No strangers to weird and wild frequency undulations, the Lost Dogz have paved a pathway in 2019 to inordinate amounts of success. Their Off The Chain Tour has been gallivanting across the country, slinging saucy beats at all who dare bring their bodies within earshot. Narrowing their focus towards having as much fun as possible while remaining true to themselves, they’ve acquired quite the passionate fan-base in the short amount of time they’ve all been working together. I recently had the great opportunity to catch up with Conrad aka sumthin sumthin, Eric and Andrew of Eazybaked, and Bryce (Milano), after their high-energy sets in Portland this past week. Check out our conversation in full below!
I’ve played bad shows with people I’m not friends with and it’s just not the same as playing bad shows with people you love – sumthin sumthin
The Off The Chain Tour has been going on for the past month and a half for you guys! How has it been so far?
Eric – It’s been good! We’re all doing what we love to do together and that’s ultimately the main thing. We’ve had great shows and we’ve had rough shows, it’s been an up and down ride, but overall it’s been really good.
Conrad – But even the bad shows equate to so much happiness that it really doesn’t even matter. I’ve played bad shows with people I’m not friends with and it’s just not the same as playing bad shows with people you love, you know what I mean? It just makes it that much better because we just laugh about it and we move on. Usually when you’re by yourself like as a major headliner it like hurts your soul.
Eric – But when you’re with your friends it’s like ehh whatever, you just shrug it off and kill the next one, getting to hangout with your favorite people in the world in the meantime. We’re all brothers so we support each other as much as we possibly can.
Bryce – Everything’s been really great so far! I’m honestly honored to be on tour with kids I met on SoundCloud, it’s a pretty surreal feeling.
You guys did a few festival takeovers this past summer, can you compare those sets and takeovers to the tour?
Bryce – Festivals are a totally different experience.
Eric – Even if we are touring together right now, I’d still have to say festivals take the cake. It’s just an entirely different vibe. At a fest compared to playing a club show for example I feel like the overall vibe is more likely to be on point. Most of the time the sound systems outside sound a lot better for what we’re doing in regards to the low end shit.
Bryce – But comparatively there’s really no way to equate fests and shows, festivals are just a whole other spectrum.
Andrew – Festivals are a much better showcase of individual talent because on tour it’s kind of a bombardment of 4-6 hours straight of Lost Dogz.
Conrad – And sometimes we’ll all be booked on something similar festival-wise and it’s just not the same because we’re all trying to prove ourselves as individuals at fests and try to reach new crowds in our own audience. Whereas this tour is a way for us to Lost Dogz as a whole versus just like individuality.
Eric – Hopefully in the next 2 years we can incorporate the rest of the Lost Dogz members that weren’t on this tour onto one so we can fully represent us a whole.
It takes a toll for sure, but it’s honestly balanced out by all the fun we have with each other, so at the end of the day all the struggles are completely worth it. – Eazybaked
Tell me about the difficulties of touring, both from a physical and mental standpoint.
Andrew – Sleep is a big thing for both because obviously physically it isn’t helpful but after awhile it also drains you mentally. Lack of sleep is always a factor in what we do. Physical and mental health are both things that you have to be taking care of proactively instead of reactively. It takes a toll for sure, but it’s honestly balanced out by all the fun we have with each other, so at the end of the day all the struggles are completely worth it.
Bryce – Food, I can’t buy groceries for my fridge and store them because I’m in one state, one city a night and then another the next so most meals have to be out and that adds up quickly. I’m mostly eating like garbage *laughs* and it shows.
Conrad – You eat three $20 meals a day or one $10 meal and that really fucks with your overall health a lot especially when you’re drinking a bunch at night. So it’s really wise to figure out a budget for yourself from day to day on tour and you’ve got to tell yourself “ok I can’t exceed this $20-$40-$60 limit” depending on how well you’re being paid at the moment. You’ve got to be fed, you’ve got to be well-rested, and that’s a lot of our conversations right now. We went and got Thai food early today and we were collectively like “this is how we should be eating on tour” as opposed to some fried chicken or burgers. Take the extra step to actually find shit that will make you feel good versus what is just convenient in the moment. I feel like in regards to this group we have something really special, because we know how much we drink, how much we party, and we’re one of the few groups that really focused on individual well-being. You know what I mean. One of our best friends is in rehab right now, and we’re all here to back him because we saw a downfall in someone and we’re here to pick him back up.
