Nashville’s indie scene, in Dillon Wilson’s reading, has settled into a kind of polite uniform — long-sleeves under t-shirts, the same sweater crowd passionately nodding their heads in a nice row to 70 BPM songs filed under shoegaze, “whatever the fuck that means anymore.” Wilson loves plenty of those bands — he’s just over the format, the half-assed between-song banter, the crowds nodding in formation. He and his drummer-slash-co-vocalist Brennan run a different operation. They call it Barracuda Disco, and the Nashville two-piece — garage rock with hardcore punk and country folded in — just put out their debut EP.
The cleanest way Wilson sums up what they were aiming at: The White Stripes with breakdowns, The Sonics with a Metalzone, The Beach Boys but evil. He’ll expand on the last one if you let him. “Old school, American response to British Invasion, but make it new and heavy” is how he puts it. The country wasn’t in the original blueprint — it crept in once they’d been in Nashville long enough for the city’s twang to seep into the writing. He treats the genre confusion as a feature, not a bug. “I believe that fight is the ingredients settling themselves, ya dig?”
The two-piece thing isn’t a phase, and they’re done getting asked about a bass player. Wilson’s argument is partly aesthetic: a third member would just make them another band.
“There are a million three-piece rock bands. They all need group chats. They all need vans to tour. There is just an expected rock-ism that comes from a more standard line-up.” He points to Two Piece, Angine De Poitrine, and The Garden as evidence the format is getting hipper, and notes that people always seem more impressed by how loud two people can get. The economics work too — fewer members, but more effort per head.
“Me and Brennan, the drummer/co-vocalist are the band. Anything else would mess with our telepathy and mojo.”
In a live setting Wilson reckons they sound huge, and the duo set-up shapes the writing accordingly.
They aim for maximum density: as many melodies sung, strings played, and drums hit at once as the two of them can pull off. Future songs are going to widen the range — chill, country-leaning sections sitting next to LOUD and MEAN ones in the same track. The recordings on the EP go after a similar idea: a loose wall-of-sound-but-electric-guitar vibe, with countermelody stacked everywhere and parts sharing notes wherever possible.
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Aesthetically they’ve carved out something Wilson calls “garagey business-casual” — a move away from the Nashville indie default of slacker long-sleeve-under-a-t-shirt. The aesthetic and the attitude line up.
“Chalance is coming back, and we CARE about things, and we want YOU to care about things as well.” Off-trend in the city by his own admission, and he counts that as a good thing. Hardcore, indie, and country live in mostly disconnected pockets in Nashville — Barracuda Disco’s project is to roll all three into the same ball. As a two-piece they also back solo artists whose music has nothing to do with their own, which bridges the gap from another angle.
The EP itself was a learning process for Wilson. It was the first record where the responsibility for getting it recorded and finished landed entirely on him. Lyrically, the songs come out of the disillusionment of a bad relationship ending and the loneliness that followed. The timing got cyclical: between writing the lyrics and releasing the record, he had a whole new relationship blossom and tragically rot, which he says feels full-circle. By the time the EP was out, the lyrics had turned into something he calls emotional karaoke — subject matter he no longer relates to, but those are the lyrics. “It just helps me see how cyclical the human experience oft is.”
The live show is where most of this gets its loudest argument. Wilson says punk bands have energy and country bands have stage presence, and that most of the bills they play sit lacking in both.
“We have this kineticism in our live performances that seems lacking in our respective genre-corner in the city.” His go-to image for it: he and Brennan come off stage able to go down a slip-and-slide, because they care about being entertaining.
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