Krewella Open Up About Their Breakup With Kris “Rainman” Trindl: “The Truth Is Very Ugly”
July 12, 2016 by Michelle Lhooq via THUMB/VICE
It is one of those comically beautiful afternoons in May when the sidewalks of Manhattan are drenched in gold and somehow don’t smell like piss. Even the two chronically grouchy men outside a corner store in the East Village have uncrossed their arms and are smiling at the stream of sun-drunk pedestrians walking by—including Krewella bandmates and sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf, both dressed in body-hugging, all-black outfits from a recent shopping trip to VFILES. Aged 26 and 24 respectively, they’ve just stepped out from the shadows of a restaurant next door, and are scanning Avenue A for a scenic spot where our photographer can take some pictures for this interview. Suddenly, Yasmine’s eyes light up.
“Tompkins Square Park! It’s like the Mumford and Sons song!” she says, pointing at a metal placard with a hand covered in snaking tattoos, her brown eyes wide with childlike glee. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she starts singing sweetly, “Oh babe, meet me in Tompkins Square Park…” Jahan, whose angular cheekbones stands in contrast to Yasmine’s baby-faced features, joins in with a sardonic grin: “I wanna hold you in the dark…” Clutching each other’s elbows, the sisters double forward in contagious laughter.
Learning to laugh at themselves hasn’t always been easy for Jahan and Yasmine, who for the last two years have been subject to intense online scrutiny due to a highly publicized—and very ugly—legal battle with former bandmate Kris “Rainman” Trindl, who left the group in 2014. (Trindl and Jahan also dated from 2006 to 2011.)
Back in 2012, Jahan, Yasmine and Kris were the new faces of the burgeoning EDM movement—charismatic poster kids for rolling face to nasty dubstep drops, thrashing your wet hair against thousands of sweaty strangers, and giving in to every impulse. The Yousafs acted as the group’s vocalists and songwriters, while Trindl produced the beats. Together, they developed a trademark sound that hijacks every nerve in your body and blasts you into a confetti cannon of mindless euphoria: sweet and synthetic pop hooks floating over chainsaw basslines that sound like Transformers kicking each other in the testicles. The video for one of their early hits, “Alive,"—which currently has 53 million views on YouTube—follows a group of hot teens hooking up amidst an apocalyptic demolition derby. It perfectly sums up their visual brand: dirty, playful, sexy, unstoppable.
After winning an International Dance Music Award in 2012 for "Best Breakthrough Artist,” the trio headlined major festivals like Ultra, Electric Daisy Carnival, and Stereosonic. Their 2013 debut album, Get Wet—which mixed hardstyle, electro, and dubstep with stadium rock, and featured guests like Blink-182’s Travis Barker and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump—reached #1 on Billboard’s US Dance charts. At a time when main stages were dominated by Tiesto, Hardwell, Martin Garrix, Zedd, Avicii, and Disclosure, the Yousafs—who proudly talk about growing up in a Muslim family with a Pakistani father—felt like refreshing outlier next to the brigade of bland white men in black V-necks. They were also one of the few female-fronted acts in a male-dominated scene—like Nervo, but more raw.
Krewella’s fiery rise sputtered out in March 2014, when Trindl missed a flight to headline at Electric Daisy Carnival in Mexico City. According to Jahan and Yasmine’s countersuit, this final straw prompted them to stage an intervention in an attempt to curb a drinking problem they said Trindl had developed in tandem with the band’s rising profile. Per court documents THUMP obtained, Trindl refused to enter a treatment program, and in September 2014, he sued Jahan and Yasmine for $5 million, alleging that he’d been unfairly removed from the group and cut out of his equal share of their future revenue. In the transcript from his lawsuit, Trindl admitted he drank to deal with the pressure of success, and accused the sisters of not being supportive of his sobriety following an earlier stint in rehab in 2013, stating that they “didn’t like the new, sober Kris” and “thought he was depressed.” Trindl also claimed that the girls only wanted him to check into a facility so so they could establish themselves as a duo, squeeze him out of the group, and make more money for themselves going forward.
In November 2014, the Yousafs countersued, claiming in their lawsuit that it had been Trindl’s choice to resign. They also noted that Trindl had refused to learn how to DJ for their live shows, wasn’t holding up his end of production duties due to missed studio sessions, and had acted belligerently on tour due to his alcohol abuse. The spat quickly got messy after the court documents circulated by the Hollywood Reporter. The media started obsessively scrutinizing every new development in the story, with TMZ salaciously reporting that Trindl had been “forced out” for “being too sober.” At one point in 2014, the fallout became the number one trending topic on Facebook. Deadmau5 jumped in with a sexist Tweet, advising would-be trios like Krewella not to “fire the guy who actually does shit.”
