“I was, like, not totally sure it was done,” Brady says, “and then it was out, and I was like, ‘It’s done, I guess.’ ”
Les laughs. “When it’s out, it’s definitely done,” she says.
In person, they’re visually similar—pale skin, lots of bitchin’ blond hair—but Les (on a couch, in a zipped-up black hoodie) is expansive and emphatic where Brady (in a swivel chair, facing away from the mixing desk) is tight-lipped and a little cagey.
At one point, the conversation turns to music discovery. Brady volunteers that these days he mostly listens to the radio in the car—pop, classic rock, “NPR shit.” Then they’re off.
“Radio is sick,” Les says.
“It’s everywhere,” Brady says.
“It’s right here.”
“There’s music in the air right now.”
“If you had an antenna you could pick up a radio signal.”
“So many of them.”
“Also,” Les says, “the best advertisements are on radio. Hard-sell car ads are, like, so good. I like the local car ads where they throw a million effects on the voice to emphasize one word—they’re like, New!, with a ton of chorus, and then they’re like, Low prices, but that has a huge echo. I’m loving that so much.”
Will the next Gecs album sound like a hard-sell car ad, then?
“It’s actually just gonna be a jazz-rock fusion album,” Les says.
“It’s just all jazz. Ten songs. Trio, no vocals,” Brady says.
“Six minutes each. Lots of scatting.”
They always seem like they’d be more comfortable just talking to each other. Their answers don’t shed much light, but their back-and-forth illuminates something about the way they work.
“Dylan’s a nice person who likes assholes, and I’m an asshole, so it works perfectly,” Les says. “The duality is how it works. Positive negative. Negative positive. I make sure the songs aren’t too good.”
Brady studied audio engineering in college; Les studied acoustical engineering, a different discipline more focused on sound itself. “And then I was recording [music] in my dorm,” she says, “and I was like, ‘I don’t even want to fuckin’ study this anymore. I’m just gonna do it, and study something else.’ I switched to an engineering degree.”
You can still find some of Les’s non-Gecs recordings—“finding-my-voice type shit,” some of which she made under the pseudonym Osno1—on her Bandcamp page. Although the Gecs aesthetic is ostensibly a creative mind-meld between her and Brady, the division of labor becomes easier to understand when you hear her solo albums. Despite the presence of programmed drumbeats and the occasional airhorn blast, 2016’s hello kitty skates to the fuckin CEMATARY and 2017’s I Just Don’t Wanna Name It Anything with “Beach” in the Title are lo-fi and personal, reminiscent of the quiet moments that punctuate a Gecs song before it shoves you back into a warp zone. As on the Gecs album, she recorded many of the vocals in her bedroom closet.