Diarrhea Planet, the Best Band in Our Solar System, Explains How Aliens Work

I need to start this with an admission of guilt: More than a year ago, I convinced Diarrhea Planet—whose six members and roughly six hundred stage guitars shred so hard they produce the musical equivalent of the woodchipper scene from Fargo except instead of a witness being killed in cold blood, they murder bummers—to take a detour from one of the busiest tour schedules in music to stop by the VICE offices on a Sunday to talk to me (who'd gotten a little too loose at their show the night before) about whatever it was that trickled out of my ravaged brain. And they were incredibly kind about it.

Then I accidentally smashed my phone, and lost the interview, then found it again and thought I'd finally make time to transcribe an hour conversation between seven people, and then lost the phone AND the audio files, and basically spent a year feeling like a hopeless dirtbag for not running this delightful conversation right as Diarrhea Planet has gotten more and more of the critical acclaim they deserve.

A few weeks ago, by pure chance I ran into DP drummer Ian Bush in the backyard of a Nashville cafe at 3 in the morning, and at that moment, staring at his handsome face as he looked at me like I'm an idiot, I felt the tides turn. The universal forces or overseers who govern luck on Earth had decided to tumble the dice in a more fruitful direction, and this interview would come to life. Now here we are!

Here, I spoke to the band about aliens and crystals and sweat that literally melts guitars, which means I personally think this interview rules but also means you might not want to take my word for it and check them out for yourself. Diarrhea Planet are currently on tour—they're pretty much always on tour—and are set to release a new album, Turn to Gold, June 10. Early tracks released from Turn to Gold sound like everything that makes DP so great: It's music that makes you want to drive a flaming Camaro into the ocean to impress that special someone while Puff Daddy, wearing a tuxedo, rides by on a Jet-Ski and gives you a thumbs up.

MOTHERBOARD: I think we can just start at the biggest question: Do you think that the future, individually or collectively as DP—whoa, I've never interviewed six people at once so this is a new experience for me—but do you think the future is going to be good or bad?

Evan Bird, guitar: Bad.

Bad?

Evan: Yeah.

Why?

Evan: Well we have to self-destruct at some point.

It's like the stars are gonna explode or something?

Evan: Like, humanity will implode. Something will happen.

Is this how everyone thinks? The future's bad?

Evan: I can't speak for them.

Jordan Smith, singer-guitar: Oh, you mean the future of the Earth? Or the future of the band?

Oh no, the Earth.

Evan: Future of the band is a total—I don't wanna touch that. But yeah. Humanity collapsing, yeah. OK, I'm all yours.

Jordan: It's feel like super hard to say because there's very obviously a lot of bad things going on. California is running out of water, and how they're saying there's all that weird stuff this last week with the Large Hadron Collider. They had the, uh, rainbow gravity or whatever.

Emmett Miller, guitarist-singer: Bad news Jordan. That was an elaborate April Fool's.

Jordan: Oh, DANG IT. That made me so excited.

Emmett: Ian and I stayed with my buddy Phil and all those guys are turbo nerds and very into it. People of science.

Jordan: Aw, I got so excited. Dude, this year April Fool's just went over my head because I didn't even realize it was April 1st, I just didn't even care.

Emmett: It was a very elaborate prank.

Jordan: But that was PBS?!

Emmett: Yeah.

Jordan: Dang!

Emmett: Yeah like if you scroll down and get to the end of the article it has a—

What the fuck, PBS is blowing it man.

[multiple people talking at once about dolphins and rainbow universes]

"Life Pass" is the first single from Diarrhea Planet's upcoming album Turn to Gold.

Emmett: Yeah the rainbow universe they created had a dolphin in it.

Ian Bush, drums: Yeah if you look at it now, this is obviously a prank, but it was pretty funny.

Mike Boyle, bass: It was something about the way, uh, Jupiter was aligning with something so that gravity was going to be 20 percent less powerful—so you could jump and you'd be airborne for like a second and a half.

Brent Toler, guitar: I can dunk today!

Evan: You can dunk every day, man. Don't give me that.

