Few bands experience an evolution as dramatic as Soft Kill’s. The band began with a few records that were sinister and synthy — in the realm of Cold Cave or Drab Majesty — perfecting the sound on their third album, 2016’s hypnotic Choke. Things got more intense and louder with its follow-up, 2018’s Savior, then leaned into more traditional post-punk on 2020’s cheekily titled Dead Kids R.I.P. City, a play on Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. After that, they released a record a year since 2022, each one less predictable than the one before it.

Soft Kill was conceived by Tobias Grave and is completed by his partner Nicole Colbath. The story of the project often starts with the tumultuous history: Grave’s struggle with addiction and stints in prison, which he discusses openly and grapples with in the songs. He got sober in 2018, and the music has since lifted from a dark fog into a more present, vibrant place. “Pretty Face” off Dead Kids R.I.P. City is devastatingly beautiful, guitars warm and synths glittering as Grave sings, “You laid there on New Year’s/ Your lips were turning blue/ I screamed and prayed and swung my fists/ To beat the life back through.” “Joy Is A Crime” from this year’s Escape Forever bounces with new-wave ecstasy as Grave contemplates the ephemeral nature of happiness, his voice emanating hope in spite of everything.

But Soft Kill is more than just a band. They excel at the craft of tongue-in-cheek ripoff merch; some designs include playing with the Champion, Sublime, Spirit Halloween logos. (My personal favorite is their faux New Yorker tote bag.) The artwork for their music is always an evocative image: a person in a black dress holding a rifle, their face concealed behind dark hair for “Another Nightmare”; a person kneeling before a body of water with their hooded head halfway in a hole in the sidewalk for 2022’s Canary Yellow; two young miscreants sitting beside each other, one sticking their tongue out and the other smiling mischievously, both of their eyes outlined with thick makeup and glowing red from the camera flash for Dead Kids R.I.P. City — all of which communicate this simultaneous longing to hide and be seen.

This specific, powerful sense of vision paired with their determination and talent has led to their ability to dodge usual music industry protocol, like labels or publicists. Their following is organic and obsessed, as well as spoiled considering how frequently they put out new music. On a phone call while the group was on their way to the first night of their tour, Grave talked about his musical upbringing, the elusive genre of Soft Kill, the past few albums, the act’s independent model, and their new EP Roseland. Read our conversation below.

You guys are based in Portland, right? Or am I wrong?

TOBIAS GRAVE: We were based in Portland off-and-on since the beginning, but about two years ago moved back to Chicago because buying a house in Portland was not a realistic endeavor, at least for me.

How much has that changed things for the band, being in Chicago?

GRAVE: In some regards it’s been really inspiring. I’ve lived in Chicago before, but being in a different environment and having different friend circles and a different backdrop and access to a lot of cities that we normally wouldn’t get to hit regularly like Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Detroit has been exciting. Portland’s really isolated; you have Seattle, which has never been the best place for us to play, and then you have 10 hours till you’re in Sacramento. There’s nothing really in between those places.

Portland was always a pretty wonderful place to be a band, but in sobriety especially the nightlife doesn’t really apply. It’s a big party city. It’s not really an environment that pulls me out of the house every night. It’s a big bar culture kind of place. Chicago is more affordable and has made it to where I feel like I’m being more creative and saying yes to more things related to tours and one-offs and stuff like that so it’s pretty cool.

Is sobriety easier in Chicago?

GRAVE: It is for me, mainly because I’m a recovering addict. My main drug of choice towards the end was crystal meth, and that is not something that is available in Chicago, but it’s kind of on every corner in Portland. So I don’t have the same triggers. I’m not walking out of the door and fighting to not pick up drugs every single day. But I think there’s a lot of nostalgia for not great times navigating my day-to-day in Portland compared to Chicago.

I want to start at the beginning. I know that you grew up in a musical family, and I wanted to ask what your earliest musical memory was.

