessarily the end product.
RT: When I explain it to people I usually say “It’s kind of Midwest emo, it’s kind of punky, it’s kind of indie, you just kind of have to hear it.”
Peter: That’s what I always say to people too.
Image via highergroundmusic.com
RT: So what drew you to the bass? Do you play guitar as well? Did you start with bass?
Peter: I didn’t start there, no. I’ve played guitar since I was around 13. I was on guitar in Halfway to Holland. The first band that asked me to play bass was Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer. I told them I don’t play bass and they were like “Nah, you’ve got it,” and I realized it was pretty simple. I had hardly even picked up a bass before that point, but it gave me a reason to really think about and get into the instrument. I loved seeing how it was different from playing guitar and how it serves to ground the song. Before I started playing bass — and I wonder how many people have this perception — felt like it’s kind of a lesser instrument and doesn’t do as much, but once you start playing the bass and hearing it, you realize that half the song wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for bass.
RT: Right. Anyone who thinks that bass is boring needs to listen to those early Black Sabbath albums. Geezer Butler is just killing it at any given moment. Klaus Fluoride from Dead Kennedys is a fantastic bassist and he does absolute work on those songs.
Peter: Yeah, for real! And my thing that I really caught onto that got me to love the bass, especially when playing with Joe and Colin, was learning that I could take a chord that they’re playing and then add a 7th or something and totally change it up.
RT: “You thought I was going to play a root or a 5th, but no sir!”
Peter: That to me is my favorite part of — creating thickness in the melodies.
RT: You get a really good growl out of the P-bass too. I mean, that’s kind of what they’re known for, but yours is especially good.
Peter: It’s the P-bass combined with my Peavey setup. I love my Peavey. It’s a Mark III head into a 2×15 cab.
RT: Every time I’m at a show and wonder why my butt is rumbling, the answer is always either a Peavey or an Ampeg. They’re some of my favorite bass amps. I’ve always been curious, what was the impetus for the reunion of Algernon Cadwallader? And when you were getting back together was it decided ahead of time if you were just doing a ten year reunion tour or if you were getting back together back together?
Image via The Alternative
Peter: It definitely started as just a tour. I remember it was well into the pandemic and I was living out of my van at the time and traveling up and down the West Coast. I was in LA parked at a beach and my buddy Curtis from Richmond, who does Rorschach Records and is in Roman Holiday. He called us to see if we wanted to play The Fest in 2022. And people have been asking since the day we broke up when we were going to do a reunion. “How about this? How about that?” and to me it always felt way too soon, you know? Like, bands shouldn’t reunite after a year or two. Why would you even break up in the first place?
RT: Right, that’s hardly even a hiatus.
Peter: Exactly. In my head I would always say that it’d be at least ten years before we did anything. People would ask all the time and I would tell them “Yeah, that’d be cool, but we’ve all got other stuff going on.” Curtis laid it on real thick and wouldn’t let me say no, so I told him I’d think about it. As I thought about it though, I realized it had actually been exactly ten years. Like I said, we were well into the pandemic, so that put a lot into perspective. Who knows how long any of us could be here, so if it is something we’re interested in doing, now might be a good time. Then in talking to everybody, interest came pretty quickly. People were stoked for it, but we didn’t want to spend all this time getting together and practicing —we all live on opposite sides of the country — for just one show, so we said we’d do a tour. Within a week or two of Curtis calling me, the ball was rolling and we were booking a tour. We didn’t announce anything to anybody — we hadn’t even gotten together to play yet — but we had all been playing in bands the whole time, so we felt pretty sure that we’d be able to get back together and do it. Then we booked the tour, announced the tour, and still had not played together yet, so we were like “Man, it’s going to be really funny if we suck!” Luckily, way more than I ever expected, getting together and playing for the first time, we almost fell right into it. Like, it felt like the most natural thing I’ve ever done, you know? I think we were all kind of blown away about how in our bones all of this music was. All of us playing in the same room, all of us playing in that style, which some of us have sort of evolved out of while playing in our other projects — broadened our musical tastes or whatever — but there was something about it that was so enjoyable and just felt so right. We were super stoked about that. The tour was a huge success. Tons of people came out. Way more than we could have imagined. There was a whole new younger audience that we didn’t even know knew about our band. It was nuts. Then by the end of the tour, we were pretty set on doing more stuff. To us the natural thing seemed to be taking it further — taking it to Europe and Japan. So we did those things the following year, 2023, during which we had more time to think about it. We said “OK, we’re all enjoying this, but we don’t want to be a reunion cover band of ourselves. We don’t want to only play songs from 15-20 years ago. If we want to keep doing it, we should definitely write new music.” We got started in 2023 as we were getting together to rehearse for the tours and festivals we had coming up. Just as easily as the old songs came back, the new songs were flowing right out. It was totally unbelievable to all of us. We were all stoked at the sound of it, too. It all sounded really organic and not forced. If you ask me, it was what we would have sounded like if we had never broken up. If we had been playing together the whole time and evolved, maybe we’d have done a couple records in between Parrot Flies and the new one, but I bet Trying Not to Have a Thought would sound exactly like it ended up sounding.
