There’s a tension at the heart of Overton‘s music that feels almost paradoxical on paper. They’ve got a punk purist’s pace with the fuzz and experimentation stoner rock (and borderline doom metal) that’s guaranteed to stick in your head. All while being lyrically unflinching in their refusal to look away from death, illness, and social collapse. With a dash of absurdist humor, of course.
Guitarist and vocalist Shayne Miel, drummer Nathan Buchanan, and bassist Dante Bruno are all veterans of the North Carolina underground, with resumes that stretch back through Bellafea and The Future Kings of Nowhere (among countless others). Together as Overton, they’ve channeled those decades of experience into something sharper and more personal.
For Shayne, the band’s lyrical core runs through a near-fatal lymphoma diagnosis fifteen years ago. A 20% chance of survival that permanently reoriented his relationship to mortality, the body, and the slow rot he sees playing out in the world around him. With a string of singles beginning with the delightfully insane “High On Faith” and a debut EP due this summer, Overton is ready to make some noise.
What’s something y’all have been listening to lately?
Shayne (vocals/guitar): Honestly, I’ve been listening most recently to Scotty Sandwich’s new band, Mental Gymnast. They’ve got a self-titled EP that came out about a month ago, and it’s great.
Dante (bass): I’ve also been catching up on stuff I totally slept on, like last year’s best records. And I’ve been getting into Drain a lot lately.
Who was the first musician you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Shayne: I have a very clear memory of sitting in my mom’s Honda Civic when I was maybe 13, listening to WXDU, the Duke station. Bad Religion‘s “I Want to Conquer the World” came on and I’d never heard punk rock before. It blew my mind. I was immediately obsessed with all things punk — went out and bought a bunch of albums and I’ve been listening ever since.
Dante: My mom was basically the biggest Beatles fan, so I only heard them growing up for a long time. But my punk rock awakening came when I got a mixtape from the Columbia University radio station. They played Farside, and it was the first time I also heard this song I could never get out of my head called “Flipper Was Dead”. Then a friend gave me a mixtape that had Minor Threat on it and I was hooked.
It sounds like college radio was a real gateway for both of you. Did that continue to be a resource for musical discovery as you got older?
Shayne: It definitely was. In my twenties, I listened to WKNC, the NC State station, a lot. Especially as I started playing in bands around here. I started playing in bands around 17, I think, but in my twenties things were starting to take off a little. I had a bunch of friends who were playing in bands, so it was really fun to listen and hear your friends on the radio — and hear yourself on the radio.
Dante: I went to college in Poughkeepsie at Vassar, and one of my best friends was a DJ at our radio station, WVKR. I ended up being a jazz DJ there of all things, but all the stuff I heard at that time just blew me away. That was the first time I heard The Nation of Ulysses, and I was just like, “What is this?! This is amazing!”
How did the three of you come together to form the band?
Shayne: Nathan and I have been friends for a long time, probably 17 years. We just met from hanging out in the music scene and having mutual friends. We’d talked for a long time about trying to play music together but it never quite fit. We always had other projects going on.
Then a few years ago we finally had a chance to play together and started working on some songs. And I was so excited to start playing with Nathan because I was obsessed with his old band Bellafea. It’s an incredible band. So I was really excited to get to spend some time playing with him. Dante and Nathan had played in a couple of bands together before, so Dante joined more recently, and it was really kind of his joining that started launching things. We got the songs together and started recording.
Dante: I also met Nathan through the music scene. The joke is that all the friends I made here somehow came through Craigslist band listings. I’d meet people and then meet other people and meet other people, and that became a core group of friends, including Nathan. I actually played with his wife before I played with him in a band, which was wild.
How did you land on your sound?
Shayne: We all come from similar musical backgrounds and grew up listening to punk rock. I think we all have a shared love of a few specific bands. I’ve more recently been getting into stoner rock and stoner metal, and I really wanted to see if we could blend those two things. You can’t quite hear it as much on the EP — maybe on one of the tracks you start to hear it a little — but some of the stuff coming on our next EP will really stand out that way. That was one of the intentional goals: to take that punk rock energy and blend it with the heft, the fuzz, the heaviness of stoner rock.