GRAVE: My earliest musical memory was going to see Peter Gabriel and R.E.M. with my dad [laughs]. Part of that musical family was that my dad is a touring roadie and sound engineer. He had a friend that was mixing that tour so we went to it. That’s the first time I remember being in the presence of live music, even though I’m sure it happened prior to that. My dad worked for Aerosmith all throughout the ’80s when I was born. I spent a lot of time around that band and that rehearsal space. I grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

The first musical memory that I had that was really impactful was when my dad did sound for a show that was in a parking lot in New England, and it was ’80s hardcore bands Murphy’s Law and Gang Green. I saw mohawks and people dressed crazy, and I was like five or six years old, so it was pretty exciting.

What do you think drew you more to a parking lot than a stadium?

GRAVE: I think that there was not a sense of disconnect. I remember being able to just walk backstage and walk on the stage and walk up to anybody, be it a band or a local crew member or a fan. I felt like I was able to roam compared to those strict environments with dividing lines and backstage areas that you have to have landlords to access and it’s a production. It was my dad’s job, and it had been communicated to me as such, and it was communicated to me in a way where a lot of the magic that people might attach to it had been removed. I think that parking lot show was a lot more real.

Did you always know that you wanted to go into music?

GRAVE: Immediately. I used to draw stages and I had an imaginary band called Runaway Robot. I was obsessed with it; I thought that was the coolest. My dad’s brother is also a roadie, but he was into all the music that became pretty definitive of my taste growing up, just him giving me tapes and records. He would hand me guitars and build me little weird guitars and stuff like that. I spent a lot of time pretending that I was playing music long before I ever learned a chord.

Soft Kill started out as what I think a lot of people consider to be cold wave, which is more synth-based than guitar-based. I’m curious about how that happened.

GRAVE: I’ve always believed that’s somewhat of a misconception. There definitely was a synth backbone. I think the place that synth played on the first Soft Kill record [2011’s An Open Door] was the place that the bass would apply. I think that with An Open Door, all the melody and hook is in the guitar lines, and that came from being obsessed with what I consider to be guitar-based groups like Wire, Magazine, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Xiu Xiu. That was the approach. That was what was intended — Chameleons, things like that. There wasn’t a super vibrant scene for that shit when that first record came out.

We played with a pretty varied sort of bands. Music blogs and promoters and fanbases have, in my opinion, a more one-dimensional view of what that stuff is. It’s like, “Oh, it’s Joy Division. It’s the Cure. Or obscure synthwave kind of stuff.” There’s always been synth in Soft Kill. It’s always been an instrument. It’s definitely foundational, but there’s always been live drums. It’s always been a rock band, compared to a drum machine with a synthesizer bass and some synthesizer melodies and things like that.

We’ve been called cold wave and dark wave and post-punk and goth and post-punk revival and all this shit, but I don’t think there was an intention at the time. If they want to call it that, then sure. But I do I know that the band has evolved and changed sonically quite a bit. I think cold wave has always been kind of a reach to me, and I also was just like, “Maybe that’s just progressing.”

I feel like cold wave may have been helpful in some way because I know you guys are on a shit ton of cold wave playlists on Spotify. That’s how one of my exes found out about you. It’s good in that way, I guess.

GRAVE: Yeah. It’s interesting that you mentioned that, because now that playlists and streaming platforms are one of the main ways that people are interacting with and discovering music, if we get called alternative, post-punk, cold wave, dark wave, goth, whatever, and it ends up to us being included in playlists of those natures, I’m all for that. That’s fine.

You guys did a good job of avoiding being pigeonholed by doing a split with Portrayal Of Guilt. That was probably very interesting for a lot of people at the time.

GRAVE: That was one of the first big shocker moments. I would have people come up to me at shows and it almost felt like they had prepared their interaction with me based off of their perception of what I was interested in, artistically or musically. I would feel that, more often than not, they would kind of miss the mark, which is no dig on them. They want us to be into the stuff that I’ve been kind of being dismissive of, which I loved all of that stuff at one point. Clearly it shaped the type of songs that I write. It’s clearly bored its way into my subconscious. But I grew up in punk rock, and that’s the basis of it.