Ian: I think the future's gonna be a lot like the movie Her.

You fall in love with a computer?

Ian: Yeah, that really freaks me out.

Evan: That movie hit a little close to home for me.

Emmett: I think the future's gonna be good, you know? Humans are either gonna live or they're gonna die. It's win/win either way.

I mean… What if we don't die though? Like you could computerize your brain?

Ian: Immortality will probably be achievable. [I'd say] in 50 years. No joke.

50 years?

Emmett: Not life extension first? Just pure immortality?

Ian: I think someone's gonna figure out how to be immortal.

Emmett: Someone's gonna build a computer we're part of right now.

Evan: Kurzweil's getting close, man.

Ian: Like a biological computer.

Evan: We're getting closer and closer.

I don't think I could live forever, I don't know. I'd get really bored, right?

Jordan: Yeah I don't know if I'd want to.

Ian: Make it count for like 80-something years?

Evan: 30-something years?

Emmett: Isaac Asimov's, what was it—"The [Last] Question"—that was like a…what was it, the inverse of "The Last Answer," that said the universe is the product of an eternal being trying to create simulations of ways of killing itself because it's immortal, or something like that?

Holy shit. That's gnarly.

Emmett: The penultimate question: "Hey can I ask you a question?" [laughs] That was dumb, sorry.

Evan: I liked it.

That was pretty good. I dunno, what about robots? Would you have a robot play with you?

Jordan: I think that would be hilarious. You could just dress it up how you want.

Emmett: Save us a lot of money.

Jordan: Trackbot.

Mike: We wouldn't have to pay em, so.

Ian: 'Cept when he wants to get paid they can just kill you with a flick of a switch. Just like a robot.

Evan: Laser eyes.

Emmett: What was the name of the robot in Interstellar?

Evan: Uhhh. Michael Fassbender.

Emmett: That my favorite part of the whole thing. Laughed way too hard at that.

Brent: Yeah, that robot was cool.

Evan: Yeah I can't remember. Archie? Archie Hicox? Dagwood?

Did you see that robot band? It's called Compressorhead or some shit? It's all robots and they all play, umm—

Jordan: The Blues?

[laughter]

Jordan: Mississippi Delta Blues?

No they play like, Motörhead [series of people saying "yeah"] and it's so tight, but it's also really noisy because they're all robots. So it's just just like…

[Someone makes really loud and realistic pneumatic robot jackhammering noises]

Ian: They just run around on the stage with a can of oil? WD-40?

Evan: What do they look like?

They look like fucking Terminator robots. Terrifying.

Ian: They look like battlebots.

Jordan: That's awesome.

And there's this guy that has like a hundred fingers to play the guitar.

Jordan: It's like playing a real, like a normal guitar.

Emmett: That's cool. That's fucked up.

Jordan: I'd love to see that.

Emmett: It's an abomination. A slight against God.

Jordan: Just if you could measure everything perfectly.

Emmett: Androids and aliens?

Evan: I'll watch any band so long as it's an affront to God.

Jordan: I feel like that it would just be so interesting to watch, to hear like a perfected version of something without any human emotion in it. Think that'd be cool.

Would it be perfect though?

Jordan: Well. No. It wouldn't be perfect in that I feel like the emotional depth and everything wouldn't be there, but performance-wise, maybe in terms of technical skill and technique, you could perfect that element of it.

But I think it would be interesting to hear how something would sound played to a T as perfectly as possible without any emotion behind it, to see the actual stark contrast between that and how a human being would play that song, y'know?

Ian: Like the Max Rebo Band in ROTJ… that alien band in Return of the Jedi? The Cantina?

[Someone does a mouth-kazoo of the cantina song]

Emmett: Yeah that's the future of music.

Jordan: Yeah right there.

Evan: It's the one with those pianos…

Ian: Yeah, Max Rebo. The giant blue one. It's this alien band.

Evan: …the pillow guy, playing the oboe thing?

Ian: Yeah. And Sy Snootles singing the whole time.

Emmett: We gotta go on a sand barge tour.