Bryce – It can definitely be hard though because most of us are starving artists
Eric – Most things are all over the place, so it’s hard to really nail down a meal schedule and stick to a certain diet. We have late nights and early flights so your stomach can be off if you’re trying to catch a quick bite at the airport. But overall on tour we really help each other and look out for one another. We keep each other in line to the best of our ability and I feel like we all do a good job of that.
There’s two routes in the electronic music scene; the fast route which is where you mimic an already popular sound as best you can, or there’s the long, hard journey which is be yourself and have slow growth. – sumthin sumthin
Talk to me about Lost Dogz! You guys have shown tremendous growth in the past year, has it been what you were expecting? What do you believe has been the biggest factor contributing to that?
Andrew – Authenticity and originality. Authenticity in the sense that we’re all just out here trying to be uniquely ourselves and just represent who we are both as artists and as people.
Conrad – Every single one of us has our own sound, and a lot of people are out there really just saturating. We’re just trying to be the biggest, best version of ourselves and collective growth being our driving force. As long as everyone is on their own page of “I’m just trying to be myself and no one else,” then we’re representing our true intentions. There’s two routes in the electronic music scene; the fast route which is where you mimic an already popular sound as best you can, or there’s the long, hard journey which is be yourself and have slow growth.
Bryce – The special thing is that we’ve all believed in each other and our individual sounds since the beginning. We didn’t meet because we were friends in real life, we met because we each really fucked with each others’ music and felt like we could really make something great coming together.
Eric – My best friends are literally my favorite producers and artists and it’s honestly the shit. It’s an absolutely incredible feeling. When we play a track it’s because we individually believe in that artist and that track, so we have this deep connection to everything we play and I feel like that’s a perfect example of our authenticity. Our main goal has always been just to make dope beats together, and as long as we continue to do that we’re on the right path.
Conrad – In our sets it’s just us and our very close friends, we don’t play any tracks outside our circle that we don’t have any relation to.
Tell me about the impact social media, and specifically your fan groups, have had not only on your presence and fan interaction from a business/performance persona standpoint, but also as regular people?
Bryce – Mind-blowing.
Eric – It’s been crazy to see the support we’ve gotten honestly. Sometimes it even feels like an actual cult following that we’ve all brought together. These people are ride-or-die and it’s crazy to think that it’s all because of what we’re doing and the movement we’re pushing.
Conrad – In my opinion, social media isn’t our biggest impact in regards to fan engagement because, if you notice, a lot of us go to the after parties, we’re in the crowd after our sets while other people are playing, and frankly, most of our networking is just being friends with people. So, social media is cool, but that’s not why people show up to our shows. We’re not the best at social media, we’re not posting everyday, but it’s mostly about the groundwork. We do a lot of guerrilla marketing, if you will, and it’s not that we’re even conscious of it, it’s just what happens because we love the scene and the people that show up to our shows so much. I think Eazybaked is a great example of this because Eric will go out and just fucking rage with people and that creates this energy that people are attracted to because they’re like “oh my god, you’re human!?” which is such a weird thing because we each individually know we’re human, but you’ve got to show that humanity to everyone you come in contact with. I think each member of Lost Dogz does this so well and I believe that really feeds greatly into our collective success.
Bryce – And that’s why the whole thing is so mind blowing too because we’re all just normal kids that met on SoundCloud and still doing what we started doing, which is just making music. So when people come up to us and “praise” us it’s like “whoa.”
Eric – It’s hard to react to at that point honestly.
Bryce – I mean most of us still live with our parents hahaha, so to be placed on a pedestal is a strange feeling. It’s an absolute honor to have the support we do though, and something I won’t take for granted. From a business standpoint it’s working really well, but from a human perspective it’s shocking.
