New York-based mathcore band Car Bomb released their latest EP, Tiles Whisper Dreams, in August 2025 and are headlining the second annual ProgStorm festival at Club Soda in Montreal this weekend. Ishmael sat down with guitarist Greg Kubacki and discussed their show tonight, Metallica cover bands, and early 20th century tile magnates.

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This isn’t your first time to play Montreal, right?

That’s right, we were here with Gojira in 2009. Also at Club Soda.

So is this your first time back since then?

I think so, yeah… oh, we were here for Jonny’s birthday. We all live about a two-hour flight away, so we came back for Jonny’s 50th birthday. We came and hung out for a few nights, saw a Metallica cover band… they actually played in Club Soda, which was amazing. It was weird because the band was spot on, but it didn’t sound like James singing.

Did they try to do their best imitation?

No, he did his own thing, which I respect. He wasn’t “ooh”ing and trying to do all the groans and grunts and things.

So you all came back to Montreal… is the band spread out geographically?

A little bit. So, we all come from Long Island. Me and Mike grew up in Suffolk County, and Jonny’s from Nassau. We all jammed in Nassau County for a while, now we jam in Brooklyn, but Mike now lives in Pennsylvania. They just got a new house there a couple of weeks ago, in Doylestown.

Any tourist traps you’re looking to check out while you’re in Montreal? Anything you didn’t see the last couple times?

I might go to a museum or something before I catch a nap, but I’m not sure. Anything you recommend?

Yeah, the Notre Dame Cathedral is a classic. And there’s a great place to get Montreal smoked meat sandwiches called Schwartz’s Deli. Nouilles Lan Zhou also does these amazing hand-pulled noodles.

Oh shit, that sounds awesome. I’ll check it out.

Cool, cool. Anyway, we should probably talk about the band…

How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it before?

It depends. If they’re a metal fan, I would try to pick some bands that they know that sound similar to us. Obviously, the closest influence to us is Meshuggah, mixed with some Deftones and some of the shoegaze thing. Like, My Bloody Valentine is a big influence.

But if it’s someone who’s not into heavy music, we always try to think of visual metaphors. Like: imagine a drum set falling down a flight of stairs, on repeat, on a skipping CD. Something like that.

We try to mix math and groove in our own unique way. That’s my intention when writing music, is trying to find new ways to groove, while also trying to make it not so predictable.

“Math rock” is a funny term. For people who are familiar with it, it invokes a particular style of music, but for the average person, what does it mean to mix “math” and “rock”?

Yeah, because if people can’t find the beat, it kind of all sounds the same to them, whether it’s a John Zorn project or just white noise. So a lot of people really can’t distinguish the tune. I don’t know if we succeed, but we at least try to carve a path through our songs so it doesn’t just sound like heavy free-form jazz all the time, you know?

And would you say that that approach to songwriting has evolved over time? Like, how approachable you try to make your music?

It depends. We kind of ebb and flow with that. On Mordial, we tried to make it a little more accessible, especially the first couple of songs on that record. And then with “Gratitude”, that was the one song on Meta where making more accessible was just a thing that we tried for fun and we liked that direction. I think now, with the newer stuff, we’re going back to the older, just pure crushing type thing.

As far as grooves, though, I’m not really sure. “Blindsides” to me definitely has a main groove thread in it, but I don’t know if other people hear it the same way I do.

Where would you recommend people start with your back catalog? What’s the first song you’d recommend.

“Lights Out” or “Gratitude” are good places to start. “Gratitude” is usually a good one for someone who’s not familiar with our music. There’s a lot of singing in there. [As opposed to harsh vocals.]

Is there a main songwriter in the band or is it more collaborative?

It’s me, usually.

So you come to the band with the melodies, or the song structure, or…?

The song structure, the guitar work, the drum stuff. And then Elliot adds his stuff, Jonny adds his stuff. And then when the music’s done, then Mike will add his vocals on top. And we’ll work together to kind of get the vocals to the right place. There might be a place where we want the music to poke out, or we’ll carve out a space for Mike to do something… We just go back and forth until we’re happy with everything.

Elliot did an interview with Generation Records last year where he said there were some unspoken rules for the first album, like “no one should be able to headbang for more than seven seconds”.

[Laughs] I think he’s being a little hyperbolic there.

He said the first few albums were “musical statements”. I don’t know if you can speak to what he said, but do you think that’s in opposition to a more narrative album or a concept album? Like, it just exists in and of itself and that’s it?

