Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Scarlet Street isn’t a pop-punk band anymore. That’s by design. The Cincinnati four-piece wanted to push themselves after they finished their self-titled debut, and NO ALTERNATIVE, their follow-up LP from this past October, is the result of this reinvention. It was something of a challenge to themselves: they wouldn’t release an album that didn’t match the vision they heard in their heads, that didn’t speak to something larger than themselves, that didn’t represent a holistic evolution for the band.
And maybe, if they did it well enough, it could be something of a challenge to the rest of their scene.
By the parameters the band set for themselves, NO ALTERNATIVE is a success. Sonically, there’s a clear throughline from the hookier material on Scarlet Street (particularly on singles “WARNING SOUNDS” and “CORPORATE MEMPHIS”), but it’s all filtered through a darker, heavier lens. These songs are slower and sludgier than anything on their debut, and frontman Ben Seitz is more likely to growl his way through a verse than he is to tee up a hook. The crunch of “PALO ALTO” is more Vheissu than “Victoria,” and the spoken-word waltz “THERE WAS A HOLE HERE / IT’S GONE NOW” closes NO ALTERNATIVE on a much different note than did the jaunty Dopamines cover that closed Scarlet Street.
Lyrically, Scarlet Street delivers withering analyses of social media, the music industry, and the relationship between those two things, as well as more explicitly political topics: income inequality, inaccessible healthcare, a decaying social safety net. Even the possibility of community provides little comfort: “you’re not alone in all of this,” Seitz offers at the start of “IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS” before asking, “but does that bring you any solace?”
We spoke with Seitz about the techno-pessimism that inspired NO ALTERNATIVE, his hopes for a more socially conscious scene, the future of Scarlet Street, and more.
NO ALTERNATIVE is very different from your previous work, and something you said a lot during the rollout is that people can’t be surprised when this sounds different from the self-titled album.
We recorded both this and the self-titled in southern New Jersey with Gary Cioni, thirty minutes out of Philly, in Woodstown. The first time we were out there we spent three weeks straight, the whole album. By the time we were in the van we knew what we’d do differently. We also recorded that one as a three-piece. I don’t know what the thought was. I guess we just thought we had too many guitar parts. I felt like it wasn’t what I had in mind when I imagined a Scarlet Street album. It’s not that different from the EP, but the EP is stuff I wrote in 2017. It’s old. When you go in recording, you have to imagine playing it in a basement, but the stuff I was listening to was so grandiose.
We wrote and recorded Scarlet Street in the mindset that these were the songs we’d play to ten people in a basement. On the drive home, we knew it was cool, and we had fun, but it wasn’t what we imagined. I knew, when we got home, that the next one had to be a home run. Even promoting the first album felt weird. The world is melting and I’m posting about this shit on a fascist’s website? There was so much just screaming at me. NO ALTERNATIVE finally feels like a step toward what we expected Scarlet Street to sound like. The lyrics were a lot of fun, too. I knew I wanted to write about external things, but I didn’t know it’d come out like that. That was a happy accident.
“MIDCENTURY MODERN WHOLESALE FURNITURE” seems to take place in September of 2024. Is that about when you wrote most of these?
That was when we were hoping to have the album out by!
Then this must’ve been all written pretty close to the release of Scarlet Street, no? By the time you were writing this album, things hadn’t changed all too terribly much, globally, since that album came out. What sparked that shift in your songwriting?
I have to shout out Career Day for that one. Their first album came out around the time we were rolling out singles for Scarlet Street, I think, and it hit home. I feel like everything I do needs to be important, but I’m not that important, so writing about me doesn’t feel like it fits! I heard that album and it felt weird to do that again. At a certain point, too, you figure yourself out, and I was getting older, and I knew I wanted the music to be heavier and I wanted the lyrical stakes to be heavier too. I can also shout out La Dispute for that. They’re a top three band for me. Wildlife in particular is dressed up like personal stuff, but they connect the global things and the personal very well.
There’s definitely some La Dispute here, especially the closer. You said in your track-by-track with I Thought I Heard a Sound that Luke wrote the music for that one and that it was the one song you allowed yourself to be a little more personal. Why did you choose to end the record with that one?