Evan: Yeah. Salacious B Crumb and the Bounty Hunters, feat. Diarrhea Planet.

Emmett: I don't want any slaves onboard though, can't get down with that though.

Evan: Yeah, I don't want any slaves.

Emmett: Slave-free, slave-free sand barge.

Evan: I do want a robot bartender though.

Emmett: Yeah, robot exploitation is fine.

Evan: Robot slaves, yeah, do whatever you want. But.

Emmett: God gave us dominion over the robots. Says so right in the Bible.

Evan: Says so in every Kurzweil keyboard owner's manual. Fine print at the bottom.

Is that how we're gonna die though?

Evan: Keyboards?

No, not keyboards. Well, keyboards are gonna kill us.

Evan: Keyboard uprising, ha. No, the Fermi's Paradox thing, where it's like "where is everybody?" Have we not seen anybody because we haven't found them yet or because they're not there anymore? And the most common—well, it's painting it with a broad stroke, but one of the most common consensuses is that there's some cataclysmic event that happens in every major civilization or planet or something.

And maybe it's like the dinosaurs and we overcame it, or maybe it's just that it hasn't happened yet. And I'm willing to bet that that hasn't happened yet. I don't think I'll live to see it.

In my opinion that seems the most likely. I'm not hoping that happens, obviously, but if I had to guess that's probably what I'd say. But… I don't… I don't read too good. I can only count to six—I don't read too good, so…

Hell of a pack today! Diarrhea PlanetMarch 15, 2016

So the one thing I did actually want to ask you aside from aliens—I wanna ask you about that—and ghosts—we can get to that in a second—but I was curious for you guys: How do you guys deal with having so many fucking guitars on stage? You have like 40 guitar players or something? You know how many it is? But is that difficult to set up and get everything working at once?

Emmett: My favorite is when the sound engineer rolls up with an iPad like, "So how many guitars you guys have? Oh…" There you go. Every time it's an iPad, I go, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."

Evan: This is really gonna hurt. Occasionally someone will ask "What's your input list for the guitars blah blah blah", and [after they say they have four guitars and a bass], it's like "Yeah, OK, cool." Then the second they think we can't see them, they just sigh, start rummaging for mics, and look like they're about to have an anxiety attack. In their defense, we don't have our own front of house or anything, so every night we just roll the dice and it's a lot to mix.

Jordan: The most frustrating thing is when we show up at a really, really tiny stage. You know, some places we'll just show up and it's really tiny. We've kinda figured out how to stack our amps. Me and Brett will stack on top and then Emmett and Evan will kind of stagger, Evan will put a road case behind Emmett's amp, and then put his amp up so it's above Emmett's to get the speakers up there.

I think the hardest stage we've ever played on was at the Parish Underground at SXSW like two years ago…

Emmett: That was brutal.

Jordan: It was so tight that we all had to stand sideways the entire show. We couldn't turn this way, so we all had to play the show like this [makes gesture of lining up front to back] with the mic here…

Emmett: It was like a barbershop quartet.

Jordan: …it was so weird. But it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes and one of the things we were just talking about last night was when we get back from this tour, getting everyone on the wireless game. It's consistently a problem with just cables all over the stage. Just getting on your nerves like stepping on them, or when you go to take a knee and play a solo and getting it on your kneecap, then your knee hurts really bad the next day.

Then you can just crowd surf all the time.

Jordan: Yeah! Then we can do whatever we want. Then we can climb anything, We can jump off anything.

Emmett: Just get a raft, get all four guitar players out on there.

Evan: Zach was talking about doing that. I got an inflatable raft and a captain's hat trying to crowd surf for the first time you guys play.

Jordan: Get a blow-up kiddie pool and all us jump in there while we're playing, with little sailor hats on.

I 100 percent support that. So I get the feeling that you guys are pretty nerdy for gear, is that true?

Jordan: Oh yeah. To the point where it's kinda like, it's probably super annoying.

Mike: Yeah, all this guitar stuff, man. When's it gonna stop?

Jordan: We went to the Guitar Center, right, before we came?