Well, we wrote a lot of Centralia together, w^w^^w^w [“w click w”] is when I started doing more stuff on my own, but the rest of the band were still writing stuff there, as well. And I think maybe that’s what he meant by “musical statements”: we were just in a room, came up with something, and that was it. It was like, “okay, here’s this idea, here’s this idea, here’s this idea…” as opposed to seeing a band like Gojira so many times and being like “oh, they start here and they go here and they come down here”.

I think once we saw how people reacted to that, and also how we reacted internally to their music, and started recognizing that in other bands, we decided to explore that, as well.

Yeah, because it’s a common trope in progressive music that there’s like this narrative throughline or a melodic throughline on an album.

Oh, yeah. No, we don’t do anything like that.

Yeah, they’re all like, distinct, quantized kind of things.

The only thing I could think of, just loosely, is that on Mordial, we tried to be more melodic, use different chords, in different patterns. On “Xoxoy”, we had Courtney from Bent Knee and really tried to bring in a shoegazey-type thing. But yeah, no concept albums or anything.

Any word on when we can expect the next LP?

We’re hoping to get the first single out. We were hoping by the end of this year, but it’s probably going to be early next year. Because we’re doing a UK tour in November, and like I said, Mike just bought a house, so he’s settling in. We don’t really want to rush it.

Well, you guys have never rushed your albums.

Yeah, and now I have this other project, Sun Guts, where it’s the opposite. Where it’s like “okay, I have six months: go”, and just try to get it out.

And how does rehearsal look for you guys? How often do you rehearse?

If we don’t have a show, we don’t. When we do, we usually do twice a week when it’s a month out, and then maybe three to four times a week before a show. And usually it’s just instrumental. Mike knows all the stuff. When we did the Australian run, he came to a couple of those rehearsals, but for this show, we just came fresh off that tour, so it’s just instrumental at the rehearsals.

But usually it’s just us going “how does that part go again…?”

Yeah, I was going to ask, are there difficult sections that you’ll repeat over and over or is it just kind of a playthrough of the setlist start to finish?

Right now we just play through the setlist and go over the mistakes. We’ve played most of the songs enough times to where, like, if Jonny drops out or I miss a note or Elliot forgets something, we know what it is and we’ll get it next time. But if we get stuck on something and it happens two or three times, it’s like, “okay, let’s go back and work on that part”.

Because you don’t want to accidentally learn the wrong thing by repeating it over and over again.

Yeah, and sometimes we do that. And it just becomes part of the song.

I think it might have been Courtney from Bent Knee, but it’s been said that “the best way to become a successful band is to not break up”. And you guys have had the same lineup since 2002. Next year, it’ll be 25 years.

Yeah.

So what does it feel like being in a successful band?

Wow, uh, I would say that we are not a successful band. We definitely see progression in terms of the shows we’re playing. Like, we never toured Australia before, that was amazing. We’re doing headliners ourselves, which is really cool.

But the weirdest thing is seeing our style of music being echoed in newer stuff. Like all of a sudden there’s lasers everywhere and I’m like “holy shit, what the fuck, that’s cool”. We’re just really happy to be able to do it and still play at this level, man.

Does your on-again-off-again approach to recording and touring help keep the band together? Like, it gives everyone some space to decompress?

Maybe it does. With Sun Guts, it’s the opposite, we’re constantly putting out stuff to see what happens to see if there’s growth there. But there’s something to be said about having some mystique and giving fans a break. Like, how many times do you want to see Metallica play “Seek and Destroy” in front of 50,000 people on your Instagram feed? You don’t want to bore people. But that’s once you’re established. If you’re a new band, I don’t know what the answer is. Because we live with phones and technology and you have to feed the beast to get anywhere. It’s more about putting stuff out as opposed to fine-tuning things.

Yeah, I’ve seen new artists with TikTok accounts and they’ll write a song and record the same song ten times in ten different locations and just push the same song out over and over.

Yeah, that’s what you gotta do. You have to think that it’s not for your audience, it’s a tool to reach a wider audience. You’re trying to get new people. So you have to flood the zone with this stuff.

Tell me more about Sun Guts.

Yeah, so I did this thing with Ben Frost where we collaborated together, made some music, played some shows… and he kept talking about this one performance Car Bomb did where unfortunately Mike wasn’t able to make it [Hellfest] because it was a post-COVID thing and flights got all fucked up. But he said “that’s a really interesting set here, where you guys played instrumental”. And I don’t know, I just saw how he worked and how much output he has, writing soundtracks and doing art installations… he’s just working constantly.

So I thought “why don’t I give that a shot?” and just see what happens. So I have Xytechra, another electronic music project that’s still cooking, and then I have all this old material from writing during COVID that I’m just trying to get out. So it’s a challenge to try to get stuff out as quickly as possible.