Eric – It’s touching, it’s humbling, it’s an incredible feeling.
Milano, the last time I interviewed you it was for your Shambhala mix! Can you talk a little about your experience at the festival?
Bryce – Shambhala is hands-down the best festival I’ve ever been to. They thoroughly care about their artists and how well the actual act is projected, you know what I mean. Other festivals are like “ok well we’ve got this side stage and we’re going to put less budget and less care into this because we have our bigger artists.” But at Shambhala, each stage is almost like its own festival, and Shambhala as a whole motivated me to keep this going. Hands down the most insane thing I’ve ever been a part of.
The last time we spoke you mentioned you had an EP on the way, would you like to talk a little about that?
Bryce – So with the EP I have 1 finished song and it’s the title track ‘Dark Energy’. Being on tour for a majority of the year hasn’t helped me finish much music to be honest. I’m so inspired to write new music, but being home for only one day at a home when I just want to sleep and eat food makes it extremely difficult to make any headway. I have another track I’m about to finish though, so there is progress being made and I’m itching to get back at it, but I’m definitely not going to rush anything.
Going off of that, how do you find a happy balance between the push to release content, while still making sure that it’s at a quality level that you deem fit? At what point do you consider a track fully completed?
Bryce – For me, a track will be finished and I won’t release it for about 2 months. The thing is, I’ll eventually get to the point where I’m like “is this good enough?” because I’ve heard it played so many times , so as an artist we have to remind ourselves that when we originally made that track we liked it and knew it was up to our standards. You can almost question yourself at times, so it’s nice to have that concrete reassurance. I have a hard time finishing music, but that’s what makes me, me. I’m not worried about quantity over quality at all. I look up to artists that can just crank out 30 tunes at a time and I’m just sitting over here with maybe 2, but if it was any other way it wouldn’t be a genuine representation of myself.
Eric – We’re very similar as well. Being on the road so much makes it very difficult to really hone in on an idea and flesh it out. Thankfully we’re taking off all of December and January, so we can really sit and marinate on tracks. Hopping in the studio, working a little bit, and then hopping back out is just not how we do things. We have to listen to a track over and over, really picking it apart.
Andrew – It’s definitely a quality over quantity approach at the end of the day, focusing on making sure everything we release is of the utmost quality that we can possibly achieve. Rather than the approach of, “how many releases can we pump out this month and then this month” constantly making deadlines to meet and detracting from creativity. There’s a middle ground to be met for sure, before you don’t want to wait so long that people lose interest, but you also don’t want to force anything and make it anything but authentic.
Eric – We just really want to make sure we’re pushing the envelope each and every time and not just putting something out to stay relevant.
Eazybaked, we haven’t had the opportunity to interview you guys before, so can you tell us how you guys got connected?
Andrew – We’ve been good friends since 3rd grade.
Eric – Yep since the 3rd grade, we’ve always been close and we started making beats together in the summer of our junior year of high school. Neither of us really had a musical background, but we were bumping Mr. Carmack and Flume and all the underground stuff. Those tracks all just really struck a chord with us.
What got you both into electronic music in the first place?
Andrew – I think it’s a little bit different for the both of us honestly. For me, it started with ripping songs off of LimeWire, and digging online originally for hip-hop. I think it definitely stemmed from hip-hop for both of us, that’s why our styles have naturally melded so well together.
Eric – For me it was really branching off of hip-hop and finding artists like Mr. Carmack and the others I mentioned through the internet and then just branching out my tastes from there. I’ve always been drawn to sounds that were unlike anything I’d heard before, I’ve always liked artists doing something different. Then we started going to shows, I had a fake ID and all that *laughs*, that pushed me into it even further. I started thinking “damn, we could really do this,” then we started fucking around working at it, and now here we are.
