Indie-Rock Band

Amina Ahmed

The Canadian indie-rock band, “Tokyo Police Club,” performed for the last time in Minneapolis on November 1. The band, who announced their departure earlier this year, will complete their last shows in Toronto this November—nearly two decades after their debut EP “A Lesson In Crime.” The consistent love and devotion to their music certainly solidified the quartet’s place in the indie-rock genre for several years, appearing in many festivals and late night shows. However, all good things must come to end, and as TPC fans across the nation soak in the last moments, I had the pleasure of interviewing Greg Alsop, composer and drummer of TPC

For those that don’t already know, who and what is Tokyo Police Club? How did the band form and what inspired you all to make music?

Greg Alsop: We all met in high school. The other three guys have known each other since the fourth grade, so they’re long-time friends. I was in the same school with them but two years ahead, and I met them during a school musical. We just kind of bonded over being the only people that we knew in our school, who were into bands like “Radiohead” and “The Strokes.” They had been playing together for a while, but they didn’t have a drummer, so um, over the summer we started jamming together, and that was kind of that.

Amina: That’s awesome, I love a good childhood story!

How would you describe your music style? Has it ever changed? Did you always know this style was for you?

G: Yeah, I mean, when we first started out, we were very young and so obsessed with playing as fast and as quickly as possible. Our first EP was seven songs and it was under 16 minutes, so like every song was about two minutes max really. That kind of continued into the next album as well. Youthful exuberance and energy was such a big part of our sound and our stage presence, um, and as we started to get a bit older and a bit more confident in our craft and our songwriting, we were able to take our foot off the gas a little bit and say like, ‘okay, why don’t we just try and slow down,’ try to do something mid-tempo, try to just kind of feel this out a little bit more, and not feel like every show has to end after 20 minutes.

What is your writing process like? What makes your writing distinctive from other artists?

G: I mean, I think uh, it’s like collaborative. I’d say it’s like Dave will come up with songs and send out voice memos of him just playing song parts on an acoustic or a piano. We have this pool of demos out there to pick and choose from, and then from there we would all meet up in a room together, and then just start hashing it out and try and make it a “Tokyo Police Club” song. Over the years you work in lots of different ways. There were times as well, where we all lived in different places, and so two or three of us would meet up in a studio for a week. On our last album, we found this artist, he’s a sculptor in rural Ontario. We were in an old church, this beautiful building with vaulted ceilings, and we would go there for a week at a time, like over the entire summer, and then just sleep on air mattresses on the floor like around our instruments, and then just get up in the morning, brew some coffee. We would go there and make as much noise as we could together without bothering anyone, so you know, making space to create, like you used to as a kid when you had endless time.

Your musical career over the past nearly two decades is impressive to say the least, in the beginning was there a goal you wanted to attain? If so, what was it and do you think you’ve attained it?

G: Hard to say, you always have such high dreams when you’re a kid, like what does it mean to be a rock star, what does it mean to be a professional musician, what does it mean to be in a band. And all you really have to go off of is what you’ve absorbed through articles, documentaries, saying this is what it means. And then when you start getting success, you’re fed this story as well of how the goal is to be the biggest, the best, like try to go for all of it. And it’s amazing when you’re rising, when everything is continuing to grow it feels great and then the second it starts to plateau, you’re filled with a feeling of like ‘oh what happened?’ Like why is it slowing down right now, why aren’t we making the impact that we used to, why aren’t the venues growing exponentially anymore, like we’re back in the same place. So then your opinion of your art, your band, your career, starts to feel like so lacking. But I would say, a few years removed from that, and now like being able to look back on our career, I would say I’m proud of who we got to be as a band, the whole way. And we really did get to make the music that we wanted to make on every album without outside influence or push from labels. There’s all these things that you hear about artists going through where they’re like ‘oh, you can’t write this song’ or ‘this album doesn’t have a hit, so we’re not going to put it out.’ There’s very little friction in that sort of way. And so I’m really proud of the body of work that we have. I’m proud of all the shows that we got to play, and I think we really got to be the exact band that we were meant to be, yeah.

Amina: I think that’s a really important and fulfilling conclusion to come to too, like throughout the entire thing, you were who you wanted to be, you made the music you wanted to make. I feel like ultimately, a lot of different musicians have that goal, so I’m very happy you accomplished that.