In December 2014, Jahan penned an op-ed in response to Deadmau5’s tweet, writing, “It’s almost as if being the female in the group, it’s assumed that you are purely there as a puppet and completely void of any musical abilities, creativity, or vision… I am asking for everyone to think about girls who are looking at this public reaction who might now be discouraged to pursue an authentic place in a male-dominated industry.”
However, other than the op-ed and their first single as a duo—the not-so-subtly-titled “Say Goodbye,” where the girls sing, “Read my lips and shut my face/Maybe you’re the one to blame… The truth is going to find you"—the Yousafs refrained from commenting further on the breakup. In fact, they practically disappeared from the limelight, taking a hiatus from their (normally very active) social media accounts. They declined interview requests from the media, including my own attempts to find out their side of the story, explaining via their publicist that they had been advised by their lawyers not to talk about the ongoing lawsuit.
In August 2015, both sides reached an undisclosed settlement. Meanwhile, Trindl had embarked on a solo career, releasing music on Borgore’s label Buygore with Grammy Award-winning rapper Sirah in March, followed by a mini US tour that spring. The Yousafs were also planning their own comeback, and in May, they dropped an EP as a duo called Ammunition, to rave reviews.
In late April, a publicist from Sony Music reached out to me, saying that the sisters were finally ready to tell their side of the story, with the hopes that this would help both themselves and the public to move on. We arranged a Skype interview from their home in LA, and a few weeks later, when the girls were in New York for a press trip, we met in person for a second conversation.
Which is how I found myself walking around the East Village with Jahan and Yasmine that afternoon in May. Earlier, leaning across the wooden table over a brunch of scrambled eggs and beet salad, with their Sony Music publicist and manager Nathan seated across the room, Jahan had explained why it’d taken them so long to open up: "I wanted to make it seem like we were just having fun, because we didn’t want to disappoint our fans, she said. "But it’s like living a lie, and when the lawsuit happened, it all unraveled. To fans it seemed like something new, but this downward spiral was something we had been dealing with for years.”
She held my gaze and continued: “I’m going to say it point blank: the truth is very ugly. We don’t want to make him look bad—when someone is dealing with a mental illness, you don’t want put them in a situation where they feel like they’re being attacked—so we’ll try to put everything in the nicest way possible.” In the following interview, which combines our Skype and brunch conversations and has been edited and condensed for clarity, Jahan and Yasmine discuss what they experienced behind-the-scenes during the fallout, their tearful last encounter with Trindl, and how they’re reinventing their sound as they return to the spotlight, this time on their own terms.
THUMP: Let’s start with your matching tattoos “6.8.10"—the date you guys took an oath to dedicate your lives to the band. Can you tell me more about what those early days were like?
Yasmine: June 8, 2010 was a couple of days after I graduated from high school. Kris had already dropped out of college, and Jahan had decided not to go back to college. The four of us, [our manager] Nathan included, took that oath to drop everything and work on Krewella full-time. It became our "dedication day.”
Jahan: I think Kris was hugely responsible for my and Yamine’s work ethic. When we first started [and were working] in his grandma’s basement, he showed us what it’s like to be a hustler and focus on your craft. He would say, “Look, Katy Perry writes a song a day, you should be doing that too.” Yasmine was a teenager, and he would threaten her—not in a mean way—like, “You can’t be in this group anymore unless you step it up.” That lit a fire under Yasmine’s ass. He set a precedent that if you were not pulling your weight, it’s not fair to the other members.
Kris’ lawsuit claimed that you guys went against what you had agreed to in that oath, regarding the band’s financials. Was part of the oath that you would split your income evenly between the three of you?
Yasmine: We never had a contract or any sort of agreement about money. I was still in high school—I was not focused on my future at all.
Jahan: After [Kris and I] broke up, we were forced to work with each other, live in the same loft, tour with each other—so we had to make it work. We went from being in love to best friends. When you feel like someone is your brother, you don’t think that you’re going to screw each other over. My money is Yasmine’s money and vice versa.
You guys are known for having this “give no fucks” attitude and a lot of your music and videos depict a hard-partying, rock star lifestyle. How hard were you partying when you first started out?
