EGG, IN YOUR FACE

EGG, IN YOUR FACE

Snõõper’s brand of punk keeps Austin—hell, the whole US of A— real weird

Derek Scancarelli

It’s 6:10 p.m. on Sixth Street in Austin during SXSW, and there are 600-plus on the street watching Nashville’s greatest underground punk export, Snooper. But the band’s performance isn’t sponsored by the U.S. Army, its giant green papiermâché mosquito isn’t bouncing around in a venue, and the band’s psychedelic video units built to look like stand-up arcade games aren’t connected to a stage. Instead, the units are plugged into hundreds of feet of extension cords placing the amps directly adjacent to the sidewalk. Punk style, just right out in the open. Is the band worried about being within earshot of more than a dozen cops? No, and if they were, they probably wouldn’t have set up directly in front of them. This is Snooper ina nutshell—fun, chaotic, dorky, rock ’n’ roll through and through, but more than anything else, totally and completely endearing. Even Austin’s finest let them finish their set uninterrupted, just watching along from the sidewalk, giggling to each other from underneath their cop-staches.

The power of the riff compels you, I guess.

The Snooper elevator pitch is simple: “Looney iTunes fever dreamSThe core of the band is Blair Tramel and Connor Cummins, with Ian Teeple, Happy Haugen, and^m Sarrett in the conventional configurad^^of vox, two guitars, bass, and drums, respectively. Their sound is eclectic but familiar—musically the band is punk, owing no small debt to intellectual gods like Devo both sonically and in their tongue-in-cheek approach (read: egg punk for y’all oversimplifiers out there). As Haugen explained to his grandfather, “It’s punk music, but not angry.” At shows, the band dons retro tracksuits, ripping through their fun-loving, catchy tunes at lightning speed. Cummins, the towering, whistle-toting guitarist and maestro, dangles from the rafters like an unhinged yeti, while a pigtailed Tramel blasts through vocals, controlling the chaos.

And then there are the visual elements, which are as essential to the band as their sound. Those arcade machines? Each does playback of trippy, grainy, and graphics-heavy music videos that add another chaotic element to the already wild band. Add a giant green nine-foot-tall mosquito to their mosh pit, better known as Super Snooper, and you have the full Snooper multimedia experience—a live show not to be missed and worth traveling to see. Just ask the king of humorlessness himself, Henry Rollins, who attended their sold-out August 2023 album release party at the American Legion Post 82 in Nashville. Rollins gushed about the band’s performance and LP |n an appearance on KCRW in his flat, deadpan manner before rushing home to chase neighborhood children from his lawn, give a couple hundred rock-doc talking-head interviews, and do whatever else he does for fun. If Rollins can have a good time at a Snooper gig. anyone can.

Snooper seem like the sort of band that must

have come out of RISD or SCAD or some other high-achieving art school—conceived as a singular multimedia condept that is p^rt visual art, part music. In all actuality, theiband emerged from possibly the diametric opposite of art school—Music City USA, the capital of the music industry in the South, Nashville. Obviously Snooper’s approach is decidedly grittier and more aligned with Memphis—home of artists ranging from the Goner Records’ stable to greats illike the legendary Stax Records to Big Star to Three

6 Mafia to Hypnotize Minds LLC.

About 10 miles from Nashville’s city center, on an unassuming suburban street with its requisite surrounding schools and churches, is the home of Blair vTramdland Connor Cummins. The friends-turnedloye interests' house is idyllic, with sprawling grass, towering trees, and a hen-filled chicken coop. But behind its doors, visitors have their senses jolted by the couple s phantasmagoric band headquarters. It feels like a Claymore of pop culture exploded—the “front toward enemy” killing anything and everything that does not fit into a wonderland for adults who still eat Fruit Roll-Ups. As you walk in, a Bert and Ernie lamp welcomes you next to a Gumby suit and Blockhead helmet, opening up into a room filled with oversize cereal box prizes, a tomb of obsolete tech, and tacky toys from yesteryear: a giant clown Fez dispenser, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster on a skateboard, a Troll doll wearing a crucifix, a dancing California Raisin, a Sports Illustrated shoe phone, a Bentley TV. camcorders.‘80s mobile phones, and a Qomino's Pizza mascot wearing sunglasses. Littered between is a pair of “X-ray goggles." puppets, ceramic cat statues, and a creepy baby clown painting that would make John Wayne Gacy proud. In the middle of a VHS contaroroi, with large chunks of Betty Boop, Goose and Richard Simmons tapes aptly sits a seriesj^j guides on “Understanding Human Behavior.” Jit’s a graveyard of kitsch to some, but in their case it’s a lush and bountiful garden of influence.