Dante: I have a little bit of an obsession with doominess, especially fuzzed-out bass. I have too many fuzz pedals. I’m a huge Sleep fan, Electric Wizard, Kyuss — that specific sound of the bass is incredible to me. I love the idea Shayne had to marry super fast punk rock with what’s usually considered very slow music. It just works so well. And then on top of that, with Shayne’s lyrics and melodies and harmonies layered on top, it becomes a totally new entity.
Shayne, from a lyrical perspective, where are you pulling from? Does the music come first or do lyrics happen concurrently?
Shayne: About 15 years ago I had stage four lymphoma and came really, really close to dying. I had about a 20% chance of surviving. That heavy brush with death left me with a lot of PTSD and a lot of thoughts about my own mortality. So a lot of these songs are pulling on those themes.
At the same time, our society right now is a disaster. It’s been a disaster for a long time, but it’s a particular disaster right now. You’re seeing this institutional rot happening. I’m trying to pull those things together: the decay of our bodies, the way we’re all going to die eventually and how horrible that is, and the decay of our society — seeing those things happen in parallel.
As for the process, I write all of these songs on acoustic guitar. I keep an acoustic guitar hanging on my wall, so if an idea pops into my head, I’ll play it there. A lot of times I’ll get just a snippet — a phrase I like or a little melody — and I’ll record that into my phone real quick and then try to figure out what sounds good with it and let that bubble in my head. Often an idea will come to me in the shower and all of a sudden I have a full chorus.
So it usually starts with a seed of an idea lyrically, then I’ll get a melody out of that, and then go back and fill in the lyrics. I tend not to bring it to the rest of the band until I have most of the lyrics done. It doesn’t feel like a full song until it’s close to that. And then we’ll take it and rip it apart — “okay, we need a bridge here, we need some extra texture there” — and that’s what actually turns it into a real song.
Dante, you mentioned coming into a situation where a lot of the songs were already written. What was that like?
Dante: I’ve played in punk bands and metal bands in the past, but the sheer speed of some of these songs actually made me change technique, like playing with lighter picks just to keep up. And now I feel like I’m probably at the top of my game just from getting through this band. I’ve played in super technical bands before, but sheer BPMs with precision. This is a really fun challenge. And now going forward and helping shape the music is really satisfying.
How does the collaborative dynamic work when it comes to shaping songs?
Dante: It really helps that Nathan’s such a great drummer. He can be heavy, he can hold back, he can go super fast. He’s also in a death metal band at the same time. But he always has a groove going, and that adds so much to the direction a song goes.
Shayne: Something I really appreciate about this band is that nobody’s trying to show off. It’s always about what is right for the song. We’ll disagree, we’ll push and pull and try to find the thing that is right for the song at each moment.
What does the rollout look like for the EP? How do you plan to support it with live shows?
Shayne: The first single comes out on April 3rd, so we’re really excited about that. We’re going to release one single a month, so early May, early June, and then the EP will come out in late June or early July.
Beyond that, we’re booking shows right now. We’ve got a show coming up at The Cave on April 23rd, and we’re trying to lay out some other dates. Hopefully, we’ll have the whole summer set up for playing a bunch.
How much have y’all played live up to this point?
Shayne: We’ve played a couple of shows, but not much. We played with Wolves & Wolves & Wolves & Wolves back in September, at Local 506. This winter we kind of went into hibernation. We’ve all got kids and all sorts of other life stuff going on, so we were focused on recording and finishing it.
Who are some of your favorite Triangle or North Carolina artists right now?
Shayne: Big fan of Treasure Pains. I’ve also been listening to Oort Patrol a lot recently; I haven’t met those guys yet but they seem really cool, looking forward to hopefully getting a show with them. Dante’s other band Gainsay is a great local band that we’re all fans of.
Worthington’s Law is great — that’s another one of Scotty’s bands. The guys in Doomsday Profit are awesome. My buddy Spencer is in MAKE, they’re great. And my friend Greg — he played with me and Nathan for a little while — he’s in Voidward, they’re awesome. Tooth, obviously.
Dante: And I’m a big fan of BANGZZ as well. There are so many great metal and punk bands around here. I’d also like to shout out Shayne’s other band, Meat & Three. We have yet to see them live, but the stuff we’ve heard is so good. Along with Shayne, I’ve been in the scene for a while, so I love the bands that are still around like Hammer No More the Fingers, one of my favorites.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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