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The band just released their new EP “No Guarantee”
By Jeff McCord
The bassline of “Hard To Go” bores into your skull like a drill bit. In catchy phrases, the narrator muses a difficult departure, ultimately moving on. But the song stays with you.
“Hard To Go” is one of six delights on the new EP from the Austin band Never, No Guarantee. Vocalist and songwriter Emily Ng wrote post-punk burners a while back.
“I think a lot of [the songs] came from me being in my other band Nevil,” Emily explains. “But they were a little too complex to be Nevil songs. Nevil is more garage rock and I wanted to take them in a different direction. I love Courtney Barnett. Parquet Courts was a really big influence on these songs. And it was just me and my friend, who is an engineer who worked on all of these songs, just messing around in the studio. He has a million synths and fun toys to play with. His name is Matt Parmenter and his studio is called Ice Cream Factory. These songs started as bedroom recordings. And then I took all of those tracks -a lot of them already had vocals and guitar -and I took those in the studio. We recorded drums for them, and then we added to them and replaced the vocals. That’s probably how this next album will be as well.”
Never, the band she assembled after recording these tracks, is made up of members of Austin bands Luna Luna, Thelma & the Sleaze, and Nuclear Daisies. Having already completed a Texas mini-tour with them, she’s back in the studio working on a full-length album.
“I’m not really a pop fan,” says Ng. “I kind of like bedroom pop, but I think a lot of the songs that I write kind of just come out like that, especially melodies and lyrics. I don’t write them in a very intentional way, I’ll just think of a song in my head or it’ll just kind of come to me and then I try to make it into something with the instrumentation. A lot of it just comes out that way. I love a hook.”