Jahan: I was a heavy drinker when we first started touring. We were just DJing [instead of singing live], and I would take a few shots during our sets. It was like a honeymoon phase: bottle service clubs and anything we want at our fingertips. It was very exciting, but you could easily go down the rabbit hole and get trapped in this lifestyle. Even before that, I was clubbing all the time and would get shitfaced. I would black out a lot. But I feel like I got it out of my system. We had very rigorous touring schedule, and Yasmine and I realized that in order to give a passionate performance to our fans, we had to take care of ourselves, so we stopped drinking. The success of Krewella kicked me in the ass and made me think, “I can’t fuck this up.”
Yasmine: We don’t want to be the sober poster children. Look at any of our old videos and we look wasted. It’s funny. I think we found over time that we couldn’t drink [and stay professional]. And I’ve never done drugs, so I don’t know what that feels like.
Yasmine: No. To be on stage like that, it’s never worth putting on a bad performance. I feel like I’m my most genuine, authentic [self] when I’m sober. I’m able to give out every bit that I’m feeling, and to have it [be] completely untainted.
Jahan: I want to have a long, healthy life. I want to tour for years and years and I don’t want to burn out. We do respect our bodies in that way.
Yasmine: On the flip side, after we were accused of kicking Kris out for being sober because it was boring, I didn’t want to be caught out in public with a drink in my hand. It felt wrong for me to be even holding a beer. For about six months, I didn’t go out, and if I did, I wouldn’t drink. I definitely felt this pressure to prove that I was sober and I didn’t want to party, and I didn’t want him to party. Now I definitely don’t feel like that—I realized that it’s stupid to let other people govern how you’re going to live your life. I know my limits. If someone sees me drunk, who gives a fuck? I can’t be perfect.
I think Kris was hugely responsible for my and Yamine’s work ethic. He would say, ‘Look, Katy Perry writes a song a day, you should be doing that too.'— Jahan Yousaf
How would you describe the series of events leading to Kris having to go to rehab in 2013?
Yasmine: In August 2013, Kris had gotten over-intoxicated and was hospitalized at a show in Phoenix. His sister, mom, and [our manager] Jake flew to Phoenix to bring him back to LA, and at that point they made the decision that his problem had become very serious, and that he needed help. Unfortunately, the timing of that coincided with Krewella’s first really big headlining tour, the “Get Wet” tour in September 2013. We had to figure out a way to explain why Kris wasn’t on the road for the first half of that tour, and we just said he was sick.
Jahan: Despite whatever you’ve seen online [about how] we tried to squeeze him out of Krewella, it was actually very traumatizing for us to go on tour without him. We felt that it was very important to have the male member of the group there, who fans thought was the producer. I remember not wanting the fans to think that it was just about the two of us.
Kris lawsuit claimed that when he got out of rehab, you and Yasmine “didn’t like” him being sober and thought he was “depressed.” TMZ even made it sound like you were forcing him out because he was sober.
Jahan: The most hurtful part of that headline was that it said we kicked him out because he wasn’t fun anymore—because he was sober and we wanted to party.
Yasmine: The funny part is that we went sober long before he ever went to rehab. I always looked up to Kris like a big brother that could do no wrong, so it was very hard for me to accept the fact that he had a problem. I didn’t think that he was an alcoholic until the day he went to rehab.
Jahan: We respected his sobriety, but we were kind of in denial—we didn’t want to think that our brother had alcoholism issues—so when we saw him drinking [during the “Get Wet” tour], we had to almost laugh at it, like “Oh haha, you’re drunk again.” Because it was too depressing to know that nothing we did worked. I remember so many times we were waiting in the car at 5AM because we didn’t know where he was.
He would just disappear after the shows?
Yasmine: Yeah, a lot of the times he would disappear. We would feel like his mother on the road: worrying about him, tucking him into bed, carrying him to his hotel room.
Besides the TMZ headline, do you feel like there are other misconceptions floating around about the band?
Jahan: I think the biggest assumption that pissed me off the most was that [Yasmine and I] didn’t work. [Kris] was getting all the credit. That had a lot to do with us being females. Right before he decided to leave Krewella, Kris himself told me, “I should have known never to trust two beautiful girls.”
Did it surprise you that he said that?
Jahan: It was hurtful because he thought we were screwing him over. No matter what we said, we couldn’t get it through to him that it wasn’t fair that Yasmine and I were working so hard and exhausting ourselves on the road—and that [he] had to step it up.