Luke literally wrote all of that by himself. I don’t know if he’d been sitting on it or what. We usually Discord to piece the songs together. Only two of us live in Cincinnati. One’s in Columbus and one’s hours away. I thought it was weird at first. I didn’t know what to do with it. The first version was six minutes long, and Luke kept asking for notes. There was no mincing words with our demos; sometimes I’d just veto Luke’s demos and the rest of the band would do the same with my demos! For so long I put that one off. I didn’t know how to make it work, especially vocally. We’re so based in straight-up punk that it’s hard to slow down a song, write a song in waltz. Gary told us to go unhinged. He wanted me to do emo-rap vocals. I guess I did it! The only thing I could think of was Jordan Dreyer, and I think that was thirty minutes of vocals. It was the quickest we’ve ever done. I think it ended up as a closer because of that intro guitar part. We talked about “IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS” as the last one, and we knew the title going in, but I think having “THERE WAS A HOLE HERE” wouldn’t work.
The tracklist as-is makes sense to me. I like the idea of “IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS” as the closer with “THERE WAS A HOLE HERE” as a sort of epilogue.
You know, we’d toyed with putting out “THERE WAS A HOLE HERE” as a bonus track, maybe six months after. We decided no one would want that.
The other one that’s really different from your previous stuff is “HAIL.” That one’s really snuck up on me and it’s one of my favorites. How’d it come to be?
That was separated from “CORPORATE MEMPHIS,” actually. The idea was to have this fast acoustic part and then the chorus for “CORPORATE MEMPHIS.” The lyrics were totally different. It was all rewritten in the studio. With Gary, he sets up the mics and he just says, “play me the songs.” He gives no indication of how he feels. You play it three times through, and then afterward he called in Jake. He said, “you’re doing a country thing, and it doesn’t make sense. I just really like that chorus.” “CORPORATE MEMPHIS” took four days to rewrite. He told me to rewrite it all around the chorus. He loved the chorus. He said it’s like a Weezer song. I said, “I’d rather die than write a Weezer song!” He asked why I hated writing hits!
We ended up leaving. We did the album in two-week blocks. We did two weeks in the studio, then we left, and we came back two weeks later. He said, “when you come back, I need a new song. You’ve got a ton of weird songs, but I need a hit.” All I did was take the acoustic part that used to be in “CORPORATE MEMPHIS,” and I wrote “HAIL.” I wanted the chorus to be the quiet part. I played “HAIL” for Gary, and he said, “it’s not the hit, but I like it.” He thought the chorus was the outro. I wanted the acoustic part to have some place on NO ALTERNATIVE. We just flipped it.
“CORPORATE MEMPHIS” is definitely the most obvious hit. That’s interesting, given that that song is about the music industry. What do you think is the relationship between being a struggling musician and otherwise being a member of the working class?
I think we live in a world where the powers that be would prefer there not be poor people. I think, actually, rich people love poor people. It’s just that they love to profit off them. The future is a world where the poor can’t make anything. Maybe everyone didn’t get that from “CORPORATE MEMPHIS,” even if it isn’t all that cryptic. I just don’t think music should be open to only nepo babies. A world that’s constantly trying to squeeze the middle and lower class out of everything feels like a world where the poor won’t be making music in ten years. I think that’s just the way it’s going. It isn’t economically viable.
I remember that really being a conversation after Covid. Then it just died out. For what reason do you think it is these conversations aren’t happening on any sort of large scale anymore, especially among DIY artists?
I think some bands are doing great and they’ve got that collectivist mentality, and then there are some scene darlings that just aren’t concerned with it. I also think we’re a social media scene, and social media doesn’t reward downers. It’s not even any band’s fault. You’re rewarded for making dumb memes. Why wouldn’t you? The party can’t go on forever, but why bother with the heavy shit when it just bums people out?
I think “THE STORM IS HERE” captures that frustration too, even if from a slightly different angle. There’s a feeling that enjoying a song is performing solidarity, but it isn’t.
