Meet Oakland Punk Band & Saint Laurent Muse, SWMRS

CB: I told somebody yesterday that it's like Jawbreaker meets Robyn. Jawbreaker is like a really grungy, pop-punk band from the '90s. And their music is really thoughtful and their lyrics are really existential. We just try to bring the best of every single genre of music. At our core we are a punk, pop band, but we're also children of the millennium, in that we have access to all different music at any point in time.

Pop-punk meant something totally different when I was in middle school. How is that genre different now?

CB: We were always labeled pop-punk, but our influences were never Blink-182. It was more of the stuff that we had access to because we were born in the East Bay, and that kind of music was almost bred out of the East Bay. You had Mr. T Experience, you had Jawbreaker, you had all of the Lookout Records back catalog, plus I had a bunch of friends' dads showing me the Buzzcocks and The Replacements, and that's like really early pop-punk, before it got really capitalized on in the early 2000s, and became what it is now.

So we got labeled pop-punk, but now what we're trying to do is just create modernist music, in the true sense. Because what we have over any other band at any other point in time is Spotify, and Soundcloud. So we can draw influence from Edith Piaf, from Black Flag, and from Charlie XCX, all in the same song. Our music is sort of a compilation of all of that.

[Photo via @abaxley]