What was your live setup like when you first started out?
Yasmine: When we first started playing shows and DJing, he didn’t really want to be [on stage] with us. But we saw that the fans really cared about the production, so we were like, “You have to be up there performing; the fans want to see all of us.”
Jahan: [The electronic music] scene really appreciates producers—it’s not the pop music world. That’s why we encouraged him to be a face in the group. In every single photo shoot and music video, we were always telling him to be in the front. It was really important for us to counteract the assumption that girls get all of the attention because of sex appeal.
Do you almost feel like that backfired when people later accused you two of not having anything to do with making your music?
Yasmine: I think people will be saying that for the rest of our careers. Our hands are all over everything we do, from the music to the visuals to the live show. It’s horrible to have your credibility stripped from you, but that’s the ego getting in the way.
Kris started off being the main producer of the group—when did that change?
Yasmine: I’d say he produced a chunk of our full-length album Get Wet. But that’s when he was drinking very heavily and not working, so we had to outsource producers. I remember a couple of tracks on the album nearly did not make it in because Kris wouldn’t work on them, so we couldn’t get them finished. After Get Wet, he wasn’t the main producer anymore.
Jahan: We write every song. But we never claimed to be [sound] engineers. People will say, “Oh, they’re being ghost produced,” but almost every artist out there has production done—if you look at [album] credits, [it’ll say] “drum work done by someone, guitars by someone.” You could almost call us executive producers, in that we oversee the entire operation, and are in the studio with producers, relaying our vision to them.
Can you elaborate on your charges in the lawsuit that Kris “pretended to DJ” while you guys were on tour?
Jahan: Here’s the problem: he couldn’t retain his sobriety after rehab and continued to be destructive on stage when he was touring with us, which compromised our shows. Yasmine had to literally program a controller for him that did nothing, to make it look like he was doing something. But we were OK with it. We said, “If you can focus on production, we’ll carry the live show.”
Didn’t he say that he was staying home to produce music while you guys were on tour?
Jahan: The product being delivered wasn’t showing that he was working and putting in his equal part.
Nathan: We were doing regular weekly meetings to keep everyone updated and accountable, because they were living separately. It was very different from the first EP, where we were all in the same loft and they would constantly be bouncing ideas around. It came to the point where he wasn’t making progress, and didn’t even want to meet with his bandmates anymore. For weeks and weeks, we didn’t really know what was going on. I think that he was equally frustrated with the pressure, and it was hard because he holed himself up in his room. He was living with Jake in a house with eight other people, and no one would ever see him.
Isn’t it ironic that he gave you your work ethic, but in the end, you’re saying he had to leave the band because he wasn’t working hard enough?
Jahan: Yeah, and his dream was to make it big—he wanted Krewella to be the biggest act in the world. Then we got a record deal and had all these fortunate things happen to us. I’m not a therapist, so I don’t know what was going on in his head for him not to seize that opportunity and be incredibly thankful.
Yasmine: Looking back, I think success kind of cracked him a bit, but not because success is what he was afraid of. Let me put it this way: there’s Jahan, me, [our managers] Jake and Nathan, and him. We expected the world of each other—not because we wanted to push each other to the edge in a bad way, but because we believed in one another. I think the pressure of other people working so hard around him kind of made him scared that maybe he wasn’t good enough. There were several times where he was like, “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”
Fuck it: there are no rules for us right now. We don’t belong to a scene. We’re going to create our own.—Jahan Yousaf
Jake’s house is where you guys confronted Kris and had this big, dramatic intervention in 2014, correct?
Jahan: Yes. That house was like an office for Jake’s management company,TH3RD BRAIN. [On the day of the intervention], we invited the closest members of the team, including our lawyer, booking agent, and tour manager. There were maybe 10 people in the room. We all wrote letters to Kris and went around in a circle [reading them to him]. It was very emotional for us, but for Kris, there wasn’t much of a reaction—even with [Yasmine] crying and reading this letter about how she used to look up to him like an older brother, and was feeling very sad seeing someone she cares about not caring about themselves.
He says you kicked him out, while you say he resigned. It’s difficult to reconcile these two completely different stories.
Yasmine: We had an intervention, and he perceived it as us trying to kick him out of the group. We didn’t ever want him to leave. We wanted him to get healthy. It was the worst timing in the whole fucking world because we were about to play Ultra, Coachella, Lollapalooza South America, and then go on a big tour in America. Remember how we said he missed the first half of the “Get Wet” tour? It was like, not this shit again. We didn’t want to tour without him, but we had to, obviously.