I hate the word “slacktivism,” and I hate the way older people use it, but I think there’s something there. A lot of this album was inspired by a lot of books. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher was a big one, and Max Fisher’s Chaos Machine, Emerson Brooking and P. W. Singer’s Likewar, and Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. In Chaos Machine, he talks about protest from 1900 to 2000, and he says it brought about change. He does it all through statistical analysis. Then he goes from 2000 to, I think, 2022, and using the same metrics you can see it does absolutely nothing. When you have to put effort into a protest, you aren’t walking away without change. If you can just like a post, who cares? In Filterworld, he says all social media is performative, and that idea was just it for me. Game over. I’ll still post, but that’s it.
You’ve talked a lot about the influence of Capitalist Realism on this album. What was your relationship with Fisher’s work before working on this?
Absolutely nothing. I hadn’t heard of him. I didn’t even know he’d passed. My commute to work is an hour and a half, and the audiobook took me maybe two days. I’ve listened to it again since my first go. I think I’m the most politically engaged of the four of us. Luke and I challenge each other in knowledge, even though we usually agree. I made him read it. I think there are some moments in there that might be a bit over the top, a bit alarmist, but it’s 2009. I’ve seen people saying he’s too pessimistic, but I don’t know. That lyric in “PALO ALTO” about being sick because of brain chemistry, that’s all him. I think I summed it up there.
How did you end up finding your way to Capitalist Realism?
There’s a book called Likewar, which came out in 2017, about social media and its implications. It starts out talking about the military. Some countries use social media in war, notably Israel. I went down a rabbithole of modern sociological nonfiction. Most of my books are just Stephen King’s fiction, but that scratched this itch I didn’t know I had. When I looked up sociological books about the 21st century, Capitalist Realism is what came up. His writing style is just so great. Every time you want to skip ahead, he pulls you back in. Somehow metaphysics is just like Kurt Cobain. He’s so accessible for what he does.
His music criticism is phenomenal too.
Hell yeah.
Something I thought was cool about your rollout was that you dropped four singles and didn’t even announce the album until the last one. I assume that was intentional, a comment on the industry?
Funny enough, no! I just didn’t want to announce without artwork. How do you announce an album without showing the cover? I had worked on the artwork myself since December of 2024, and it was this collage I’d been working on every single day for seven months. My wife took the picture on the cover, just like the last one, and so I messed with it a bit to make it drearier, and I thought it was cool. We can be a bit chaotic. It was probably bad marketing.
Were all the single covers part of the original collage cover then?
Sort of. I’m no artist, for sure. I went to school for graphic design, but it was more of a marketing degree, and I hate marketing. Most of the album and lyrics were done when I was working on the artwork, and I wanted little references. The original artwork, the main basis of it was a picture I took out my window in Cincinnati, and then I cut from logos, from Apple instructional booklets, all these things. I’d just blend the layers and I told myself I wasn’t allowed to undo, so I’d just erase layer after layer until it was good. Then, of course, Holly says, “I like this,” and I did too, and that was it.
We talked about the broader DIY scene, but sonically I’m not sure how much you fit with a lot of the other bands people think of when they think about that. Where do you think you fit in, and who do you think your sonic contemporaries are?
I don’t think we’re on the cutting edge here. I think you can look at The World Is, at La Dispute, and you’ve got bands with similar vibes, similar criticisms of the world. We finished recording in June of ’24, and my goal was to have this out by the election. We figured by the time we started the rollout the scene would be so far ahead of us, would be writing these angry post-hardcore songs. I thought everyone else would be past writing about being awkward at parties. I thought we could catch that wave, honestly. As far as where we fit in, I just defer to history. I think of stories of Saves the Day touring with Bane, for example. If the portion of the scene that’s a little less serious doesn’t fuck with us, maybe the other portion will. We’ll go to whoever likes us, whoever wants to let us in. Why don’t we tour with metal bands?
The music and the politics don’t go hand in hand for a lot of your contemporaries the way they do for you. Why do you think that is?
