Comet

Could you introduce yourself by sharing a song with our readers/ listeners?
Comet: Our song One is our most popular. I originally wrote it two years ago. It’s on our debut EP “Two-Winged” that we recorded in New York in 2023.

How did Comet as a musical project come to be? 
Comet: Originally it started as a solo project named after me that later became Comet the band. I was involved in different projects before this that were focused on creating music according to a collective vision. With this project, I wanted to collaborate with musicians who have more skill than me while still being able to lead the project.

I hate performing solo so I found a band that I could play live with. For me the live experience of a full band brings the music to another level in a way that can’t be emulated by a backing track. Rock music is something that should be experienced with a real live band.

Is there a big scene for the type of work you are making in NYC? Is it easy to find collaborators and opportunities?
Comet: In NYC definitely way more than other places, I lived in LA before and it fucking sucked for meeting people who made good music. Scene wise though I feel like there is one everywhere. Playing in Europe showed me people are so hungry everywhere for something raw and rock. Music these days is so overproduced and fake, and people want something different. It’s not like “guitars are better” but you can only listen to so much hyperpop or techno before it starts sounding the same.

Mainstream music in general feels like a hospital right now. There’s no center point to culture lately. I don’t know anything about pop stars anymore. Like my mom may not have liked Britney Spears but she knew what was going on with her because she was an interesting persona and she was everywhere constantly for better or worse.

Comet the music project is associated with the “neo grunge” movement. What does this term mean to you?
Comet: Neo feels like a sterile term to me, like something computer generated. The term I’ve heard most in the last 2 years in the NYC scene is “Nu-grunge”, like an amalgamation of nu metal+grunge, which is a better description of the type of sound being made now. It feels like in the last decades there’s been a lot of “grunge” revival bands that are not in the spirit of the original grungers. And now there’s a return to some of those aesthetics and figures that influenced it originally.

I think these terms like Neo or Nu are sort of what other people outside of the scene are labelling it, even though there is definitely a growing movement in underground rock happening. The recent revival of nu-metal also blends into goth rock, like Marilyn Manson and Evanescence, as well as Korn and A Perfect Circle. In my opinion it’s not really about one distinct sound but a loose connection of people who are inspired by similar periods of music.

The music video for “One”, which you directed yourself, feels very inspired by performance art from the 90s. Is visual/ performance art influential in your work?
Comet: The visuals are always an important aspect to me, when I compose a song I feel like I’m creating a whole world in my head, and directing this video was a chance to give a face to that. I feel like performance art is not so much an inspiration as much as music videos from the original grunge era.

You’ve done two mini tours in Europe in the last six months and both times played in Berlin. Is there something in the scene here that made an impression on you?
Comet: My wife Taraneh and I were invited to play Creepy Teepee Festival in Czech Republic last summer and she knew some people in Berlin so we booked a show there. I had never been before but it’s somewhere people in NYC love to talk about. Then after that the organisers of The Opioid Crisis Lookbook (OCL) paid for us to fly out to play the closing event for an exhibition at Traumabar und Kino, promoting the magazine’s most recent issue. It was dope and I felt like people were into our music but to be honest I only stayed in Berlin 72hrs total in my life, most of which I haven’t been sober. So I don’t really feel I can comment on the scene there.

The exhibition of OCL was a mix of “Neo Grunge” art and music combined with archival footage from their publication, which mainly consists of documentation of counter culture around the theme of opiate addiction. There is a similarity in your music with its “doomer” vibe, and this art with the sort of nostalgia for an earlier period, when issues like addiction and surveillance seemed simpler. Do you feel that linking your art with this documentation worked ?
Comet: I disagree that the exhibition or my art has a “doomer” vibe, actually I thought the exhibition was very hopeful, in my eyes it was an honest take on the reality people see around them. When I think of “doomer” I think more of like a nihilist neck beard metal band. The point of the art and the performances that night was about everyone coming together around images that may be perceived as negative by most of society but for us it’s sadly our lives or the lives of people we love. It wasn’t meant to be shock art or subversive. The realities of addiction will likely seem shocking to people who have never been immersed in it.

I think where the “Neo Grunge” sound comes in is in the addition of the computer, like for example in Alex G’s music, you can hear the addition of computer editing in the rock. Today, you could buy 90’s recording equipment and record in a throwback kind of way but that’s all that it would sound like: a throwback, because it’s not the 90’s anymore and it never will be again. With OCL it’s similar vibe when they include memes or internet archival footage about addiction. As far as messaging goes there’s still the underlying root of what the OG grungers faced but now it’s filtered through government surveillance and big pharma and AI and shit.

Grunge as a counter cultural movement in the 90s was associated with contempt for middle class norms and the embrace of things people consider mundane or depraved including the aesthetics of drug addiction. Is this a topic that you feel is still important to explore today?
Comet: I also kind of disagree that grunge was intentionally against the middle class, like Courtney Love was a trust fund kid, and it was kind of a movement mostly popular with the children of the middle class. The movement often drew attention  to the dysfunctional mental healthcare system and the class divide that runs deeper today than it ever has. It’s what OCL is doing today, it’s like “this is the reality we are living in, this is the elephant in the room and everyone knows it but no one wants to talk about it so we’re going to.”

Grunge isn’t about purposeful shock factor, that’s more the nu-metal route like Skinny Puppy dissecting a (fake) dog onstage. When it comes to something like Courtney Love’s “Kinderwhore” aesthetic for example, I don’t think that she was dressing that way to just make a statement, it was more like those were the dresses she made to wear growing up now she is wearing them as an adult, because she’s like “this is who I am, I’m the little girl that you did this to. Here is my best Sunday dress you all tear off of me.”

And with “aesthetic” addiction stuff I don’t think she was like “I’m gonna be so high on stage to show you guys what a high person looks like” it’s more like, “I’m gonna do heroin tonight and I happen to have a show at 10pm”. It’s only shocking to the people far removed from this reality. I think heroin chic and labels like that are things people coined once there were enough “cool” heroin addicts. It put that look into the zeitgeist as aspirational in a way because they were amazing artists.

A lot of social outsiders feel drawn to these counter cultural movements. Is that something that inspires you?
Comet: That’s not something I think about. I create art for myself, it’s a thing I feel compelled to create. I’ve always been different so naturally people who are different will relate to that sentiment.

Do you have any upcoming tours or releases you would like to share?
Comet: We have a new single coming out on March 28th called “Opium” and a new EP called Quitter sometime after.

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Photography: Alex Hall. To follow Comet, click here. For more interviews with NYC-based creatives, click here.