What was the last interaction you had with him?
Yasmine: Our last face-to-face was in mediation. We were crying in each other’s arms, holding each other, and then his lawyer came and took him away.
Why were you in each other’s arms?
Yasmine: Because I love the dude, you know? It’s weird to go from seeing someone every day, and suddenly you’re fighting over this horrible thing, and you don’t know what the fuck happened. When we both walked out, I pulled him to the side and I told him, “I’m so sorry.” I started crying and he just gave me a hug and we just held each other. That was it.
So he was in pain while this was happening?
Yasmine: [Tears up] Absolutely he was in pain. I don’t want to ever take that away from him—that this was so hard for him.
If I can be totally honest, it looks like it’s still hurting you.
Yasmine: It’s just the memory. It’s a hard thing to remember. Hard to talk about.
Jahan: I haven’t fully let go. I still get tempted to email him. With his most recent song, I wanted to email him and say “Congratulations.” Sometimes I still pretend that we’re friends, and I’ve created this weird fantasy in my head where I’m like, “Oh I’m going to hit him up for tacos!” Because last time we talked on the phone, he said, “I just want to be friends again and get tacos with you and Nathan.” In my head, I’m still thinking that it could happen.
Do you think you could be friends again?
Yasmine: I feel like if he ever came back and wanted to make amends and be friends— obviously the amount of trust we have for each other could never be [at] the level it was— but I would never close my door to having him in my life. Never. We went through so much together. I would never ignore his calls or emails if he wanted to meet up or needed help with anything.
Jahan: Yeah, I’d be like, “Sup bro, how’s life?”
I would never close my door to having him in my life. Never. We went through so much together.—Yasmine Yousaf
Jahan, what drove you to write an open-letter to Deadmau5?
Jahan: I’m glad you brought that up, because I think Deadmau5 misinterpreted it as me saying he was sexist. I didn’t say he was sexist, I said he was promoting the sexist idea of the man doing all of the work. When he tweeted, “If you’re a trio, don’t kick out the guy who does all of the work,” he was completely negating the fact that Yasmine and I were doing more of the work.
Yasmine: Eight months later, he tweeted that [our CDJs] were unplugged at Ultra. And that further solidifies that he thinks we’re just figureheads.
Jahan: If you have an immense amount of power and influence, I think it’s important to make sure the facts are straight. You can ruin people’s reputations. He got more attention than the TMZ article, so I think he was the main one to spread that lie about us.
Yasmine: He was also saying that you were whining, when you were trying to make a point that was super relevant.
I think it’s about the way society values different types of labor. Like, a certain type of technical labor is assumed to be male and given almost an exaggerated importance, while all this other creative labor—like vocals—is not valued as much.
Jahan: You just gave me a realization. It doesn’t matter how many hours you put into the work—[people will think] the production is more important.
Yasmine: The reason why we’re as big as we are is because we had a song on the radio. How do you think a song gets on the radio? It has vocals. Who’s to say one type of work is more valuable?
Jahan: I don’t think it needs to be about who’s more technically competent. In the EDM scene, a lot of producers and vocalists aren’t even credited on songs. So how come we don’t hear the reverse [outcry] about ghost singers? [With our music], the production carried the same weight as the lyrics and the emotion of the song. The fact that people put so much focus on production, like that was the only value, kind of discredited our work as vocalists
What was your equipment set-up? Why would Deadmau5 say you were unplugged at Ultra?
Yasmine: Because the way we plug in our equipment is through a completely different mode than he has probably ever used. So he was ignorant. We were using CDJs and a mixer like everyone else, but the mode we use is called HID mode. It’s something that more and more people are using. My boyfriend uses it when he DJs, and he never gets called out.
Yasmine: It takes away the sound card so it’s just computer plugged straight into the mixer. You just have to have a certain driver on your computer to make the software work. Without the middleman, there’s a million less wires. It’s less convoluted and easier to set up with better sound. But if you look at other DJs’ equipment, it has a bunch of wires coming out of everywhere, and we had three tiny little cords plugged in. People look at that and think, “oh there’s nothing plugged in.”
Some amazing dude made this video on YouTube after Ultra. He’s not a fan—actually, he hates our music. But he made this video discrediting what Deadmau5 said, explaining, “Yes, they were plugged in; let me show you how.” And it’s funny, because you can tell he has so much contempt for us, yet he can’t stand the fact that someone called us unplugged because he knows we weren’t.
