Listen to Styrofoam Ones' "O.T.T.A.P."
Who are they?
Styrofoam Ones’ Alexander The is from Etobicoke. Josh McGuirk is from Scarborough. One booze-addled night in a downtown bar, they ended up at the same impromptu jam session; now they’re a raucous dance-rock trio (rounded out by drummer Clay Jones), one whose following stretches all the way across the city, and stops at all points in between.
On their grind, from suburb to shining suburb
Over pints at Embassy, down the street from their cozy studio wedged inside a Filipino cultural centre in Kensington Market, The and McGuirk explain how they came to build a grassroots fan base. The describes an early Scarborough show in a makeshift venue next to a recycling plant, saying, “the whole show was cursed. A couple of people in the band before us couldn’t hear their mics, I couldn’t get sound through my keyboard, I spilled a beer on my keyboard… but the people there were feeling it.”
In the ensuing year and a half, Styro’s now-legendary live show (bolstered by the release of a seven-inch and an EP) found them doing gigs in everything from art galleries to The Horseshoe to a U-Haul truck for Nuit Blanche. “Now we’ve got a solid crew that come and check us out at every show, and they wild out. That’s what it’s for; they will come down and pay that TTC fare.”
“It’s funny,” McGuirk adds, “you look at our crowd and it’s such a cross-section of Toronto.”
Dance-rock in 2010 = ?!@$
McGuirk: “Some people have told us that we’re very hip-hop, and we’re like, ‘what?’ Others say we’re a dance band, some say we’re a punk-rock band playing Vangelis. We don’t know where we are, genre-wise. We’re just putting the energy out there.”
Is there more to their music than just a beat?
The and McGuirk are adamant that their live show comes first; now that they’ve done the EP, though, they’re looking to develop past the raw punk-funk of early songs like “O.T.T.A.P.” (“On The Tiles And Plastered,” or as The points out, the name of a Filipino cookie spelled “otap”). “The first record was to document what we had at that point,” The says. “Now we want to see where the fuck we want it to go.” They point to the subject of their next video, “Blue Lines”; it’s a hyperkinetic jam with a dash of Franz Ferdinand and some previously unhinted at romantic melancholy (“change your lover / chase another”). “It’s also about living in the city day by day and being forced to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily always do, just to get by,” says McGuirk, “whether it’s for financial survival or whatever.” The says the song’s title is a reference to the TTC’s night service, “when you’re waiting at 3am in the morning trying to catch one.”
He describes the feeling as both devastated and hopeful at the same time. “It’s definitely a Dr. Seuss kind of trip.”