I feel like people make the scene into a competition in a lot of cases and I feel like it should be one big happy fucking community where everyone is free to contribute what they contribute. Making things a competition over genuine collaboration breeds egotistical bullshit. – Eazybaked
Tell me one thing that you love about the current state of the industry that you hope will grow, and one thing you currently dislike about the industry that you hope will peter out.
Eric – One thing I wish would end would definitely be people comparing one another. I feel like people make the scene into a competition in a lot of cases and I feel like it should be one big happy fucking community where everyone is free to contribute what they contribute. Making things a competition over genuine collaboration breeds egotistical bullshit. I feel like all of our intentions are in line with what we’re trying to promote, and in other areas of the scene it’s over-saturated with people doing it for the wrong reasons.
Bryce – There’s a lot of people that do it to be the next “someone,” instead of just trying to be themselves.
Andrew – It really goes back to our idea of authenticity as well.
Conrad – We never stand on the DJ table, we never yell “1, 2, ready JUMP,” we never do the stereotypical EDM shit. Not like we would want to do those things regardless, but they’re just examples of gimmicks that we don’t feel we need to do in order to be successful.
Eazybaked, you guys recently had the opportunity to play at Wakaan Music Festival in Arkansas, can you tell me about your experience there?
Eric – It was incredible! We played a 2am set which was the first late-night set time, and it was crazy to see people literally bum-rushing the stage, sprinting down this hill trying to get a good spot just for our set. People out there were literally mouthing our tracks out-loud which was totally surreal. Wakaan definitely did a lot for us, that was one of the biggest festivals we’ve played.
What artists do you guys listen to in your free time, Both EDM and non-EDM?
Eric – A plethora of things really! Edm definitely Tsuruda and Carmack, non-EDM lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Bon Iver.
Bryce – I love the Black Keys, and I’ve been listening to a lot of Animal Collective lately. I really like Modest Mouse too.
Eric – Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of chill shit, even some classical too. CJ put me on some dope airport heaters.
Conrad – I don’t listen to anything outside of real music in my free time. We do enough bass music weekend to weekend where I get inspired by bands that aren’t doing what we’re doing. One of my biggest inspirations is Coldplay, out of like everyone. Just based off the vibe they’re able to portray just in a single song like ‘Fix You’ for example. That song’s made millions of people cry their eyes out just by itself. So if I can find any sliver of life like that and put it into my own music, that would be awesome. I’d love to be able to make a bunch of people feel what I feel. So on a day-to-day basis, I almost never listen to bass music. It can almost drive you crazy if you constantly surround yourself with it.
Bryce – Especially if you’re someone that makes it. We listen back to our own songs so many times that we almost get sick of them, so listening to any other form of music that’s similar to ourselves feels almost monotonous.
Andrew – I’ve actually been listening to a ton of Weezer lately and it’s been great.
I’m with new management, they’re doing a ton of really dope shit, we’re all doing sick individual things. Next year we’re going to take some time from doing something along these lines so we can create another web and keep spreading this shit through whatever we can. – sumthin sumthin
Where do you see yourselves individually, and Lost Dogz as a whole, this time next year?
Conrad – I see us taking a year off and kind of developing each other as much as we can. I mean it’s not going to be a Lost Dogz 2.0 tour next year. This was just a cool proving ground and test to see what we can do, and I think the general consensus is to work on yourself individually and then build on that with each other. I’m with new management, they’re doing a ton of really dope shit, we’re all doing sick individual things. Next year we’re going to take some time from doing something along these lines so we can create another web and keep spreading this shit through whatever we can.
Bryce – To sum it up, a shifting of focus really.
Conrad – Not necessarily even something like a rebrand, just a realignment with our goals. Lost Dogz didn’t start off really focused, we just really liked getting rowdy.
Bryce – It wasn’t a joke, but it was like a really serious joke.
Conrad – Now that we know that people like what we’re doing and will show out to support us wherever we go, I think it’s time to be more serious about what we’re doing overall.
Follow Lost Dogz on: Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud
Follow Sumthin Sumthin on: Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, Spotify
Follow Eazybaked on: Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, Spotify
Follow Milano on: Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud
