Snooper
It was just after 8 a.m. in Nashville — which is 11 p.m. on the eastern coast of Australia — when we finally overcame the inevitable technical difficulties of a Zoom interview. The five members of Nashville’s Snooper were seated on the floor, crowding into the frame so they were all at least partially visible. Front and center were founding duo Connor Cummins and Blair Tramel, with the heads of drummer Cam Sarrett and touring guitarist Ian Teeple poking up from behind. Off to one side, bassist Happy Haugen swayed in and out of the frame. Across their faces was a unique composite of exhaustion and enthusiasm that could only come from flying halfway around the planet before starting a two-week tour.
By now, if you have an ear even pointed in the general direction of Nashville’s underground, you’ve heard the impending rumble of Snooper. After only a handful of cassette tapes and 7-inch EPs, the band is on the latest of many tours, 9,000 miles from home, just weeks ahead of their debut full-length; Super Snooper will be out July 14 via Third Man Records.
“There’s a lot of ‘Pinch me’ situations,” Cummins tells me, “where me and Blair will be standing next to each other and we’ll be like, ‘Can you believe that we did Music for Spies and now we’re in Australia?’”
So how does a DIY band — which began as a COVID quarantine bedroom project, with no intent of playing a single show — end up touring a continent that’s about as far as you can get from home?
“We’re actually at Billy’s house right now, who runs Computer Human Records,” Cummins explains. “He put out our first 7-inch ever, Music for Spies.”He and Tramel made that EP together at home in 2020, and with a limited pressing of only 200 records, helped foster connections between the DIY scenes in Middle Tennessee and Australia. (Shout-out also to rock polymath Ryan Sweeney, whose Sweet Time has frequently booked Aussie bands in Nashville and released or distributed their records.)
“People were buying our records, technically, in Australia, before they even reached the States,” Cummins continues. “So we kind of felt like we had a fan base here from the beginning of the band.”
The EP has since been reissued on the band’s own imprint, Electric Outlet, which has in turn released music by Aussie punks Research Reactor Corp and Gee Tee. Those two are among the bands sharing bills with Snooper while they’re Down Under, part of the Snoops’ deep connection to the Oz avant-garde. Throughout our conversation, they refer to the bands and labels in Australia with a kind of familiarity more akin to friends than just peers or co-conspirators.
Snooper’s sound is frenetic and turbulent, like watching early silent movies whose film is sped up ever so slightly — just enough to feel off-kilter and surreal. Their hyperactive staccato mania is a throwback to the spirit of primitive Midwestern art rock, à la Devo, Pere Ubu or even Sparks. The band finds inspiration in their layered textures of what you might call multi-fidelity, marrying the immediacy of 8-track home-recording techniques with the craft of professional studio sound.
Super Snooper is the product of almost four years of creative collaboration between Tramel and Cummins, picking up new members along the way. By the time they got to pro-level East Nashville studio The Bomb Shelter to make their album for Third Man, they were ready for the moment at hand.
“We were playing [the songs] live for so long that we just, like, kind of went and knocked it out,” says Cummins. The LP includes new songs as well as new versions of ones from previous releases, updating the sound to a full-blown rock quintet. Super Snooper’s hodgepodge spirit mashes together samples and 808-inspired percussion with the group’s traditional punk instrumentation, tracing their further evolution. “It kind of just feels like we’re still doing the exact same thing,” he continues. “It’s just, like, now there’s new aspects to it.”
Snooper
It’s impossible to limit a Snooper live set to just the sounds blasting from the P.A., though. There is a spirit of experimentation and satire that sets Snooper apart from the rest of the Music City underground. Tramel, a keen video artist, created a visual component to what would become the full Snooper artistic package at the beginning. But the YouTube shorts, elements of which eventually made their way into the band’s live show, were more than music videos: Her lo-fi cable-access animation and larger-than-life puppetry are just as much a part of Snooper as the guitar riffs or the beats.
Tramel’s over-the-top imagery, cartoonish costumes and giant grotesque sculptures play off mundane trappings of consumerism from decades past — especially the 1980s. Gargantuan handmade takes on pop-culture paraphernalia like dumbbells, the Magic 8-ball, arcade consoles and massive brick-style cellphones are woven into the lampooning. In addition to needing the band’s gear to make it safely across the Pacific, they had to make sure all the props and costumes got there, too.
“This big, huge box has been a pretty big liability,” says Tramel. “[Rideshare drivers] see the box and drive right past us. They’re like, ‘We’re not doing that!’ [Laughs] We want to keep the box intact because … we’re doing domestic flights [throughout Australia] and we’re trying to ship this box with all the props from place to place.”
Though it’s the product of years of work, Super Snooper positions the band to reach a whole new level. Their Australian tour wrapped July 1, and the next day they were due in Oakland, Calif., for their second appearance at the Mosswood Meltdown festival, with a string of Golden State shows to follow immediately. In November, they’re set to head to the U.K. Not for nothing, punk legend and recently arrived Nashvillian Henry Rollins gave the LP a ringing endorsement. But more importantly than where the group is geographically or professionally, the new record represents where they are creatively.
“For me personally,” Haugen says, “it would be cool to look back in 20 years and have an exact — almost — replica of what the live show sounds like.”
