Interview: Monoxide Brothers
Sometimes if you don't laugh, you'll cry, right? We wanna make fun party music, but we're really angry a lot of the time.
On the release of ‘Horses’, the second track ahead of their forthcoming EP Manic Pixie Dream Pop Jared Dix has a quick word with Birmingham electro-punks Monoxide Brothers.
Driven by a thumping beat and insistent synth line ‘Horses’ offers a sardonic takedown of tiresome patriarchal weakeners and comes with a fun animated new video. A duo of Emily Doyle (she/her, synths & beats) and Sophie Hack (she/her, vocals & synths) they’ve been steadily making friends with increasingly impressive live performances, even winning support from DJ Deb Grant on BBC 6 Music.
On the origins of the band Emily says “I’d been messing around with a solo electronic set for a while, spurred on by pals at Birmingham experimental institutions like Amok and Don’t Mind Control giving me a platform to let my noise gremlin out of the studio and onto the stage. Sophie coined the term “audio zoomies” for what I was doing at the time, which feels appropriate. I was just playing with loops and textures really, and seeing what I could get away with in a public setting.
One late night in the smoking area of the pub Sophie started reading some poetry from her notes app and I was immediately like “we need to put a beat to this”. We’re both pretty open about the fact that we’re very anxious people – who isn’t in 2025 – and a lot of that energy comes through in the music. It’s cathartic. Although it does mean some days we get together to write and realise we’re not in the right headspace and need to be like “actually, do you just wanna watch a trashy film instead?”
Cinema has a role to play in ‘Horses’, which isn’t so much about horses. Sophie explains “So, when I read that poem out to Emily, it was after watching the Barbie movie in the cinema. I think Ken’s realisation of the patriarchy not being about horses resonated with us enough to carry it on.” Emily adds “It’s kind of an in-joke that stuck. The whole equine theme definitely bleeds through into the track now, though, the percussion really feels to me like a horse galloping about.”
A playful sense of humour runs through what they do and balances out the earnestness of the song’s subject, as for how important it is to the band Emily thinks “Sometimes if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, right? We wanna make fun party music, but we’re really angry a lot of the time.” While Sophie says that with ‘Horses’ “Humour was not the intention initially, the song was one of the first we penned and it was a more litmus test. I was in an anxious spiral assuming I was no good at this music malarkey, kept stumbling over words and overthinking. Emily turned her back and I pretended she wasn’t there, the words just sort of fell out of my mouth as they are now, luckily she was secretly recording a voice memo at the time!”
Emily becomes animated on the question of what other films beyond Barbie had an influence on them “Now THIS is the question I wanna chat about. Where to start? I don’t know if Monoxide Brothers would exist if it wasn’t for years of rinsing Shudder and going to see every 2 star horror movie that comes to the cinema. Stuff we’ve both really loved the past few years has been things like Talk To Me, Barbarian, Ti West’s X trilogy… I LOVED Infinity Pool but I think that was pushing the limit for Sophie. One of the newer songs in our set is heavily inspired by I Saw The TV Glow, which was one of my highlights last year, it’s got this really great uneasy feeling alongside a really bright, considered art direction.”
“The video for our first single ‘Spine’ has a big Cronenberg influence, especially Videodrome – not just the practical effects but the dreamy, voyeuristic feel and the staticy analogue textures. We’re lucky enough to know a great SFX artist, Mel Boniface, who worked with our performer Amy McCranor to create this woman/creature hybrid. There was a lot of lube involved. And I found out this week that it’s been nominated for an award at Forward Film Festival which is a bit surreal to me!”
“The ‘Horses’ video was a weird bit of heatwave hyperfocus on my part. I’d been messing around with papercut animation, riffing on stuff like Terry Gilliam and the old Steve Madden ads, I wanted something cute but uncanny. I dunno what people are gonna make of it, to be honest. I’ve done a few animation projects lately but nothing quite this unhinged. I went digging through some public domain archives to find images that were sort of horse adjacent, some press shots from our pal Sam Frank Wood, and just built it out from there. Our live sets have a big visual element, our best pal Rose (frontwoman of Luxury Nan Smell) has started live coding some amazing visuals for us in hydra this year, so I felt like we needed something equally interesting.”
The AV element of their live show is striking, but so is a joyfully chaotic feel, a sense that the gear might cease to cooperate at any time but that they aren’t about to let that get them down. Asked about if or when the joy tips over into stress they both seem at home with it. “Sophie may not agree here but I LIVE for the chaos.” say Emily “My other projects (Luxury Nan Smell and Exotic Pets) have a traditional rock band format and the chaos there kind of comes from trying to keep the wheels on the whole thing. Where as working with electronics I feel like you have to find that chaos in different ways – if you just let the machines do their thing they will tick away quite happily, but we use live loops and feedback and body patching and they all bring these elements of unpredictability, and give the rig it’s own character. Sophie agrees “I think the chaos both keeps it fresh and makes what we do relatable. The thought of being on a stage holier than thou doesn’t sit right with me, so if we can extend what we’re doing to make people laugh, agree, disagree, think, start a conversation, then that’s the right direction.”
