***KUTX Artist of the Month is powered by PNC Bank***
The band celebrates the release of their debut EP at Mohawk on July 26
By Paul Carrubba
I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to Austin-based glam punks (and July’s KUTX Artist of the Month), J’cuuzi. Band members Trey Razeldazl (they/them), Gorge Bones (they/she), and I talked about the group’s beginnings, being brave enough to try something new, and the benefits of metamorphosis.
Paul Carrubba: We can jump right in. First of all, can y’all introduce yourselves?
Trey Razeldazl: Yeah. Sure. I’m Trey.
Gorge Bones: I’m Gorge Bones. Hi.
Paul: Where did the name “Gorge Bones” come from?
Gorge: It came from, I really love old country music and the first songs that I can ever remember singing are old country and that my family is from Georgia and my dad really, really loves George Jones and he’s a very serious kind of uptight lawyer man, but when he has a little wine, he’ll get real theatrical about George Jones songs. And we used to do that together, and I think that’s a big part of where my sort of theatrical performance style originated.
And then I was like, “Oh, it’s like George Jones.” I just also really love, he’s kind of a sketchy character, but in a funny way. He’s just squirrely and but everyone agreed across the board he was the best. So I was just like, “This is such a character. What if it was like George Jones, but a sad lesbian, Gorge Bones?”
Paul: Ahhhh. Yeah. George Jones of “The Grand Tour” fame?
Gorge: Yeah, the saddest, most yearning songs. It’s kind of the country equivalent of the silk shirt boombox in the rain. That dude’s just sad and he’s constantly, this is like, “Ah.” But it’s very theatrical?
Paul: So to start off, where did the conceptual idea for J’cuuzi come from?
Trey: Gorge and I moved in together toward the end of 2020. I’ve played music my entire life and I’ve been in in and out of bands since I was a teenager. When we moved in together, I did what I always do, and set up a little room where I can record music. Gorge and I recorded the track to “Big Machine” one day. I wasjust sort of practicing. I didn’t really have any direction in mind. I was just writing songs and recording them. I brought that song to Gorge and was just like, “What do you think? I kind of hear something over this. I feel like you would be able to crush it.” And Gorge wrote the vocals, and I put in a little background vocal thing and I was like, “Well, this is fun.”
That was in Atlanta and 2021. So we moved out here. I moved out here in 2022 and Gorge in 2023. I was kind of playing with people in the scene and meeting people and trying to put a band together, but it just was hard to get people in a room and everybody else is in other bands anyway. And then Caitlin from Hotel Vegas hit us up and was just like, “I’m booking y’all for a show.”
Gorge: She said, “Get ready.”
Trey: We showed her our recordings and she was just like, “I’m putting y’all on the show. Figure out how you’re going to perform.” So that really was where the idea came from. “Okay, well we need to perform these songs that we have.” We just started singing and playing them together. Then we had that chair and Gorge was like, “I want to play the chair.” And that was kind of it. It was not a lot of forethought or design, it was just sort of, we were just winging it.
Gorge: Yes/and-ing each other. And now we’re here.
Paul: Speaking of the chair, tell me more about the chair. How did that just end up on stage and how did it become another member of the band?
Trey: We both worked for a moving company, when we first moved into town. One time, we moved an older woman who lived alone into a retirement apartment community. She had a bunch of cool, funky stuff. She was from Austin. She was just a sweet, eccentric older lady.She was like, “I just don’t have room for it in my space, but I’ve always loved it. It reminds me of Captain Kirk. Do you want it? You can have it.” And I was like, “Hell yeah.” And I was living with a friend at that point and didn’t have space for it, so it just stayed in the back of my car for six months…
Gorge: Marinating.
Trey: …until Gorge and I moved into a place here. Then, when we were practicing the songs in our living room, Gorge was like, “I’m going to spin in the chair the whole time.”
Gorge: I’m a stripper and it was very much like, I want to bring that in, but I don’t want to be so, “This is sexy, super sexy, cool,” that whole thing. So I thought, this is similar enough to the sort of mechanism of the pole, like the spinning, but it’s really different and very much just something you would see in a home or, I don’t know…
Trey: An old lady’s apartment.