RT: That’s actually really similar to how I felt the first time I heard Trying Not to Have a Thought. It doesn’t feel like a band going back and trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. It feels different, but it also 100% still feels like an Algernon Cadwallader album.
Peter: Yeah, all the noticeable personalities are still in there, but they’re doing some slightly different stuff.
RT: Like you said, I feel like the sound has grown and matured. I think it’s also probably fair to say that you guys bring some elements of the bands you’ve been in since Algernon into the new record, whether intentionally or unintentionally, so it was really fun to hear it all these years after Parrot Flies and be able to see what you’ve grown into, and I love it. I think it’s really cool. Was it a conscious choice for the new album to be so openly political? I mean, I feel like Algernon Cadwallader has always been a socially conscious band, but I feel like this is the first release where the politics are a big focus of the album. Obviously the combination of politics and punk is not a new, but was that a conscious decision for the new album?
Peter: For sure. We’ve always had political stuff, but we’ve always kept our lyrics kind of open-ended. Our strange phrases and words were meant to play off the music a little bit. The music was coming really fast for the new record, but we weren’t quite sure what songs would go with what, so I just started writing words. At the time — and today’s no different — it was hard to get your brain away from those thoughts and themes that are on the record. As I sat down to write, that’s what was coming out and when we finally started recording some demos for the new record and I was able to actually record some vocals and hear what they sounded like over top of the music, that was the first time I noticed that it was a more direct message. I sort of questioned it for a minute and asked myself “Does this feel authentic?” It did. “Does this feel like what we’re going for aesthetically? Does it fit with the music.” I thought it did and I asked the band what they thought of it and they were floored by it. They loved it. So I decided I wasn’t going to hold back from being political and that I’d also let anything else come out that wanted to. That’s how the record ended up being way more direct than our previous albums. Part of it is also that once we realized that we were playing to a new generation of younger kids, it felt like there was a sort of social obligation to let people know where Algernon stands and where we think they should stand too. We felt like if we baked these lyrics into the music, there would never be a question about it again. Some of those thoughts came during tour when we were playing to crowds of a thousand kids and bringing up these issues between songs. Like I said, with our old lyrics, they might leave some questions unanswered regarding what we care about and what we think, so I was doing a lot of talking between the songs. It gets a little long-winded, so we decided to just put these messages in the songs so we can deliver it all at once.
RT: I love it. I mentioned when we met at the show in North Carolina on this last tour that I kind of took a year off from school and work and life and just helped out in various non-profits because I felt like the state of the world around me was upsetting me so deeply that I had an obligation to spend some time doing something about it, so the song “Million Dollars” is one of my favorites off the record. My dad lost his job in the Recession while he was in the middle of grad school with a wife and two young kids at home. Even though in retrospect, we weren’t really in any danger of being homeless, but I didn’t know that as a kid. All I knew was that we had lost our source of money and that we owed my dad’s college a lot of money still. I remember at one point getting up the courage to ask one of my parents — I don’t remember which — if we were going to lose our house.
Peter: Yeah, and that feeling of insecurity can be hugely traumatic on a young kid.
RT: Right. So it has always infuriated me, I dare say on a spiritual level, that my fellow human beings are deprived of the things that they, by virtue of being my fellow human beings, deserve to have. And it’s not by accident. There is a system in place to keep people poor. Housing is held financially hostage by massive real estate companies to drive up prices and make more money. Even as a pre-teen when I first had opportunities to visit large cities for the first time, it made me so angry to see the bars in the middle of benches so people couldn’t lie down. It made me so angry to see the anti-homeless spikes under overpasses. Like you say in the song, a million dollars is a lot of money. You could pay someone’s rent for a thousand bucks a month. The idea that homeless people are to be treated as nothing but an eyesore is really upsetting to me. We don’t have a lot of homeless people in the town that I’m from, but we do have a couple who are or who have been. I did a lot of work with food banks during that time in my life, so I saw a lot of food insecurity. And when you have people who are struggling financially, a lot of then turn to less-than-healthy coping mechanisms, so I met a lot of people who were working to recover from drug addiction and/or alcoholism and were just trying to get by. I’m going off on a little tangent here, but it was really nice to hear Algernon be really blunt about the system being messed up and drawing attention to those issues.
