Brett CallwoodSubstance Over Style: Having wandered into the Silverlake Lounge recently and caught a short but intensely enjoyable set from Dove Armitage, it was clear that this is an artist that needs to be firmly on our radar.
That set was representative of her career so far; while some musicians find their style and rigidly stick to it, only varying their course as much as the accepted genre boundaries allow, Armitage seems to take great joy in bouncing from one thing to another. It all sounds very her, it’s not forced. But this is an artist who makes her own rules, and that’s to her immense benefit.
It all began for Armitage in 2016, when she started to teach herself to play bass and sing.
“I started a band around that time called Cat Scan,” she says, via a Zoom call. “It was like this kinda post punk band akin to the Cardiacs or Devo. That band got some traction and then it started to get serious where I was like, I want to make my own music and learn how to produce, and take it to this next step beyond needing to rely on other people to write. That happened in 2018-2019, then in 2020 I was able to learn how to produce and spent the whole pandemic doing that basically.”
Having wisely used the lockdown time to teach herself the art of self-production, Armitage felt like she had the knowledge and creative freedom to go it alone. While she sits somewhere on the alt-pop spectrum, her solo sound, she correctly points out, is genre-less and uninhibited.
“It evolved over the years – it kinda started as an ambient project,” she says. “I wanted to make pretty strictly ambient music, but that turned into making a few dark wave-y tracks. But ambient music was always the goal. I’ve been doing that for many years of my life. I love writing and that’s my favorite thing to do, and I like playing with words. I wanted to have more lyrics, and melody incorporated in music, so I was like, I should insert this pop element that I’ve always been curious about but I also missed being in a rock band with the Cat Scan energy. I miss playing bass a lot – that’s one of my favorite instruments to play live. I wanted to write kinda how I used to write, merging these two new ways of writing. I wanted to bring in all of my music history per se, for this new sound.”
As well as her own band Cat Scan, Armitage has played bass with some heavy hitters, including the Death Valley Girls and Yungblud.
“(Death Valley Girls) was super fun,” she says. “It was actually about six months. It was short-lived, but really impactful. They’re the best people, and super fun to play with. Everyone I’ve played with has been wonderful. I did Jimmy Kimmel last year with (Yungblud). He’s a wild one but he’s very fun.”
Right now, between her own shows, Armitage is on tour playing bass with Royal + the Serpent.
“It’s definitely buzzing, and every crowd we’ve played so far has grown and grown and grown,” she says. “Royal’s been so fucking fun to play with.”
(Sarah Pardini)
That’s all great – it’s important to be busy. But we’re here to talk about Armitage’s own music and, at the time of the interview, her Concernless EP was about to drop.
“I’m super excited,” she says. “It feels like the feeling that I imagine women feel when they’re about to have a baby and you’ve been pregnant for too long. That’s the energy it’s been feeling like lately. Like, I just want to give birth to it already.”
Armitage worked on Concernless with some respected peeps around town, including Chris Greatti and Liam Hall (aka atlgrandma).
“Me and Liam were talking, and we were just late-night sharing influences one day and he was like, ‘Oh, we should do a session.’ I was like, ‘That would be amazing, fuck yeah.’ We went in without any expectation of making a full body of work,” she says. “I just loved his production style and he liked mine. So we just intended to jam and see what happened. Within five hours we made the track ‘Brittle,’ almost to completion. Me and Chris went in and we made ‘It Won’t Die.’ Then we made another song, so we made ‘Pop’ and ‘In Chaos.’ Me and Liam got back in and made ‘Glass in Me.’ It just was so fun to work with these two, and it felt so effortless and easy, and all three of us combining what we were best at just created this perfect balance and I think just our attitude going into it to, of we’re not trying to make a rock record, or a pop record, or cater to Tik-Tok virality. We’re just gonna make good songs that we like to make and feel good about.”
That’s the joy of the EP, and Armitage’s music as a whole – her willingness and freedom to experiment with glorious abandon. The song is the important thing, although some themes did crop up.
“I started writing a lot about juxtaposition or contradictions in feelings sometimes,” Armitage says. “How two seemingly contradicting feelings could exist at the same time. How things that are good for you could be actually really bad for you, and things that feel not great could be good for you. I was exploring these themes of entropy and organized chaos. Finding contentment within, kind of an uncontrollable chaos that we just live in with this world, and that became the overarching theme of the EP.”
This city made its way into the way into the music, too — Armitage having moved here from Austin, TX, as a child.
“Every city has its issues, but I think Hollywood is hysterical,” she says. “The history of L.A. definitely found its way in with its eclectic, wackiness. It’s haunted as fuck, L.A. That ghostly energy found its way in as well.”
Armitage will stay busy in the coming months, performing her own music, playing bass with other bands, and doing the occasional DJ set, too. She’s one to keep an eye on, but with a work ethic like hers, you won’t have to look hard.
Substance Over Style: Dove Armitage’s Concernless EP is out now.
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