Ian: [Mimicking DP's army of guitar players] We need this transparent distortion, you know we gotta hit up this pedal company. Like, alright.

Emmett: My favorite is Ian, where you know the buzzwords for pedals and stuff. We're dragging him into it even though he's the drummer. Now we can really talk the talk.

Ian: What kind of diodes are you guys using?

Emmett: We're playing soft diode content.

Jordan: Do you got these NOS Germanium transistors, I found this stash of them.

What about those crystals though?

Evan: You need a lot of crystals, yeah.

Ian: Working on Star Wars pedals right now. Got the AT-AT fuzz, got the land cruiser delay.

Jordan: The Wookiee-based octave…

What's your Holy Grail? What's the search?

Jordan: You know, I've changed so much but I would really freak out the most if I got to get an original Mosrite Mark II, like the same guitar that Johnny Ramone has. There's only around 150 originals in existence.

That's probably not cheap then.

Jordan: No. Mosrites in general, they're four to five grand usually, umm, but that's probably for me. But it wouldn't even be because it's an amazing guitar or anything; he's my favorite guitar player and I've always loved Mosrites and Mosrite-styled ones. I'm on my second Univox Hi-Flier right now. I like all my other guitars, but those guitars, they weigh nothing and they're so much fun to play. Those guitars are way more fun to play than any other guitars.

That's chill.

Jordan: My Hi-Flier's taking a beating this tour, I've got so many dings from this tour on it already. Wonder how long that guy's gonna last.

I get the feeling you guys are not very easy on your gear.

Jordan: We all clean our gear relatively frequently, but for me, even if I'm not hitting my guitar on stuff, the amount that I sweat just destroys—I mean it ruins my bridges, it ruins the screws, it ruins the electronics, it ruins the jacks. I just sweat 'em out and they corrode.

Right now my Fender, which has been my guitar for a long time, I gotta get some stuff fixed on it because my sweat just like caused all the screws to rust. And the pickguard, it's like I can't get 'em out anymore. They just corroded over.

Do you think it's something wrong with your sweat? Do you have poisoned sweat?

Jordan: It's just enough. Maybe there's just a high acidic content or something, you have a diet that makes it a little more corrosive.

I would have never thought about that.

Jordan: Yeah, you know like the movie Aliens? Where like, "dude I'm pretty like have this special thing…" Greg Ginn in Black Flag, he had to take his guitar and basically had to solder everything together and put duct tape over the entire guitar because his sweat just kept destroying his electronics. That's the only other guitar player I've heard of that has this sweat problem that I do.

Our tech who does all of our work, Dave Johnson from Scale Model in Nashville, he's always laughed because he'll put in a Switchcraft jack, which is the ultimate, best jack you could put in your guitar. He's like, "Dude, you'll never sweat through this." And one tour I came back to him and said, "Dude," hand him my guitar, and he says "I've never seen someone destroy a Switchcraft jack before." I sweat, like I can wring my clothes out, my pants, my shirt…

Gnarly.

Evan: Life finds a way. We gotta get that waterproof spray that you can put on like clothes and electronics whatever…

Jordan: Scotchgard.

Evan: Yeah. Just take the necks off and spray the bodies down…

Jordan: I wanna see if I can get anyone to make pants out of bamboo but make them look like jeans, y'know, like a lightweight absorbent material that wicks the stuff away. But make pants out of something like that that look like jeans so it just gets all the moisture off me. So when I crowd surf, I just soak the crowd. They're rubbing it on all their clothes, getting all the moisture off me.

This was from Will OliverNovember 20, 2015

Jordan soaking the crowd. Full disclosure: I tried to dive over him.

You might as well stuff your pants full of newspaper. Like "you got some weird, puffy legs. What's going on?"

Jordan: What's with this guy's like, guy's looking like he's wearing a giant diaper. He's so wrinkly. Basically like fish and chips in a pair of jeans.

Do you guys think aliens would like Diarrhea Planet? I'm just going off the rails now, so…

[laughter]

Evan: I don't know man.