Peter: Yeah, like you said, all of that stuff is by design, and it’s a really good design. That’s why it works. It’s extremely fucked up. I think it’s super cool that you got into volunteering. The same thing happened to me when I moved to Portland in 2020. There was the pandemic and all that, so I got more into volunteering as well and quickly realized that it works just like a music scene. You’ve got a community of people with like-minded goals and everybody uses their talents and strong suits to make things happen.
RT: Yeah, and there have been a lot of non-profits that have spawned from the punk scene. Food Not Bombs, for example.
Peter: Yeah man, punk’s always been political. I learned so much from punk bands when I was like 16. That was another reason we had a lot of our lyrics content evolve into what’s on the new record. We grew up with a lot more politics in band but felt like some of that messaging had sort of fallen out, so we wanted to take some of the responsibility for that. We didn’t want to be the ones who dropped the ball on carrying the torch, so we had to make sure we did our part.
RT: I think we underestimate the influence that politics in a person can have on a person. As you can probably imagine given that I grew up in a rural Appalachian town, I was conservative until I was probably halfway through college. Even then though, I always knew that there was a chance that that could change. I was never married to the idea of being born a conservative and dying a conservative. I always had the mindset of “If there’s more information out there for me to learn that would change my mind, I want to hear it.” My freshman year of college I worked in my university’s cafeteria with this guy who really got me into punk. I had always sort of ambiently enjoyed it as someone who grew up on classic rock, but I wasn’t super deep into it. That being said, I loved Dead Kennedys, and Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is politics the whole way through. Then this coworker of mine put me on to Bad Brains, who also have a lot of politics and a lot of commentary about racism and classism in the United States that still holds true. Between the art/music that I was consuming at the time and taking the year off to work with people who were underprivileged, the combination of the two changed my views on things pretty quickly.
Peter: That kind of music so often serves as a documentation of history, too.
RT: Absolutely.
Peter: Our schoolbooks teach us whitewashed bullshit, and those schoolbooks are probably going to be around for a long time, but so are these records.
RT: Right. One of the things that I never learned about in school — and maybe they would have if I was from where you’re from — but they never told me about the 1985 MOVE bombing, which your newest record has a song about. They never told me anything about the bulldozing of black neighborhoods in California in the 90s. I never heard a word about that in school.
Aftermath of the 11985 MOVE Bombings. Image via The New Yorker.
Peter: They do a great job of sweeping that stuff under the rug.
RT: Without getting too tinfoil hat about it, I wrote one of my senior papers about the Iran-Contra Affair and the CIA selling crack to black communities to fund right-wing rebellions in Nicaragua and the War on Drugs working in tandem with the prison industrial complex.
Peter: There’s a book I’ve been reading lately — I’m about halfway through it — called Washington’s Bullets and it’s a history of the CIA. It’s good, I can’t read too much of it at a time.
RT: Yeah, I imagine that after reading it, you walk away thinking about all the ways that the enemies of humankind are controlling your country. Pardon the lack of a segue, but how do you keep touring fresh? I’m sure it gets repetitive to get up and say the same things and play the same songs every night. How do you keep it fun? How do you keep it fresh?
Peter: You’re not wrong about that. It’s definitely a grind. It’s definitely a fun grind though. I think the way we keep ourselves in good spirits and stoked to be doing this awesome thing we’re doing, even though it might be super tiring and super taxing, is just non-stop dumb jokes. We’re constantly joking and pranking each other. It becomes like a language.
RT: Who would you say is the most bully-able out of the band?
Peter: Probably Colin.
RT: That was my guess, actually.
Peter: He gives the most shit too though, so we have to give it back to him. He’s really good at it too. The other thing that keeps us sane is having solid support bands on tour. If your bandmates are your blood brothers, support bands are like your cousins. You have to have someone else to get to know, one member at a time. If they’re having a great time, that rubs off on you. Most of our tour we just did was with Gladie, who are fucking amazing people.
Gladie. Image via New Noise Magazine.
RT: Yeah, I got to talk to Augusta and Evan after the show for a little bit.
