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THE SONIC ROAD PODCAST
The stuff that doesn't make it to YouTube.
What's up everybody — Beau here.
Episode 39 is Moon Destroys, and I've been sitting on this one for a minute because there's a lot to get into. I sat down with Juan Montoya and Evan Diprima to talk about their new album Omni, out September 4th on Blues Funeral Recordings. The full episode drops Tuesday, August 19th on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but you already know how this works by now — you get it here first.
Quick background if you're not familiar: Juan's a founding member of Torche, Evan came up through Royal Thunder, and the two of them have been writing together since 2009. Last year they picked up Zach Amster of Abrams on lead vocals and rhythm guitar after meeting him on tour, and that addition changed the whole shape of this band.
Omni is shorter and punchier than their last record, She Walks by Moonlight, which leaned cinematic and atmospheric — more My Bloody Valentine and The Cult than straight-up heavy rock. This new one is stripped down, to the point, captured almost in real time. I've been buried in expansive ten-minute psych rock records all summer, so getting something this direct was a nice change of pace, and it's the kind of record that gets better every time I put it back on.
We covered a lot of ground — the origin of the band, the guest list on their debut EP (Troy Sanders/Mastodon, Paul Masvidal, Bryan Richie/The Sword), how COVID nearly buried them the week that EP came out, how Blues Funeral's Jadd Shickler brought them into that world I wrote a whole newsletter about a few months back. I'll get into some of that further down. But there's a stretch of this conversation I want to spend real time on here, because it's the same fight I keep circling back to on this show.
Where Your Merch Money Actually Goes (Again)
Midway through the interview, the conversation turned to venues taking a cut of merch sales, and Juan and Evan didn't hold back on how they feel about it. To be clear, this isn't something they've built a workaround for — it was two guys venting about a practice they're sick of, in the moment. But at one point they started kicking around an idea: pop-up merch stands set up across the street from the venue, so the club never touches a dime of it. Half-joking, it turned into bring a box truck, park it, open the back doors, and sell out of it like a food truck. A merch truck. Nothing either of them has actually done. Just an idea that came out of being tired of the same problem every band in this scene runs into.
That's the part I want to go further on here, because it's not a one-off gripe from one band having a bad night. It's a real structural problem in this business, and the numbers back it up.