THE SNOOPER ELEUflTOR PITCH IS SIIT1PLE “LOONEY TUNES FEUER DREflm.”

As you may be able to tell by the insane collection of memorabilia, music was not the band’sbbt&fl nal focus—it was built later to fill in the soundtrack for a video-forward project utilizing some of those wild wares. “Originally, it was just a way to score animations,” says 3O-year-old guitarist and songwriter Cummins. “[Blair] would make a new video and not have a song. I’d say, ‘Let’s make ones.’”

Unlike Cummins-who’s dedicated his life to music-Tramel had no experience playing. By day, Tramel is a Montessori school instructor, teaching 3-to 6-year-olds during their stage of the “absorbent mind.” The singer taught herself 3D printing, programming, and robotics-on top of her million other hobbies-all of which find their way into the cabal of influences: stop-motion animation (Claymation and paper cutout), sculpting (like her famous Snõõper papier-mâché), sewing, quilting, and more. She even began experimenting with conductivity to excite kids about learning-using fruits to complete electrical circuits that powered games like Pac-Man.

Tramel quickly turned her education tool into a music project with Cummins that preceded Snõõper, BARKO PC, channeling Bill Nye to perform to a studio audience of stoned and confused punks. The experiment was played live by using cooking tools as their instruments. “I made a meat piano,” Tramel recalls. “Meat itself is conductive because it has water in it. When I touched an iron to the meat, .1 coded it to make a sound...but I had no idea how to do the music aspect. That’s where Connor came in."

“I came close to having a panic attack,” Cummins says. “She was cooking meat. I was slicing vegetables and they would activate samples. I had a drum machine—basically a kitchen timer. There was no song structure. It was purely noise, anxiety-inducing music. I asked, ‘What am I playing?!’ She would tell me to just keep going. I was like, ‘What does tihe fucking song sound like?!'"

So if the instruments are the food, then what function does the dining room serve in the TramelCummins household? Sewing and craf^, naturally. Lined with racks of stage clothes, yarn, and papiermachd: an enormous hand, a massive wacky fac^ and a (sadly inedible) magical red mushroom. It^ connected to the office of Electric Outlet Record the boutique label that put out the band’s e^w releases. Nearby there’s a small studio space packed with instruments and a pink mascot bunny head, wires tangled in an unhinged manner. The room is where Snooper recorded most of theirn^tc.-save for their 2023 full-length for ThircbMah Records.

As Snooper emerged as a band, they naturally evolved and changed in scope—much like a lot of what inspired the couple in the past. “When Snooper started, there was an element of 'Fuck it. we're never gonna play this live. Let's put on seven guitar tracks and use drum machines,’” Cummins says. "That opened the doors. ‘Let’s build a giant puppet!' There were no limitations. Now I have freedom. I’ll write a fucking dance, post-punk, or fast hardcore song. I don’t even think about it.”

‘Tt was a deep home recording project,” Tramel explains further. “I never thought we’d be doing any of this. We were never expecting to play live. When we got asked to, I was so mad. I was so nervous I was gonna fall down on stage.”

Four years removed from the band’s debut Music for Spies EP and a year from their debut LP, Super Snooper, for Third Man, Snooper are in high demand. Despite the hassle of traveling with fragile puppets, the band doesn’t want to disappoint their followers. There’s no phoning it in—except when

they’re literally carrying their five-foot prop mobile phone inside a venue. For Cummins, a purist in years past, it took a while to reconcile the kitsch of his own creation. “I felt insecure about it,” Cummins admits. “Is this a gimmick? Is everyone gonna think we’re a fucking gimmick band? But we toured the first year without any props. And we played hard as fuck. With or without them.”

Snooper have created a wonderful monster—even; if it is grueling on the road. At the core of the band is simple yet eclectic songwriting that is committed to a good time, but also the bit—no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is carting around all of those additional props. “It puts pressure on us,” Haugen says. -[There are] days where I’ve been like, ‘Fuck, no!’ or ‘I don’t wanna wear my track suit. It smells terrible!’ Then I remember how much fun it is.”

In the shadow of all the new hotels, with a backdrop of several cranes throwing up skyscrapers with the quickness, and only a short distance away from a Soho House, Snooper are having the time of their lives in front of 13th Floor during SXSW 2024, cho^ ing off the main artery Red River with hundreds of fans watching from the sidewalk. With the mosquito zigzagging around the crowd like a pinball, the band’s 100-mph punk is causing mayhem, as various members of the band are either surfing on the crowd or are even momentarily airborne. The Nashville band is delivering one of the best performances of the entire week. It seems like Snooper’s dedication to fun and keeping things rteresting is working, embracing a slogan that the city has long since abandoned: Keep Austin Weird.