Mike: I'd say chances are pretty slim.

Evan: If they got ticket money [laughter] they got some merch money…

Ian: Yeah, they'll love our merch, they won't like the band.

[Unclear who's speaking]: Do you guys think aliens have very sensitive ears? [General agreement from the room]

Emmett: Yo, if you guys find an alien civilization that had music and language, would you rather be able to speak their language, or play their most popular instrument as a virtuoso?

This is a great question.

Ian: Instrument. Well I feel they would, if you were the BEST at their instrument, they would figure out a way to communicate with you and then you'd just be the king.

Evan: Yeah if you could move them to uh, alien tears, by a concert, surely they'd do what they could to reach out to you.

Emmett: Yeah I kinda like the idea of someone being presented with this opportunity and all of human civilization being like, "you gotta pick the language so you can learn!!!" and the dude's like…

[Everyone in room]: "Nahhhh" "Nahhhhhh"

[laughter]

[Someone makes vocal approximation of alien instrument solo]

[More laughter]

Yeah. I would definitely go that route.

Evan: What do you think?

About aliens?

Evan: Yeah.

Would they like your band?

Evan: Yeah.

Uhh, yeah.

Evan: Not to put you on the spot, but you can be honest.

No no I mean I personally feel like aliens probably—you said they had sensitive ears, I think the ears would are probably tuned…

[laughter]

I think they're probably tuned…

Evan [to others in the room]: Don't listen to him.

…more kinda like a 311 kinda vibe. But yeah. I think you guys could pull it off.

Brent: 311?

Yeah, I'm pretty convinced aliens are big fans of 311. But that's not related.

Emmett: 311 was an inside job.

Ian: Yeah, aliens have very sensitive ears.

Evan: Duh!

Yeah I think it could work. I feel like any alien civilization that we manage to hang out with, they would already know what they're into it because they'd be coming to visit us. And if they were gonna come and visit us and didn't kill us all then they'd probably be relatively chill. But that might just be me hoping.

Ian: Depends on the race, too.

Evan: [Extremely nerd voice] Well if it was the Tyranids, uh—with their superior firepower we'd surely be destroyed.

[Discussion about the extreme Star Wars fans that a few members of the band stayed with the night before]

Jordan: Why did we all start talking about Star Wars today? Because we were talking about Star Wars on the way here.

Emmett: It's just crystals or something.

Ian: Just the vibes.

Evan: It's the future, man. The singularity.

Emmett: [The Star Wars fans] got to talking about the scene in which Han Solo puts Luke inside the tauntaun. There was like a huge Reddit thread about this recently like whether or not that would kill him—once you got it open, if that would actually behoove you to be inside the beast. Because they got to talking about like, it might start getting rigor mortis, you might get trapped inside…

Ian: Yeah, but you're in a wet environment in a cold environment, and you'd get hypothermia much quicker and the rigor mortis, you would be trapped inside the ribcage… I was like "no one disagreed!"

Emmett: [Quoting their host] "Think about perspiration on the skin, we have all that wind, it's just gonna get so cold. It's like you're not taking account of the surface area nor the residual heat of the beast after it's died, it's gonna stay warm for a little bit. It's gotta count for something." He just went on and on, like, yeah, you forget about rigor mortis, he's got a goddamn light saber he can cut it open again.

Seems like an obvious solution.

Emmett: I wish these guys were here cuz they can just riff on this stuff forever.

Evan: We gotta get them to start a band and we'll give them your info.

That sounds great, I'd love to listen to hours of two people debating tauntauns. So you guys are reading that on Reddit too? Do you guys use Reddit? Are you guys Redditors?

Emmett: I wouldn't call myself a Redditor but I spend a lot of time—

Evan: Dude, you are totally—you are addicted to Reddit.

Emmett: I don't post. I don't ever post on Reddit.

Evan: I mean, I'm addicted to the internet, but maybe not Reddit specifically. But then again that's coming from me so it's like…

Ian: I don't think I've ever been off the front page, I don't know how to work it.

Jordan: I like to read their Reddit Music stuff, it's great because I feel it's one of the last places on the internet that you can go to that's not constant trolling. In a lot of the comment threads on it, there's actually a lot of really intelligent discussion and it's a lot more positive. It's not just arguing and public shaming and all this crap like that. It's actual people talking, and you can learn a lot from other people on Reddit. I like it.

Yeah? That's awesome. What's your, uh, what's your social media strategy?

Evan: Shock and awe, shock and awe man.

Do all of you guys have the keys to your accounts?

Evan: We do but it's mostly, uh, mostly Emmett. We occasionally do some guest posts but Emmett…

Ian: Yeah Mike had a guest post when we were in Toronto on Instagram.

How does it feel, does it feel powerful?

Mike: Well [Emmett] posted it for me: "Hey, Mike here!"

Emmett: That was good.

Evan: Hey it's me, Mike!

"Juggarnaut" is what got me hooked on DP in the first place.

That's awesome. I think that's what Larry King does to tweet, he calls someone and then records it into their voicemail, and then they read it and type it into his Twitter account.

Emmett: So it really is him, kinda. It's not just someone…

Ian: He can't use Twitter like a normal person. He's got very sensitive ears.

Emmett: He's an alien.

Ian: He probably is an alien, he's been alive long enough. He's probably achieved immortality.

Do you guys have any serious Twitter fans, like people DMing you all the time?

Emmett: We have a follower that that we picked up this past tour who is consistently on the likes podium across Twitter and Instagram. Like top three, every single time. And I don't know if she gets notifications whenever we post something, or if she's constantly refreshing.

Jordan: It's crazy, like she's on point.

Emmett: I think she's one of those 19-year-old blog girls, but it's never on your stuff, it's always photos of the people.

Evan: It's like small town in Florida, these guys are the closest to whoever but the Jonas Brothers. It's harmless. It's weird, but it's harmless.

Have you ever met her?

Evan: Yeah. We met her and her mom at a show, yup.

It's tough to meet someone on the internet and be like "oh you're that internet person."

Ian: Well that was pre-race-to-the-likes finish line.

So you converted a very strong fan, basically. That's a good personal approach.

Evan: Gotta keep excited for the fans, man.

How was that last night? I saw that a lot of people were like on stage.

Jordan: Yeah, last night was awesome. I mean, there's the one dude who totally destroyed my mic stand when he was singing. Yeah, I got dumped on hard by that guy. But it was funny, there was a point where I was just like "Well, y'know it's my personal mic so if he destroys it the venue won't be mad," I was like whatever. It's insured, whatever. I stepped away and I was like, "I'll just sanitize it later."

And then I just watched the dude dismantle the mic stand and unplug the mic screaming in it, and just throw the mic on the ground really hard. I thought, "Well, it's gonna take me like five minutes to set this thing up before the next song," but fortunately the Bowery staff, they were killer. And the dude ran out. I did not expect that, like I was like "dude…thank you."

I saw that dude sprint out of the side and I was like "holy shit."

Jordan: Yeah, I think the hardest thing is, I keep getting stuck with mic stands where the boom gets out too far and a lot of people like to come up, and they like to like crowd surf, and I have this automatic response now of kicking my monitors back into place because people like to crowd surf up off that. But the main thing is, people will crowd surf and jump off directly in front of my mic with the boom way up so they're always jamming the mic into my teeth. So I'm waiting for the show where I'll break my front teeth out.

I've chipped out my teeth and spit out pieces of teeth, like I've seen pieces of my teeth come out of my mouth onto the ground. My lower teeth are looking like the graveyard, but I'm waiting for the show where there's a crowd surfer who does me in and knocks one of my teeth out. Then I'm gonna say "Okay, I think it's time for me to get a cool gold tooth."

Evan: Time to get a headset and a headset mic, man.

Jordan: I really want, yeah, get a headset mic, do Ted Nugent style, "Awwwwwriiiight!"

Ian: Dude we have to play Stranglehold.

Jordan: Oh dude def—Stranglehold will definitely happen anyways at some point because that song kicks ass.