Artist Spotlight: Meet Signal Static
How did you come up with the idea?
The whole ‘cancel culture’ thing is pretty hard to miss these days when every celebrity with an axe to grind is obsessing about it as a means of distracting people whenever their latest bigoted tirade or straight up abusive behaviour comes to light. At a certain point, I started to see people in my life trying to use ‘cancel culture’ as an excuse for all kinds of abusive crap they were getting up to and I couldn’t help but say something about it. In musical form, naturally.
Were there any challenges or breakthrough moments during the songwriting process for "Cancel Me?"
We were going through a bit of a transition during this whole period of the band after our former frontman and vocalist left the band during Covid and Ryan stepped up to take over the role. “Cancel Me” was among the first of our songs with Ryan wholly taking over as lead vocalist, and also the first song that Ari Mihalopoulos from Destropy did the mixing and mastering for us. Ari came in and just got our sound with very little effort and made us sound better than we had ever sounded before.
How does "Cancel Me" fit into your overall artistic vision?
Our artistic vision has mostly consisted of writing whatever song it occurs to us to write in the moment and “Cancel Me” was no exception to that. After we released ‘Start Transmission’ (our debut album) we realized that a lot of our songs tended to be on the longer and downbeat side of things, and we made a conscious decision to focus on writing songs that felt more urgent, energetic and economical. While “Cancel Me” is probably the heaviest and darkest of that batch of songs, I think it sits very nicely in that pocket.
Can you tell us more about you as an artist?
We’re three guys from the West Coast of Canada just trying to make music that we like and that means something to us all as individuals. The idea behind this band which has really continued throughout its existence was to create a platform where each of us can be creative and musical in the way that makes the most sense and with each other’s support to make all of the ideas as good as they can be.
Are there any specific themes or messages that you aim to convey through your music?
We are really interested in using music as a means of exploring what it means to be human and specifically what it means to be good humans. Sometimes we get a little political, and other times we dig into our own feelings and experiences to find kernels of truth. It may be a bad sign for humanity that the majority of our songs seem to end up revolving around the message “Don’t be an asshole”.