I think inertia’s part of that, and that’s funny for me. We completely reinvented ourselves for NO ALTERNATIVE. I think it’s easier to market a song that’s relatable, too. I think everyone is trying to be relatable. There are bands who write about being awkward at parties, drinking too much, whatever. That’s relatable! I think bands want to be relatable, and not even cynically. I think they want to find their people, people like them.
But then it’s risky, too. You write an album that’s very political and you might offend half the population. There’s another thing, too, which is true of me too. You don’t want to write cringe! I think it’s funny, because you can be cringe about drinking at a party, but you can’t be cringe about politics. I think if you’re serious about something, though, and someone doesn’t like it, then we all know you’re serious. If you’re nonchalant, and someone doesn’t like it, then you just laugh it off. I think we really need to be fucking serious though. We need to be serious about something. There’s probably a lot of fear, too, that you might try it and it sucks. We need to treat art more like trial and error, I think. How many bands don’t change at all, sonically, unless they get big? It’s easy for me to say, maybe, because the afterglow wore off so quick for the self-titled. We had to change to stay afloat! It seems to be working, too, going by the numbers.
What do you think accounts for that?
I think in some ways a band can only be as successful as their scene. If you’re a pop artist, that’s different, but for anyone else you’ve got to work with your scene. I’m not sure, honestly. Journalists are liking this one, but they liked the last one too. I think the last one was more visible, but people didn’t fuck with it as much. This one isn’t as visible, maybe, but the people who fuck with it really love it. I think the disgusting thing about our scene is that, honestly, sometimes you need a tastemaker. I’d honestly rather kill myself than ask someone to share our songs. Maybe we’d be lighting up the world if we’d begged people to take us out on tour.
On the last album, you had a single called “Dealey Plaza,” which immediately follows a song called “Digging Up Jimmy Hoffa’s Body” in the tracklist. I assume that was done on purpose, so here’s an easy one for you: who killed JFK?
It was Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.
Fascinating.
I’m a huge conspiracy theory reader. I don’t do drugs, so I do this instead. I don’t believe them, but they’re so good. I went down a rabbithole with one you retweeted.
The JonBenet one?
Yes, fucking insane.
That one’s a great example of Twitter-induced psychosis.
I’m terrified of that sort of thing. I’m not on social media personally. I only do it for the band. It’s like smoking cigarettes to me, if smoking cigarettes was the only way to market your band. The only one I’ll really use is Reddit. To me, Reddit’s what Facebook wants to be. It’s a good place to get news, unfortunately, especially from a left-leaning perspective.
Speaking of social media, I do appreciate how much of your social media is pretty straightforward. You don’t do a lot of kissing the ring. Does that help or hinder you more? I could see it going either way.
I think it’s ultimately net neutral. With this album, a lot of the idea is that the modern world, the algorithm bullshit, is bad. Why would we buy into it? If we endorse a band it’s because we believe it. Pretty Bitter didn’t ask me to big up them. I just think people need to listen to that shit. Something I told the rest of the band is that trying to be relatable isn’t relatable. Being genuine is relatable. I think a lot of people can’t pick up the difference. They see relatable as genuine, but it’s really the opposite. It’s one of those “hello, fellow kids” things. We try to be as genuine as we can. If we were pumping up bands more transactionally, I think people would see through it. They’d say, “this band is just kissing ass.” If we did it, anyway, I don’t think we’d get any further.
What can fans look forward to in 2026?
No idea. We’ve got nothing in the pipeline. Maybe we’ll work on the next one? Honestly, I don’t know if we’re going to go on for another week or another decade. We’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes, and you’ve got to book tours eight months in advance. Normal we’d book things ourselves, but it’s become impossible. I booked us a tour in 2023, but it’s fucking impossible now. No one’s answering, and if they do, it’s “sorry, we’re booked.” That’s what you see all these stacked, staggered tours. It’s a win for fans. I like to see that. So, for Scarlet Street, nothing’s lined up for now. It’s everyone’s offseason. Here’s some good news: we’re working on getting vinyl out.
NO ALTERNATIVE is out now via We’re Trying Records.
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Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
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