In episode 3 of True Detective season 1, Marty Hart is describing a traveling revival ministry he and Rust Cohle once investigated. “Old-time religion,” he says, smirking. “You can imagine what Mr. Charisma thought of that.” Cohle, the show’s killjoy lead, had no patience for what he saw as low-IQ piety, and the line stuck.
Years later, two friends from Houston named their folk project after it. Mr. Charisma release their debut EP ‘Evil in This World‘ on May 19, four songs in minor and Dorian scales, sung in the voice of a man who has been disappointed enough times to find it instructive.
That voice keeps coming up. “The general premise of the voice in this band is one of the cynic,” Daniel Austin says, “someone like Rust Cohle, who sees another side of the issue at hand. Someone who wants to probe further into the heart of matters to hopefully get to some clearer, more accurate understanding of truth, no matter what the cost. But that’s often a sad endeavor, so the mood of the songs reflects that entirely.”
The Bandcamp tagline reads “sad music for assholes.” Asked if that bio is a joke or a warning, Austin doesn’t hedge: “Yeah, that’s tongue-in-cheek, which means it’s funny because it’s true. Just ask our wives.”
Mr. Charisma is Austin (Die Young) and his longtime collaborator Chris (Will To Live). They have known each other since they were 14. They went to high school together, got into hardcore together, and have played in Will To Live together for over 15 years.
The music they’re making in this new project, Austin says, isn’t actually new for them as listeners. “This is the kind of music we’ve been listening to on drives after shows on tour for ages, and to some extent we’ve grown up with some of the influences for it, so it’s not new for us as far how we enjoy this style. That’s part of the vibe, too, to put it on and go for a drive. It’s mellow, but not too mellow, like Outlaw Country.”
What is new is the songwriting. Austin had been working on acoustic demos for Mainlรคnder, his cover-only side project, when one of them turned into “Mind Don’t Work.” He sent the demo to Chris. Chris said he had always wanted to sing in a project like this, recorded a vocal take on his phone, and sent it back. “My jaw dropped,” Austin says. “Immediately we knew we had to explore this further, and maybe we have been playing the wrong genre all these decades.”
There’s something quietly pleasing about watching hardcore lifers pick up acoustic guitars and not try to make them sound heavy. Years ago this kind of swerve might have read as a betrayal. These days it lands as a relief. Austin in particular has been one of the smartest and most articulate writers in hardcore for a long stretch. His lyrics in Die Young pulled from philosophical pessimism long before that vocabulary became normalized in the scene. Mr. Charisma reads as a logical destination.
For Austin, True Detective season 1 isn’t moodboard fuel. The show sent him down a longer path of reading philosophical pessimism, which shaped both Die Young’s 2016 LP “No Illusions” and the Tooth and Claw record he made with Scott Crouse. The cynic-as-narrator voice on Mr. Charisma is a continuation of that, just unplugged.
The title track is Austin’s interpretation of what the show called the “psychosphere,” a metaphysical dread that hangs over the whole season, from the Louisiana swamp to the corruption of organized religion to the apathy of the police department.
The song’s argument is direct: “There is evil in this world and it’s in me / I’m not above it, though I try to be.” Austin maps the idea onto the Jungian Shadow, Schopenhauer’s concept of Will, and the Jewish notion of Yetzer Hara. “The evil in you is necessary for survival,” he says. “So don’t act like you’re above it. Instead, learn how to control it and utilize it for the greater good.”
“Mind Don’t Work” reads most plainly as a report from the present moment.
“We are modern personality projections running on primitive software,” Austin says, “and we are highly emotional, to a combustible extent. We have all the world’s information at our fingertips all the time, much of which we don’t even verify before reacting to, and it’s making us insane. People are less adapted to survive in the natural world than they ever have been on average, but we really think we know everything. We’re not happy, but we think we have the answers because we are fed answers in reels constantly.”
The song’s chorus is its own indictment of that: “Centuries to grow / A mere weekend to kill.” Austin points to two scenes from the show. The first is Cohle’s monologue from “The Locked Room” about time being a flat circle and history repeating itself and nothing really being solved. The second is from episode 5, where Cohle describes his success in getting confessions: “Everybody knows there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is.”
“Cold Feelings” is the curveball: a Social Distortion cover, Austin’s favorite of theirs, picked because the sleeplessness and anxiety in the lyrics matched what the EP was building toward. “That could be in reference to Rust Cohle,” he says, “or really anybody.”
“In Another Time” closes the EP and lands as its cleanest editorial statement. The song rejects utopian thinking in both directions: the nostalgic kind that idealizes a “golden era that we must revive,” and the future-facing kind that thinks the right ideology, leadership, or majority religion will finally fix everything.
“Utopian thinking was the guiding vision of every mass murder campaign in history,” Austin says, listing Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. “Let’s not waste our time dreaming about a perfect world. Instead, maybe just make the best of things right now, as best we can. That’s really about as good as it gets. We’ll all be happier for it.” He points to the final episode of the show as the song’s anchor: Cohle bewailing from a hospital bed that he and Marty “didn’t get em all,” and Marty answering, “That ain’t the kinda world it is, but we got ours.” “There is so much wisdom in that line,” Austin says.
The Gulf Coast is the other backdrop here. Austin grew up driving through Lake Jackson, Freeport, Surfside, Galveston, and Pasadena, sometimes to surf, sometimes for shows with his first band Finer Truth.
His mother’s family is from Louisiana, and he spent a chunk of his childhood visiting relatives there. Both his mother and grandfather graduated from LSU in Baton Rouge, where he later went to basketball camp as a kid.
“One of Houston’s nicknames is the Bayou City,” he says, “and a lot of the surrounding industrial areas look exactly like the parts of Louisiana portrayed in TDS1. Southeast Texas and Southern Louisiana do not feel much different on first impression if you drive through them in the same day. These places are humidly eerie, desolate, polluted, like a violation of nature, but in neglected or economically depressed areas, you see where nature is fighting back and taking over. It’s a perfect backdrop for both murder tales and dark folk music.”
Asked for films and shows that sit near the world of Mr. Charisma, Austin offers: The Wire, Seven, No Country for Old Men, Hell or High Water, Twin Peaks, Quarry, and Mindhunter.
“All of the above are great modern noir tales of absurdity and human depravity with very flawed heroes. The flawed modern hero is one of the aspects I enjoy most about this genre.” Fargo season 1 gets an honorable mention, with a caveat that it leans more dark comedy than the rest.
“I honestly rate it as a more gritty, compelling, and relatable tale of good versus evil than even Star Wars ever has been,” Austin says of True Detective season 1.
Then a small request: “Hey, someone please send this interview to Nic Pizzolatto. We’re heaping high praise on the dude here, though very well deserved, and we would love it if he gave Mr. Charisma a spin.”
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