Gorge: I really love that. Yeah, it’s giving your “Meemaw’s apartment” where you feel really safe, but you’re doing somewhat slutty, crazy, spinny freaky stuff in it. I love the idea of turning stuff that’s domestic or into a really freaky imaginative landscape.
Paul: It’s campy and it fits. It sort of ties everything together. Y’all have a sort of Mighty Boosh-meets-John Waters mashup vibe.
Gorge: Yeah. Oh wow, that’s such a compliment. Yeah.
Trey: Those are good reference points for us for sure-
Gorge: The strip club is rife with camp and I really, really loved that. I tentatively tried to do a couple little musical projects, and I have my own songs and stuff and was trying to launch various ways. But really, the strip club was my first true performance outlet where I really found myself and got really confident. Because if you can do a naked back-flip in front of a crusty old man and not give a fuck, then you can, be like, “Oh yeah, nothing matters.” This is awesome. I can do whatever.
Paul: Trey, you’ve been in music and Gorge, you’re a dancer, how did y’all use that kind of alchemy to develop y’all’s stage performance?
Trey: We have, essentially, a third member of the group, our designer Durs, who currently lives in New York. He and I did dollar-bin warehouse drag in Atlanta for a couple of years. We lived in a big shitty six car garage that we built into rooms for a DIY venue for drag and shows.w
Gorge: It was legendary. It was wigs stapled to wigs, stapled to wigs.
Trey: And thrift store fashion stuff. A lot of my music history has been very, I’ve had fun doing it, but I’ve always taken it very seriously. As soon as Gorge started exploring the chair and stuff like that, we started talking about outfits. So I think this was the first project where I wanted to create a character, really amping it up.
Trey: Yeah. Whenever Bones goes to work, they even say, “I’m getting into drag.” As in, having a fun little character to put on. I think it’s really where a lot of the performance interplay comes off.
Gorge: It’s funny that you say that too. I used to take it so seriously to a fault. So now I’m trying to back off of that. Because for me, this is the most serious that I’ve ever taken music. I’ve always kind of been scared to try because you’re scared to fail kind of thing. And then Trey’s energy, was comparatively to me, intense and I was like, “Oh, okay. I’m going to try my best to match you and try to be embarrassment-proof and try to really take it on of the chin if I mess up or whatever. But I’m really going to actually try to be serious about this and buckle down.”
Paul: It’s controlled chaos in a good way. After y’all played that first show at Hotel Vegas, when did it start to feel like, “ This is real.”
Trey: We made one T-shirt for that show. We announced that it was $250 right before we started playing the last song, The second we stopped playing, a guy was at the front of the stage asking what the Venmo was so that he could buy the shirt. And that was really the moment where I was like, “Cool.”
Gorge: We did it.
Trey: We played a show that made one out-of-town dude ravenous enough to buy this $250 T-Shirt.
Gorge: That we made with Hobby Lobby bedazzlers.
Trey: It was a cute shirt.
Gorge: I mean, it was an awesome shirt, but it was clearly like, we must’ve done something and everyone’s reaction was really intense. The crowd was frothed up and people were reacting in a way that I was like, “This is a thing now,” you know?
Paul: What brought y’all to Austin in the first place?
Trey: I’ve had friends out here for a long time, different people just over the years touring through and playing South By and stuff. And I’ve always really admired and liked the scene out here.
Gorge: I’m the kind of person that needs to be very close to a natural body of water at all times for my general well-being. So when I came to visit Trey and we went to Barton for the first time, I just cried and was like, “I need to live here.” And now here I am.
Paul: So I mean, you’ve played some pretty cool venues, what would be a dream, how do I put this, a dream non-venue to play a J’cuuzi show?
Trey: Yeah. I always would rather play in a place that’s not a venue. We keep trying to set up shows and none of them have worked out so far. But I would love to play some of the more famous places around town. I remember when I moved into town, Alton from Fuck Money invited me to a show that was behind the Fiesta off of 38th. I didn’t make it over, and then I saw later on Instagram that it got busted up by cops, and I was like, “That sounds fun. Playing behind the supermarket until the police come.”
Gorge: Whenever you get shut down by someone, that’s always how you know you’re doing something cool. Even during South By, we got shut down by the fire marshal at one point and I ran out and took pictures. I was like, “Can I take a picture with you? There were too many people at my show and that’s why you’re here.”