When we toured with Portrayal Of Guilt, I saw another band that was really trying to carve out their own little thing, and we really respected them as people. When we decided to do the split, it was definitely discussed that the contrast between the two would have a lot of people talking because a lot of people that interact with and consume music aren’t that adventurous. I don’t understand. Why is it like that? With Twitter and that type of stuff being as promotional as music blogs and things of that nature, we thought people talking about it in that way would be kind of fun. And it was. It was a lot of people that were super excited about that and a lot of people that thought it was the dumbest thing imaginable.

It’s also one of my favorite album covers. It’s so beautiful.

GRAVE: Yeah. That was going to be the album cover for Savior and we ended up not using it just because of the subject matter of what that record ended up being and we held on to it. It’s a photographer named Jane Pain and it felt perfect for that split. I think that we have always believed, at least as time went on, that having something that you see and you go, “Wait, what is that?” is pretty important with how much information is on the internet as you scroll.

As you mentioned, Soft Kill have been changing their sound quite a bit. I do need to inquire about that. I think it’s especially interesting with the last three albums, because it felt like Canary Yellow was very different, but then Metta World Peace felt more like your old stuff. Then Escape Forever was a totally new sound, just very happy-sounding to me.

GRAVE: With Canary Yellow, Dead Kids was a record that I did almost 99% of the musical writing of, and then Canary Yellow was in response to that where, with people that had been playing in the band live for a long time, I wanted to try to do something that was a little more collaborative to see what we got out of it. We wrote a lot of demos together and ideas and ended up choosing a few of those to go with songs that I’d written to make a bit of a more varied-sounding record. But what really shaped it sonically was that we went in with Rob Scnapf, who produced it. He had a vision for how it should sound. When I listened back on it when we got it, I was really excited about it. But probably if you were a long time “I want Soft Kill to be a post-punk goth band” fan, the way that the vocal was recorded, the way that the snare drum sounded, the way that the bass tone was, it was the opposite direction, almost on every component of what Dead Kids sounded like. I think we could have just repeated what we did before since that worked so well for us, but that sort of comfort zone doesn’t really exist in my brain.

With Metta World Peace, I do think you’re dead-on by saying that it’s more my old self and familiar because it definitely came out that way. When I was creating it, a lot of the elements that were seemingly unorthodox — like having that rapper Evil Pimp on a song and sampling old records and stuff like that for parts and tracks — I was like, “This is really radically removed and it’s going to be a huge misstep.” But I was having so much fun. Nicole and I were like, “Oh my god, this is playing out in a way that is really inspiring and cool in the moment.” Then when I listened to it, regardless of those elements, I was like, “This really has some of the most dark wave Soft Kill songs imaginable.” That record is really a response to Canary Yellow because I wanted Canary Yellow to have a bunch of elements like that — the really stream-of-conscious collage feeling and all over the place.

The second you let go of control to a producer, you kind of lose your ability to sculpt it, especially if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, which is an underlining part of Soft Kill’s creative process to begin with. I do not know what I’m doing. So I wouldn’t even have known how to communicate some of the more outlandish or seemingly outlandish shit to somebody that’s been making records for Elliott Smith and Beck and all these people for decades. I’d be like, “Hey, I think we should drop this Chubby Checker sample in here at half speed before this song.” “Excuse me?” “Nevermind. I’m gonna go sit back down.” It really required me to get back into my spot.

It made it to where writing Escape Forever, which is really inspired by all the stuff that I grew up on in my earlier years, like all the punk and stuff, it was just a no-brainer. Even though it was a big departure. The people that are on board for what I’m doing are gonna stay on board. We might gain or lose fans, but none of that should be a deterrent from writing what brings me joy.

Escape Forever was also mastered by Will Yip, which is super sick.