I think the biggest difference I noticed between the Sun Guts material and the Car Bomb material is that with Car Bomb, you do bends and slides and things that sort of incidentally lead to microtonality, but you’re exploring microtones intentionally with Sun Guts, is that right?

It’s always intentional. I’m always trying to do microtonal stuff. But the bending is actually an Elliot idea. He was like “why don’t you just bend everything?”. And I was like “Okay, yeah, sounds good.”

But I think the sonic palette for Car Bomb has been fermenting for so many years that now I can do all of our tricks intentionally. But another thing I’ve been trying to do with Sun Guts is to make it more 4/4 sometimes. Because we don’t do a lot of that in Car Bomb. And this is a good opportunity, because I love the 4/4 stuff.

Yeah, for you guys, that is progressive. A straight 4/4 beat.

[Laughs] Exactly, yeah, yeah.

How would you say your guitar playing has changed since the first album?

Way more left hand. Our earlier stuff was a lot more right-handed, more chugging. I just didn’t have the vocabulary. Not that I do now, but it’s way better than what it was. So now I’m way more conscious of, you know, what key we’re in and… I didn’t know any of that stuff when we started.

Did you absorb new techniques by learning to play songs by other bands or was there a conscious effort to sit down a learn a new technique?

Being on tour with Animals as Leaders and seeing what they were doing was a wake-up call. I was like “we’ve got to figure out what they’re doing”. Because they were doing all of these crazy hammer-ons and I was like “what the fuck is that?” So learning these new techniques and having all of that in your tool kit is always a positive.

You don’t know what you can express unless you have the ability to express it.

True, very true. But at the same time, making demos and going back to them, it’s usually the one or two note caveman thing that wins. So learning all of this crazy double-sharp fifth whatever the fuck and it’s like — we don’t even use that.

Just chug on the strings.

Yeah, exactly.

What’s your favourite song to play live? And are you going to play it tonight?

Oh, man, I think “Spirit of Poison” now. Just because we haven’t played it in so long. The last time we played it was, I think, nine years ago.

What’s the hardest song to play live?

It’s probably a tie between “Blindsides”, “Antipatterns”, and “Xoxoy”, just because there’s so much pedal stuff going on. And lots of left-handed stuff. I know how to play the left-handed stuff, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. So I’m constantly looking at what fret I’m on, forgetting a pedal, stuff like that. So those are difficult. The older stuff was way easier.

Are you the kind of person who’s very secretive about the kinds of pedals you’re using and the techniques you use to create your sounds?

I’ll give the general idea, but not usually. I’ll tell people the details in person, but I don’t post about it. I try to keep some of the mystique about it. Because I also want to hear new stuff. I don’t want people doing everything that I’m doing.

I’ve read in some interviews that there are conflicting philosophies in the band about playing with a click track. One of my colleagues at The Subway wants to know how this influences how you feel really fast meters. Like, you’ll have a 9/8 or a 7/8 in a 5+4 or a 4+3 and, listening to it, it feels more like a swing than distinct beats. Do you get that same feeling?

Yeah, I think of rhythms in that way where there’s either a skip or a subdivision. So you have a different subdivision with something else going on, or there’s that thing where it kind of pushes and pulls because it’s like a swing. Like in “Blackened Battery”, the verse of that is four notes and then three notes so it sounds like this weird, slurry thing. But we don’t think of the time signature, we just think of little groupings and trying to feel the push and pull.

But as to the click track, I’m the grid guy. Elliot is not the grid guy. He wants to feel it. And we do fight, but we realize that we usually meet in the middle and that’s “our sound”.

Which is unusual for a drummer to not want to be so precise.

But that’s the beauty of Elliot, he just feels it out. He has a really unique way of approaching music and the way he remembers things is not how other people remember them. And me and Jonny, I mean, God bless Jonny, too, because he just walks into everything that we do. And that’s where the secret sauce is.

Is there one person in the band who’s the music theory, sheet music person?

Not music theory, not sheet music, but I’m the dude who’s like “hey, this is this, that is that, this is how it’s written”. And Elliot will say “well, what if we kind of just floated down there” and the rest of us are all like “oh yeah, that’s cool”.

In Elliot’s Generation Records interview, he mentioned some of his non-metal influences like Bjork and A Tribe Called Quest, which I thought was cool. Are there any newer bands, maybe non-metal, non-progressive ones that you think our readers should check out?