In your open letter, Jahan, you speak out against online harassment and the negative effect it has on social media culture. Both of you were really active on Twitter—why did you decide to take a break? And now that you’re out of hibernation, is it different using social media?
Yasmine: Between [our last release] and “Beggars” coming out last month, there was a year of no music for us, so I felt strange going online when people would ask “So when’s the new music?” and I would say “Soon!” but I didn’t have anything to back up what I was saying. Now that we have all this stuff coming, I think there’s more reason for us to engage now.
Jahan: We still get hate, but everything that happened in the past two years with the lawsuit and a lot of fans picking a side, it kind of filtered certain people out. So the remaining group is our core group [who are] so dedicated and passionate. Those are the best fans that you can ask for.
Tell me about “Ammunition,” the title track off your new EP. Where did the name come from?
Yasmine: The actual song “Ammunition” is what we like to call a “love song to dead ears.” But it means so much more than that. It talks about everything we’ve been through in the last two-plus years. All the amazing, the bad, the ugly shit—all of that acted as ammunition for us to do what we’re doing now and to rise above anything that held us down. We hope “Ammunition” will give people strength to know that anything bad that happens to you, you can turn it around and make the best of it, and keep being powerful.
Jahan: I still feel like I’m a 16-year-old boy sometimes, but we’ve matured—we learned how to be happy artists while feeling like our career was going downhill, while people were telling us we were irrelevant. At times we felt irrelevant. But your life is going to be a roller coaster ride if your self-worth is based off what thousands of people think of you.
Do you feel like your sound has changed without Kris? “Beggars” on the new EP doesn’t sound to me like a huge departure from the stuff you put out when you first started.
Yasmine: Thank you for saying that. A lot of people are like, “The old Krewella is better!” I would say that [our sound] has evolved rather than changed. Because at the end of the day, us writing the songs was the common thread through everything. We still love hard-hitting music. We’re emotional girls. We sing and write from our hearts.
Jahan: Kris leaving kind of forced us to make it about the vocals and storytelling. So anyone that says, “You sound different,” well yeah: now it’s more about the lyrics and the song. Which is exciting, because that empowers us as well.
Yasmine: If you listen to other tracks on the EP, like “Marching On” and “Ammunition,” it definitely doesn’t have much of a dubstep sound. We’re calling it “alternative dance music. "Ammunition” almost isn’t a dance song anymore—the main sound on that drop is a guitar and a vocal. Despite the lyrical content of “Say Goodbye,” “Somewhere to Run,” “Beggars” and “Broken Record” sometimes being written about Kris, I can see every one of those four songs being released while Kris was still in the group. It was exactly the musical trajectory we were going on.
Jahan: Our sound has evolved in the sense that we’ve worked with producers to incorporate real elements like guitar and tribal drums [on the new EP]. But this “rock and rave” [sound] was something we were trying to achieve even when Kris was in the group.
A lot of the EP was inspired by all of the things that happened. It almost seemed you’re trying to send a message across the airwaves.
Jahan: It’s weird. We don’t want to shit talk, because things are ugly, but we found that art is way to say things that you can’t say in real life. Because we felt rejected from the rumors, it kind of felt like we didn’t belong anywhere, and it was almost a blessing in disguise. Like, fuck it: there are no rules for us right now and we’re going to make whatever we want because we don’t belong to a scene. We’re going to create our own.
Yasmine: Our EP was a lot of stuff that we were never able to say, so we wrote it in a song.
You still do want to play the big EDM festivals right?
Yasmine: We do—eventually. But I don’t think we have to rely on the EDM [establishment]. As much as I love EDC, if we never play [there] again, it’s not going to be the end of the world. If Lollapalooza becomes a staple for us, or Coachella becomes a staple for us, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that that’s the way we could go.
Jahan: I’m an optimistic person. I think we’re going to be back on the festival stage. It just might take a while.
What’s coming out after Ammunition?
Yasmine: We have a follow-up song coming out. I hate to say it’s a “Fuck you” song, but it kind of is. We just wrote in the stream of consciousness [style], and produced it out with our buddy Chaz.
Jahan: Michelle, there will always be another project. Yasmine and I will never stop working. The work ethic Kris set up for us is still in our bones—I feel like it’s in our musical DNA.
Michelle Lhooq is THUMP’s Features Editor. Follow her on Twitter.
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