GRAVE: Yeah. Phillip Odom, who mixed that record, we met him years ago. He essentially — and if I’m wrong, Phillip can slap the shit out of me — I believe he apprenticed under Will. So he moved to Philly and worked in the studio with him on a bunch of albums. He learned and shaped his process working with Will. They have an agreement where the stuff that Phillip mixes or produces, Will masters it. And Will did a killer job. There’s always this kind of joke in writing and recording music like, “What is mastering and is it a necessary thing? And do I need to spend X amount of dollars to do it?” That was one of the moments where when we got the record back, I just was like, “He pushed this into a slightly more like three-dimensional zone and it’s perfect.” It was one pass and we approved it. We were really happy with it. Obviously, he’s known for knowing what he’s doing.

I’m admittedly very into emo music, so he produced basically all of my favorite records. I feel like he makes everything sound really loud and immersive, which I can hear on Escape Forever.

GRAVE: Yeah. The thing is I recorded almost the entirety of that record at home, the worst way imaginable. When you send somebody that’s mixing the record tracks, they want it a specific way. And I was like, “You know, you’re not getting it that way. You’re getting it this way. I apologize.” I get it in the best way that I could. But outside of the drums being recorded in a professional studio, everything else, for the most part, was recorded with me just plugging my guitar directly into an interface in my living room. So Phillip had a big job in his hands in that regard to make it sound big and he did such a beautiful job. I think one thing I would assume he picked up from Will, based on what you’re saying, is they know how to make stuff sound loud without removing what is impactful and organic about it. There’s a lot of people that can make something big, but lose its life and its character, and that doesn’t seem to be on their agenda.

You released those three records in the past three years, and you’re about to release an EP. I have to ask if you’re just constantly making music.

GRAVE: Almost constantly. I try to write every single thing that pops into my head. I find a way to document it, even if I’m just humming into my phone. I’m writing and demoing material almost constantly. That’s a big part of the process in sobriety; creating and writing music is just a day-to-day thing for me. That’s how I keep my sanity. There’s always 20 or 30 demos sitting and floating in a hard drive at any given time. Then once I write something that I feel like is the starting point for whatever the next project’s going to be, that’s when an album starts to come together.

This EP in particular is songs that were from the Metta World Peace mindset that were written around the same time. Metta World Peace and Escape Forever were overlapping in their concepts. These were songs that felt like they didn’t really belong on either but should still be out there in some capacity.

I want to ask about your pursuit to be fully independent, which I read about in an interview. That seems like it’s gradually changing, since you’re working with a label for the EP and you’re working with producers and booking agents. I’m wondering where you’re at with that.

GRAVE: The main reason that we decided to become an independent band was we did two records with a Canadian label. It wasn’t big on PR and promotional stuff. It was more like, “This is the label. We have a fanbase. It’ll be available in stores. I’ll pay for you guys to record and I’ll put it out.” That’s really the dream when you initially are just trying to create art and music. We didn’t really have business savvy or any real understanding of the trappings of that stuff. But luckily, there was no contract involved.

When we were getting ready to do Dead Kids, we initially were going to do it with the label that put out the split with Portrayal Of Guilt, but they offered us something that’s called the perpetuity deal, which means that they were going to own our record forever. It was one of the first times that being handed something we thought was our big validating moment or dream came with something that was really a shock to us. We were like, “Wait, this is what we have to do.” It was explained to us in very matter-of-fact that that was just standard business practice. We then talked to a bunch of people who said that that’s absolutely bullshit, and luckily we were able to avoid giving away a piece of our art.

We talked to another label after that, to put out Dead Kids. We found what we thought was the right home for us, which was a big indie label. They weren’t known for a specific sound or style and that seemed really validating because we really believed in being all over the place sonically and playing shows and tours with bands that are all over the place. Being on a metal label or a goth label would be limiting. So it looked like it was going to happen and then the pandemic hit.

When the pandemic hit, we got to see firsthand that without touring most of these labels didn’t understand what they could really do with a piece of your music. That was eye-opening and made us understand that the main promotional tool outside of PR relationships with writers and digital distributors having a monopoly on playlisting was via something that we were already doing for ourselves. We were already going on tour constantly. We were already playing like 150-200 shows a year. We said, “Well, fuck it. We’ll just self-release this record during the pandemic because who gives a fuck, and you guys can have the next one because we write a record every 20 minutes.”

And the amount of money and the amount of exposure and the gift that was given to us from self-releasing that record was so overwhelming and validating and financially rewarding that we were like, “Why would we ever do it differently moving forward?” That’s become a core part of our ethos. When I was on Twitter, that was what we liked to talk about. We’d like to be like, “You know, if you think giving away your album so that you don’t have to cover your $3,500 recording budget is the win then we’re just on different pages.” But they’re not going to tell you that you shouldn’t do that, and they’re not going to tell you to advocate for yourselves. These are the type of things you need to look out for in these contracts because you can fall trap to it. The worst thing about that is if you sign a bad record deal and then you go on tour and you never get to the point where you’re making what they call headliner money, how many bands can tolerate the fatigue that comes with not being able to pay your bills for three years straight in some attempt to blow up? And you’re not making any money from royalties from an album because you’re still in debt to a label which you’re a tax write-off to, and on and on and on. That was where our heads were at.

With Born Losers [who released the new Roseland EP], they reached out to us. Essentially, the business model of that label is really cool because they do as much of it in-house in a way that is included with working with them to begin with. I don’t want to put this shit out there, but you’re essentially not paying for a bunch of the stuff that they normally rack up bills for as you’re coming into an album cycle. But with an EP, I told them very clearly, “I’m not giving a label an album.” Part of not doing that and being able to own our masters and generate the kind of money that we’re able to generate from our own album cycles by self-releasing our records means that we can do one-offs and fun projects with smaller labels that seem to have inspiring ideas about how to work with us. That’s how this one came about. They really support Soft Kill and they think the vision is cool and they wanted to create something that could stand alone and be relevant to their catalog but also be of benefit to us via being able to utilize some of their PR and digital promotion and playlisting and essentially just experiment and see: Does putting Soft Kill in this place with with these resources do anything for us? Because at the end of the day, we created a cool EP and I’ve had a fun time working with them and we get that regardless, but maybe there’s more to it and you don’t really get to know that if you don’t try. And you don’t get to try stuff like that if you’re assigned to a four-album deal with little to no movement or say-so in what your schedule is going to be.

I did see that Dead Kids was #1 on a Billboard Alternative chart, which is crazy.

GRAVE: [Laughs] I’m sorry, it’s so stupid and weird, but yes.

That’s insane for a self-released album.

GRAVE: Yeah, we sold thousands and thousands and thousands of copies on pre-order, and I had never had that much money in my entire life, and we cried. Nicole and I are both recovering addicts and essentially lived in abject poverty for a decade and a half each, never believed that we would make money off of art and to own the record and to be able to define the story of it and not compromise with a label’s vision of what it should be and to press it locally in Portland at Cascade and to distribute it ourselves and to have it reach that many people and be on a few Billboard charts, including a number one slot. We were just completely floored.

Aside from loving your music, I’ve also been wanting to interview you because I noticed that music publications don’t cover you because you don’t have a publicist. But that also makes the band more interesting, because there are so many cases of bands being covered in every publication and you get tired of seeing them everywhere and the PR being pushed so hard. So I thought Soft Kill was interesting, being less annoying.