Paul: So talk about the fun a little bit, actually, because it seems like y’all are having a lot of fun.
Trey: Yeah. That was kind of my prerequisite for this too. I guess I just say I took it seriously in the sense that I was very much in the music industry, labels and management and stuff for literally since I was a teenager. I kind of always had bands that were not in that world at all, that were just for fun. And so I think this one, my prerequisite was like, “Oh, I want to make sure that we’re having fun.” And for me, that comes from making songs that I won’t get tired of playing or hearing and that are fun to play for me because they’re interesting or they keep me on my toes. They’re a little difficult to play.
I think that’s kind of how I’ve transmuted what the parts that I still do take seriously, which is the making of the music. I’m soundtracking a really fun show for us. [Nashville punk band] Snooper was a big influence for me when we started the band too. I had just seen them at South By, and I was just like, “That show looks fun to play because it looks fast and it looks like a workout and you got to be right on top of it.”
Gorge: They kick.
Trey: Yeah. But they still leave a lot of room for them to just have fun and be goofy.
Paul: Gorge. You said that you wanted to try music, but being a dancer, you probably are no stranger to being in front of folks. How is being in a band different?.
Gorge: Well, dancing taught me how to be a true rodeo clown. Being a stripper is genuinely like being a sex clown. It makes you genuinely embarrassment-proof and other-people’s-opinions-proof because you’re so vulnerable. In the club that I started out, you’re buck-naked. And that place was also crazy too. It was a Lynch-ian very strange place and it was constantly getting shut down by the cops.
I think that music was scarier because there’s the vulnerability of being naked in front of somebody, doing a little silly dance. All of that’s really fun and just messing with people. I learned to be really good at being a trickster god and just fucking with people and enjoying that because there’s so much opportunity there. People expect certain things and then you get to just be like, “Surprise.” Because this is like, there are no rules in here. It’s the wild west. .
Trey: There’s actually no rules.
Gorge: I think going into music, that was always more vulnerable for me because That’s something I’ve always kept close to my chest. It’s always been an outlet for catharsis. I would write songs when I was heartbroken or so sad that there’s nothing to do, but wail, which is very George Jones. I didn’t think I could withstand it if people responded poorly or didn’t resonate or whatever. I just was like, “If I’m not actually good at this, I’ll freak out.”
And then through dancing I was kind of like, “That doesn’t matter. There’s different ways to do everything.” There’s different ways to do being a stripper. Some girls are way more serious and whatever, and everyone has a different style. And this avenue in particular also is so perfect because it is like, I’m being very raw and real, but it also is really goofy. And that’s like, before J’cuuzi, I was only writing sad ballad-y songs. And I’ve always wanted to get into writing stuff like this. I think Trey’s influence and also a lot of the music that they showed me, I was like, “Oh, I want to do stuff like Viagra Boys, specifically.” I remember hearing “Sports” and being like, “This is real as fuck. This is a true tale. And it’s also so goofy and funny and accessible.” It doesn’t have to always be like, [Gorge puts on a Country & Western croon] “He stopped loving her today.” It doesn’t have to be so serious and sad.
It really also helps to have, I feel like I have the big guns behind me. I feel like I have my big dog that’s holding it down. I don’t have to worry about whether I’m going to play this guitar solo right. Because I feel very fortified by Trey’s knowledge and they are so sure of themselves as a musician. I feel now I’m definitely a lot more sure of myself. Before, when I wasn’t, I was just like, “Okay, well if I can just bring the personality card and bring the performance, I have backup. I’m good.” And then I was able to grow from there. We jammed yesterday and I was playing the drums and I was like, “Oh, I’m good at this now.” Playing the synth confidently, little by little, just putting the set together.
Paul: And also, I mean you mentioned David Lynch., What are some other non-musical influences for y’all? Artistically, likewise?
Trey: Dragula, the show Dragula, the competitive drag monster makeup show. We loved Dragula. A lot of TV, honestly, we have a lot of reference points. We’ve been watching The Nanny a lot recently and realizing that that’s a huge influence on both of us from our youths. Fran Drescher fucked both of us up. I mean, in a good way.
Gorge: In a good way.
Trey: She was a positive influence-
Gorge: The amount of times in our house, you know how people yell for their partner to come look at the dog for the tenth time, that’s us except we’re like, “Oh my God, oh my God, she looks incredible in the shot.” The Nanny is such a classic example of something really trashy and really fabulous in an inappropriate setting. I think we really love the wrong setting, wrong vibe thing or that kind of vibe. Also reptiles.
Trey: Reptiles in general.
Gorge: In general, animals molting. I’m really into reptiles and nature. I genuinely think natural phenomena have been a big influence. I feel like every concept I ever have is, “Okay, it’s a shrimp and it’s transforming…”.
Paul: Some sort of Animorphs, kind of thing.
Trey: Very much Animorphs. Yes.
Paul: Do y’all have animals?
Trey: We got two dogs and Gorge Bones has a snake.
Paul: What’s the snake’s name?
Gorge: Orangina.
Paul: Nice. Y’all’s stage setup, it looks very cozy, but anarchic. I say cozy because I mean, it’s you, Trey, wearing a bathrobe. Gorge has got the chair…
Trey: The bathrobe was very much a kind of cocoon that I molted out of because when we started, it was just Gorge and me. I mean, the bathrobe was Gorge planning out costume changes and I loved that aspect of it, but I also knew that I was going to be handling a lot of the technical side of things. So I was like, “Well, I’m going to run in the opposite direction and literally just wear a bathrobe.” And I am cozy. I am a homebody.
Gorge: Trey is a Taurus.
Trey: I’m a Taurus, I’m an incredibly Taurian Taurus.
Gorge: They love to be cozy.
Trey: And I kind of miss the bathrobe because it was so cozy.
Gorge: We should bring it back.
Trey: It was nice to just be in public, but also it was too hot. Our designer, Durs, really, really brought the element. That honestly to a degree is cozy. Durs makes stuff big and baggy. We have never had to be measured for any of these clothes.
Gorge: Not once.
Trey: He just makes clothes and they fit. It’s crazy. And we don’t give him any direction.
Gorge: You can’t. It’s against the rules.
Trey: He’s like another creative force in the band. He’s…
Gorge: Ungovernable.
Trey: He comes up with outfits and we put them on and we’re like, “These look awesome. I feel so comfortable.” That that also adds that element of drag and camp and that can feel so comfortable when you just lean into it and you’re just like, “Oh, whatever happens is part of the performance.”
Gorge: There’s something about having Durs make the outfit that I’m going to be wearing and having no control over it. It really takes a lot off., I’m like, “Oh, I feel like I’m protected.” Because I’m like, “Oh, well, whatever I’m going to be wearing, it’s going to be cool and it’s going to be my cool friend’s art. So yeah, whatever it is, lay it on me.”
Paul: So talk to me more about the transformation aspect too, because I mean, y’all both have mentioned it a little bit and how do you see, from starting off to now, how has J’cuuzi transformed?
Trey: I mean, I definitely think that there seems to be more of… I don’t know. I think the way that I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I think we’ve discussed this too, is there’s sort of just a page that everyone’s on. We’re not necessarily all doing the same thing, but it does feel very much like a team, more so than it did before where it’s literally like, I mean, I just described it to someone the other day as a heist.
Gorge: Yeah, like Ocean’s Eight.
Trey: Yeah. You know what I mean? When you’re calling up, it’s like, “You son of a bitch, I’m in.” The driver and the demolitions expert.
Gorge: One more heist.
Trey: All three of us are doing what we do full speed and we’re kind of all in our lane. Like the beginning of the Powerpuff Girls when all three of them shoot up and it’s just three parallel color streams going up. That’s kind of what it feels like. It feels very much like we’re all in our lanes working efficiently together.
Gorge: Passing the baton seamlessly.
Trey: Yeah.
Gorge: I was going to say, I feel like the trust has grown a lot. In the beginning, there was a lot more anxiety. I know I was sort of fucking off a lot more, and I think Trey was a lot more like, “Okay, I’m holding us all together so hard.” And I think we’ve figured out our responsibilities and delegated a lot better and become sort of boring. Not “boring,” but it’s important because I think it’s made us all more relaxed. When we used to load in and out, it’d be like, “Oh, we got to… Who’s doing all this and who’s making sure we have everything?”