Peter: You already know how they are then!
RT: Oh yeah, they were both absolute delights. I spent like 20 minutes talking to them and they were so sweet.
Peter: You’re spot on. The first half of the tour was with Walter Etc. and Star 99, both from California. It was weird when they left us, you know what I mean? I think their last show was in Chicago and it was like “Holy shit, you’re not going to be on the rest of the tour?” It seemed impossible. We were so tight at that point. Thankfully Gladie came next because I don’t think anybody else could have filled those shoes. There were countless times on tour where having those solid friends saved the whole thing from tanking. We had our share of bumps in this tour and they just refused to let us stay down. Like literally, they threw us in their van and drove us to a show after our van blew up. We wouldn’t have made it to shows if it weren’t for them. We’d have to cancel several shows.
RT: I’m always curious, what makes for a good and memorable crowd?
Peter: Actually the worst thing, I think, that happens with our crowds is people not quite knowing how to stage dive correctly. They’re either stepping on pedals or hitting mic stands into my teeth.
RT: “NOOOO THAT’S THE TUNER DON’T STEP ON THAT ONE!!!”
Peter: It’s forgivable, but people should learn how to do it. Talented stage divers know what they’re doing — you don’t spend too much time up there, you do your little dance, you’ve got two or three seconds. Don’t step on the monitors, don’t step on the pedals, watch out for the mic stand and you’re good to go. I’ll even make room and move my bass so people can get by. But that’s part of what makes a crowd so memorably good too! People going fucking nuts. The energy is very one-to-one. More energy happening in the crowd equals more energy on stage. I was so stoked on this tour to hear people singing along to the new songs. At the beginning of the tour, the new album had only been out for like a month, so it was really cool to hear people singing the new songs. I love to see people dancing. I love when there are actual dance pits and not just moshing. It looks like a Peanuts cartoon, you know?
RT: Yeah, everybody’s just doing their little jig.
Peter: Yeah, it’s sick. I love it. It all adds up to an even better performance when all that stuff’s happening.
RT: Still talking about touring, I’m always curious, what are some of your favorite tour snacks?
Peter: Oh that’s a good question. I’m a pretty simple guy. I usually go for nuts, especially the flavored almonds. Vegan jerky’s another one. I’m not vegan, but I get down with the vegan jerky. It’s a good way to get some protein. A lot of the guys just eat granola straight out of the bag, so I guess we eat pretty healthy when we’re just snacking. The big snack from this tour was Dot’s Pretzels, have you ever heard of those?
RT: I don’t think so.
Peter: They’re braided pretzel sticks. They’re kind of a unique flavor. They’re a little mustardy and a little sweet. The original flavor is pretty amazing. On this tour, every gas station we went to we’d be looking to see what different flavors they had. Nick was the big Dot’s head in the band. He tried every flavor, so he can give you a lowdown on what his favorite flavors are.
RT: So now that you’ve finished your tour and have the new record out, what’s next for the band? Do you guys have any plans for right now or are you just laying low for a bit?
Peter: We’re going overseas again. We’ll be doing two weeks in Japan in April — 14 tour dates — and then we’ll be going to some other to-be-announced places as well.
RT: That sounds awesome! Well, thank you so much for doing this! This has been a lot of fun!
Peter: Yeah, thanks for asking man!
RT: Of course! So for the closing question — and I’ve decided that I ask this anytime I interview someone with cool facial hair — how do you maintain such a beautiful beard and what are the downsides of having one?
Peter: Oh man, there are so many downsides. It’s a constant challenge to keep food out of it. It gets stuck in things too. It’ll get stuck in my guitar if I sit down to play. I’m a big dog guy, so I like To pet every dog and sometimes they’ll try and go for it. I don’t do that much to maintain it, to be honest. Maybe twice a month I have to get the tangles out in the shower. I don’t use any product or anything. It’s all-natural. It does get a lot of compliments though. It’s kind of crazy. I’ll just be walking down the street and people will tell me that they love the beard.
RT: What does your significant other think of the beard?
Peter: Surprisingly she’s super down. Well… I don’t know about super down, but at least she hasn’t complained!
RT: Well thanks again for doing this! I really appreciate it.
Peter: Oh definitely! We’re always down to talk to people. Interacting is what makes the music community so fun. Thanks for doing the stuff that you do!
Thanks again to Peter for doing this! It’s not every day you get to interview a member of one of your top 5 favorite bands. Check these guys out wherever you stream your music, or, if you can, catch them on tour and hear them in person!