A lot of Afro stuff. I can’t name anyone specifically offhand, but that vibe is really cool. And The Marias, they’re poppy, sultry Puerto Rican music. Like, they’re over-the-top sexy and it sounds so cool. In a weird way some of their stuff reminds me of Portishead but not as depressing. Not a new artist, but electronically, I really like Aleksi Perälä. He’s part of that whole warp ecosystem with Aphex Twin and he does atonal, four-on-the-floor techno stuff. That’s some of the most interesting stuff, texturally, that I’ve heard in a long time. It’s really hypnotic: the same pattern over and over again, add a layer, delete a layer, but some of the tones he gets are really beautiful. [Greg recommends the track “GBLFT1740065”.]

In the early days of Car Bomb, you guys did a lot of building your own preamps and compressors and microphones and stuff. You also built your own light show. Is that still part of the band, or is it more off-the-shelf now?

Elliot used to do all of the preamp stuff. He had a whole soldering setup in his apartment in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. And I put together the light show. We did this whole thing where the lights were triggered by Elliot’s drums. And we built custom fixtures and soldered LED strips and things together.

We don’t do much of that anymore, but we try to keep things hands-on on the creative side. Like, we still write all the music. I still make all the art. And maybe the light show will come back if we do a big tour or something, but it’s a lot of work.

Was it just more of a necessity thing at the beginning?

Well, Elliot has a gear fetish thing. He used to have each compressor for each tone. When he first started building, he had racks and racks full of amazing shit. It was awesome.

You have a show coming up in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Did you get any pushback because of the name of the band? Was anyone like “are you sure you want to play there with a name like that?”

[Laughs] No, I don’t think so. We might when we get there, though.

But we had a similar problem just after 9/11, because we would drive to Manhattan all the time and take the Midtown tunnel, and there were always cops there. They would stop our van and ask “what are you doing?” and “what’s the name of your band?”, and we’re a band named Car Bomb, driving a car through New York City just after 9/11. We were like “please don’t shoot us”.

We’re fifteen years on now from Mike’s “why you do this” documentary, and a central conceit of that documentary is overcoming adversity and playing a niche genre of music because it’s what you want to do, despite setbacks to both your wallets and your egos. You’re still playing a niche genre of music, but now, as you said, you tour around the world with bands like Animals as Leaders and Between the Buried and Me. So how would you answer that question now? What drives you? Why do you do this?

Is still the same. As you get older, it’s not easier. You have more responsibilities, less energy, you’re contemplating your mortality. It’s like, you know, do I want to do this for another 10 or 15 or 20 years, but the answer is always yes. We’ve been really close friends forever. We still are. We still really love playing new music and that’s really all there is to it. Everything else is secondary. Being able to play music and share it with other people sounds cheesy, but it’s really awesome.

Can you pinpoint what it is about extreme metal specifically that interests you as opposed to, say, country music? Or just straightforward 4/4 rock?

It depends. I think, when you play it, you get that sort of caveman, visceral feeling, but it’s also cerebral. You have to concentrate. You get into a flow and then something changes and someone else does something and you have to adjust and somebody catches your eye in the crowd and the whole experience is addicting. When you’re just in a 4/4 pocket groove, you don’t get that, you know? There’s no turns and breakdowns and… I always think of it like how people absorb media now. It’s like, you can do this for five seconds, then something different. Our music has been like that forever.

The musical equivalent of TikTok. That’ll be the tagline on the article.

[Laughs]

Are there any dream bands that you’d like to tour with?

We’d love to tour with Meshuggah again. That would be amazing. Or Tool. I think asking for Metallica would be too much. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. But I think our north star would be Tool. They brought out Fantômas back in the day. You know, there’s no more of a musical stick in the eye than them, because they’re literally just making music to piss people off. If they can do it, we can do it.

Okay, last question. Your breakthrough tour was with Gojira in 2009. In 2024, they opened the Summer Olympics in Paris. Do you think Car Bomb are on a similar trajectory? Super Bowl halftime show? World Cup?

All of the above. I mean, is there a castle we can play in the States where we’re hanging and there’s fire and all that shit?

Well, speaking of Doylestown, there’s actually a castle in Doylestown called Fonthill. It was built by this tile magnate in the early 1900s and it has all sorts of staircases and hallways that don’t go anywhere and it’s all covered in tiles.

I’m sure Mike knows about that. We’ll shoot a video there. We’ll call up Donald Trump and FIFA and get them to set up the next World Cup at Fonthill in Doylestown. Perfect.

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Thank you to Greg Kubacki for the interview and make sure to check out the new EP Tiles Whisper Dreams on Bandcamp and wherever else good music is streamable!

Links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Car Bomb is

• Michael “Mike” Dafferner (vocals)
• Elliot “Eli” Hoffman (drums)
• Greg Kubacki (guitar)
• Jon “Jonny” Modell (bass)