And now we don’t even think about that. I know for anyone that’s been in bands before, kind of something people take for granted. But for me, I was always like, “I don’t know how this works. I don’t know where to put stuff. I don’t know who to ask for things.” I feel like I’ve just become a lot more confident and I’ve been able to gain a lot more of their trust so that everyone’s just more relaxed because I’m like, “Oh yeah, I know where to store stuff. I know how to put things together. Hell yeah.”
Paul: It’s become more predictable. You can be more creative when the mundane stuff is taken care of.
Gorge: Mm-hmm.
Paul: Talk to me about the album coming out on 25 July.
Trey: It’s all the singles that we put out this far plus a new one. I’ve been calling it more like a sampler platter because it really is us sort of finding our footing, finding the through line. All of these songs definitely are our brand, but I think even as we were putting them out, I was like, “We’re going to see how people like one that sounds like this and we’re going to see how people respond to one that sounds like this.” And I think it’s very representative of it sort of coalescing into what we now think of as our J’cuuzi sound.
Gorge: It’s like a pack of Scooby Doo gummies. You got the chalky blue one, which is obviously Big Machine. You got, I don’t remember the other colors, but it’s different things that clearly are part of the same snack.
Paul: And to what extent was it a challenge to organize that if they are coming from different eras, essentially? Different bits of y’all?
Trey: For sure. I mean for me, I’m neurotic when it comes to our recordings. I do all the recording right here in our house or wherever we have lived. And so all of these, like two and a half of them were recorded in Atlanta, and then two and a half of them were recorded in one house in Austin. And then I think the other, a little bit was recorded in a different house. They’re kind of all over the place. And I had different recording setups. I was experimenting with how I would want to record us. So it is a little grab bag of sounds and flavors, but I think it’s really fun. It’s definitely, it’s like a retrospective, I feel like, of our first year. The sort of transformation that we talked about. I think that that’s very evident of these songs too.
Paul: So I got some fun ‘n’ weird quick-fire questions for y’all.
Paul: Drama or comedy for y’all?
Gorge: Dramedy.
Trey: Comedy. What did you say?
Gorge: Dramedy. I said the same.
Trey: Oh, no. I said comedy.
Gorge: Oh, I said dramedy.
Trey: I don’t want drama in my comedy. Stay out of it.
Gorge: I like them mixed together.
Paul: Comedy or horror?
Trey: Comedy. You’re going to go horror.
Gorge: Horror.
Paul: Why is that?
Gorge: I love horror. I mean, I think since Trey does not do horror, so I haven’t been watching as many horror movies, but I love horror movies. IT was my favorite book when I was a kid for a long time. I just love being scared. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Paul: Chaos or planning?
Gorge: Chaos.
Trey: Yeah, chaos. Oh, well-
Gorge: No, don’t lie. Don’t lie to be cool in the interview. Trey’s such a planner. I’m not letting you get away with this.
Trey: No. Yeah, no planning. But then you surrender to the chaos.
Paul: Fair enough. Loch Ness or Bigfoot?
Gorge: Loch Ness. Loch Ness Monster.
Trey: Yeah, Loch Ness.
Paul: Why is that?
Gorge: I love things that are monsters that are too big in the water. We were watching Pirates of the Caribbean last night, when they had the Kraken, I was just like, nothing beats a giant thing in the water. A giant scary thing in the water? Unbeatable.
Paul: The Cramps or the B-52s?
Gorge: Ooh.
Trey: B-52s for me.
Gorge: It depends on the day. I’m from Athens, so I have to say B-52s, I think.
Paul: That’s it for the quick-fire questions. So, what’s next for y’all?
Gorge: World domination?
Trey: Yeah, I guess we’ll see. I don’t really know. I mean, probably put out some new music. I mean, I think the plan right now is to sort of like, this is sort of the tail end of the first chapter. So I think maybe top of next year we’ll see some more radical transformations.
Gorge: Radical transformations, world domination. Big plans, big songs. Can’t lose.
J’cuuzi is set to release their debut album, SLUDGEcontent, on July 25th with a release show at Mohawk the following night, July 26, as part of Red River Cultural District’s Hot Summer Nights.