GRAVE: I think that you’re the only person that mentions us on blogs. Your name is attached to every single time we end up on Stereogum. We got ignored by all those places because of the reasons that you’ve stated. We came to a place of accepting it and being fine with it. Then when we started to see ourselves pop up on there, it was validating. And then we saw your name attached every time we were like, “This is cool,” because music writers have always been a key part of how I’ve found music to begin with through Maximum Rocknroll and print zines that I bought as a kid. If they are attaching themselves to what they think is relevant and interesting and wanting to show it, I would love our art could reach people in that manner. I don’t fully understand the business of music blogs, but I assume that there’s a lot of pre-existing relationships that take priority over other things. But what do I know?

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird. To me, Choke is a classic album. I don’t know how people don’t know about that.

GRAVE: [Laughs] If that’s true, that rules. But I also know that we’ve been able to exist in this cool middle ground where some people go, “You guys are a classic, legendary band, and you guys are crushing it,” and then other people are like, “You’re an obscure band that nobody cares about and I want to cherish you because of that.” We’re about to go on tour and all the venues are pretty fucking big — the biggest venues we’ve ever headlined — and we expect to do really well, and the band does really well. I live off of the art completely.

I do think that it benefits us at the same time that we don’t get a lot of that kind of love, because people get to have, at least in their own perception, a more intimate connection to what we do. You’re not having to interact with us through the wall of management or a label. If you buy a record from us, we’re the ones fucking mailing it to you. If you come to our show, we’re at our merch table, and we’re not in a fucking hotel waiting to take the stage. We’re still just completely geeked that we get to make art and make music and then go play it with for people. There’s enough people that celebrate what Soft Kill does that it’s made it to where I don’t have to have a 9-5 job, and that’s awesome. But I can only imagine what having this “team” behind it would have also done, even though I don’t think in the long run it would have been worth the sacrifice.

I also think your merch is probably a big part of that.

GRAVE: For sure, absolutely. There’s a contrast that we were talking about with the split with Portrayal Of Guilt where we have not made pigeonholeable post-punk/dark wave merch. We’ve made some stuff that scratches that itch or whatever, but we’ve also just been inspired by streetwear and high fashion and all stuff that we wore when we were kids and trends and things that aren’t trends and just having fun with it. And then releasing things rapid-fire and doing it as often as possible and in small quantities and again having fun with it without any rules or guidelines attached.

That’s really benefited us — trying to be as creative as possible but also trying to come with good quality and have enough variation to where it’s not one person that can buy a Soft Kill shirt and have it fit their aesthetic because we try to be as all over the place as possible. But yes, using that as a creative outlet, in addition to the music, has been massive for us. Almost as important as the music, as weird as it feels to say that.

My last question: What’s your favorite Soft Kill song?

GRAVE: It’s gone all over the place. I would say right now… The song that I currently love the most is “Molly.” I love it because when I wrote it, I remember feeling a sense of peace because it was my first step forward from leaving Portland and rebuilding in a lot of ways that are its own in-depth conversation. I really felt like I had harnessed something that would be inspiring and it’s why that record even exists, just because everything became really simple after that. And I just love playing it. I love the vocal melody. It’s an example of when I feel like I know what the fuck I’m doing for five minutes. But it changes. It’s always an older song or a brand-new song. It goes back and forth. It depends on where my mental health is at.

You probably get this a lot, but “Pretty Face” and “Magic Garden” are some of the most beautiful songs in existence.

GRAVE: “Pretty Face” is probably the most important Soft Kill song to me. I think the fact that it has been received so well has made it kind of buried in my brain because it might seem a little obvious. That’s the song that made Dead Kids become an album and making that possible too. So it has a similar place and storyline as “Molly,” and it was written about a dear friend of mine that is unfortunately not with us anymore — Zach Delong, Rest In Peace. And it’s just pure. I found out he died and I walked into a room and 15 minutes later that existed. It’s therapeutic in so many ways imaginable. It just put a lot of things into focus because it’s really the reason that I ended up going to rehab and started to change my life. So I probably should have said “Pretty Face.”

You had to go with the deep cut.

GRAVE: Had to go with a slightly deeper cut. I love and hate them all. We’ll leave it at that.

Roseland is out now on Born Losers.