!!!

In high rotation was a bizarrely titled Californian collective using three exclamation points (most commonly pronounced “Chk Chk Chk”) as their name, coming into their own with a cult classic sophomore LP, 2004’s Louden Up Now.

11 years later, !!! are still alive and kicking. In fact, they never stopped – and the fact they’re still keeping the dream alive is as surprising to them as it is to any keen observer of the time period in which they first flourished.

“I’m aghast to our longevity as anyone else is,” says Nic Offer, the band’s frontman. “I’m truly surprised to be here after all this time and still with so many of the same people as when this band started. It’s been fun for us the whole time that we’ve been doing it. People ask us why we’re still around and so many other bands like us have gone away. We can’t speak for them, obviously. I don’t know why they’re not here. I only know why we’re still here – and that’s because we still love doing this.”

This week sees !!! release their sixth LP. Entitled As If, it’s a timely and vital reminder of just how much of that fun Offer and co. are still having. There’s a sense of urgency in its harder-hitting tracks – which, given they were created during a time of considerable creative unrest for the band, makes perfect sense.

“We were kind of sitting around on our hands for a while, waiting for Thr!!!er [2013] to come out,” Offer says. “I started learning Ableton, and so did Mario [Andreoni, guitarist]. The two of us would come up with little beats or loops that we’d show one another, eventually bringing what we’d started over to Rafael [Cohen, multi-instrumentalist] – he was already well across using Ableton, so he was able to clean things up really easily.

“Before too long, we had this massive backlog of demos – all the time we were promoting Thr!!!er, we had this whole other thing going on. We had 40 songs, eventually recording 20 of them. We then went even further and whittled them down to what ended up being the songs that made the album – our friends, people on the label and the rest of the band all had a hand in voting in and voting out songs.”

Going from 40 songs to just the 11 that made the final cut of As If – 12 if you include the Japan-exclusive bonus track – was not an easy process by any stretch. There were plenty of arguments and disagreements over what would eventually get pressed to disc and put on wax. As Offer testifies, however, it all resulted in something positive and constructive for the immediate !!! camp.

“The process really helped us look at what we were creating a little more objectively. Of course, there were songs that I was vouching for and really wanted to get through the voting system. When you’re saying yes, though, and at least a good share of people are saying no, you have to take a step back and think about what’s not working. It allows for the songs to develop and for us to work toward better songs as a collective. Plus, if your friends don’t tell you the truth, the truth will come out as soon as other people hear the record.”

They’re not done with what’s left of the 20 songs that made the cut, either. “You may well see another album in fairly close proximity to this one,” Offer says. “We’re tossing up the idea of taking them into the studio with another producer and seeing what more we can do.”

Although the band only found a larger profile after the turn of the century, the earliest formation of !!! goes back to the mid-’90s, during which time Offer – then the vocalist in a hardcore punk band, The Yah Mos – was brought in to front a new project that rose from the ashes of two Sacramento acts, Popesmashers and Black Liquorice. “We wanted a band in which we knew we were going to be able to sit in a van with one another for hours on end,” Offer explains. “The idea, musically, was to play funk – but we never wanted to be experts or virtuosos. In fact, we wanted to get it wrong. We wanted to discover what lay off the path.”

Nearly 20 years later, !!! still stand. The band still tours, still receives formidable reviews and still has a respectable following. The key, according to Offer, has been to ensure that it never feels like a chore to keep the group going.

“There’s something to not taking yourself so seriously,” he says. “I mean, we take the creative process seriously, I suppose, but in a lot of ways we’re just laughing at ourselves the entire time. It’s music, after all. It should be fun, I think. It deserves to be fun.”

[!!! photo by Piper Ferguson]