The Black Queen interview with Greg Puciato: ‘I’d never had a panic attack before … I thought I was dying’

The Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist’s new electronic project has proved a cathartic experience for him and his bandmates. But they had to endure a wealth of difficulties to get there

The Black Queen, from left to right, Joshua Eustis, Greg Puciato and Steven Alexander (J Whitaker)

Greg Puciato knows how to scare an audience. Whether he’s breathing fire into a startled crowd, running rampant over the top of people’s heads or literally bleeding all over the stage, Puciato is a terrifying presence as frontman for The Dillinger Escape Plan. The tables were turned however for Puciato’s first show with his new three-piece electronic outfit, The Black Queen, when they played their debut show in LA. ‘I was f**king horrified!’ he recounts. ‘I haven't ever been that nervous before a Dillinger show, I thought I was gonna pass out right before we went on stage because I wasn’t able to rely on just sheer aggression. It’d be wrong of me to say it's easy to have presence when you're being aggressive but it's certainly easier than when you’re being vulnerable. It's impossible to really critique someone if they're a giant ball of aggression, because you're terrified of them! So I knew that I was going to be on the opposite side of that, where now the audience is no longer scared of me, if anything, I felt a little bit scared of them. That was a very unusual position for me to be in after 15 years of doing this.’

As he says this, Puciato is a nervous bag of energy, possibly because he is mere hours away from playing The Black Queen’s second ever show, to a sold-out crowd in the hipster-chic sprawl of Hackney, East London. The three-piece, completed by Joshua Eustis (Puscifer and Telefon Tel Aviv) and Steven Alexander (former guitar-tech for The Dillinger Escape Plan and NIN), have recently released their debut album, Fever Daydream, an apocalyptic melting pot of gentle electronica and soulful R&B-inflected vocals, infused with an undercurrent of Lynchian paranoia. It’s an ethereal, other-worldly record inspired by the rain-soaked, neon-drenched LA streets of 80s Science Fiction and the obsessive attention to detail found in Stanley Kubrick movies.

‘We all have a really visual way of thinking about music. We're more inclined to watch a bunch of movies to isolate the feeling we’re trying to create rather than listen to a load of music. We constructed every sound on the record ourselves, there isn’t anything pulled from a soundbank; they all came from things that mean something to us. So if we found common ground over a video game that we were all into from our childhood, we would rip a sound from that video game and mutate it into a snare drum or a sound or a blip. We started to put as much of ourselves into this record as possible, even things that no-one but the three of us would ever understand, so that when we hear the songs, we feel personally connected to every second. You wouldn't be able to do that if you were working in a normal studio environment because you'd piss money up the wall’

The band signed a lease on a roach-infested warehouse in an industrial part of Downtown LA where the bulk of Fever Daydream was written and recorded. This led to a more old-fashioned organic approach to composition as opposed to the modern pursuit of sharing files and musical ideas over the internet that’s become so common in 21^st century music creation. Puciato says it was ‘essential we were all in the same place at the same time. Once we moved in together, our lives became inseparable from the band.’

This physical proximity brought out aspects that would have remained hidden if the three musicians had been writing individually. ‘As an artist, you're fragile, so you always want to present people with your ideas fully formed. If you’re file-sharing, you’re going to wait until that idea is the best it can be, which is a relative term anyway, before you share it with anyone else. But with this, we were able to intercept each other’s ideas, so one of us might be working on something and then someone else would step in and say, 'Hey, what if you try this?' and you have to open enough to the idea to say, 'I wasn't thinking of doing that but that's actually a really good idea.' It caused me to grow as a writer because that collaboration forces you to put trust in somebody else.’

The Black Queen, as a concept and an idea, has been gestating for a very long time (some of Puciato’s earliest demos date back to 2007) and has been teased out to early adopters of the band in a series of esoteric ways. 3 unique VHS cassettes were made and sent out to 3 people at random on the band’s mailing list, the contents of which were only known to the recipients. Reference to a 'fever daydream' has already been made in the lyrics to The Dillinger Escape Plan song Paranoia Shields from their 2012 album One of Us is the Killer. The symbol that the band use as their artwork has been tattooed on Puciato’s bicep for years. Considering the associations that each member has with established bands, they could have easily secured label funding but the desire to keep complete creative control was so great that they decided to self-release. ‘I don’t want to put anyone else’s name on this but ours, this means too much to us. I refuse to do it, I don't give a f**k how much work it is, I don't care if we have to mail out every damn record ourselves and we're constantly lugging s**t to the post office, I'm not corrupting our aesthetic. It ended up paying off because we have control over every aspect now.’

It’s abundantly clear that all three members have a deeply personal investment in the album, the making of which has cost all three of them dearly. ‘I think we all were in very similar points in our lives, Josh and I in particular weren't dealing with a lot of things from our past. That's really what causes anxiety … if you don't deal with something, you're just putting it in a room and letting it grow and grow until one day it just bursts the f**king door open. When you're on tour in a band, it's very easy not to deal with a lot of things. Touring is such an intense bubble and, over time, you develop all these destructive tendencies that you often feel the need to re-create in your home life too.’

Musicians often struggle to get back into a normal routine once they’ve experienced the highs of touring the world and for Puciato, this came to a head when, out of nowhere, he had a panic attack. ‘I’d never had one in my life and it was so severe that I thought I was dying. I was convinced I was having a heart-attack. Once I realised it was a panic attack, I was like ‘Where the f**k did that come from?’ And then another one came about a month later and I started to become agoraphobic. I thought I’ve got to deal with this somehow, so I went in to therapy. At first I didn't even know what the f**k I was gonna talk about, I didn't feel like I had anything to talk about, I just wanted these panic attacks to stop and thought maybe they could give me some medication or something. But in the end, I ended up going voluntarily because I realised that there was all this s**t that I'd never dealt with. The more I got rid of that stuff, the better the band was getting.’

To an outsider, the primal-scream ferocity of Puciato’s role in The Dillinger Escape Plan would appear to be a stronger form of catharsis than the soulful fragility he showcases with The Black Queen, but the latter provided the outlet he was desperately seeking. ‘People think that aggression is offensive’ says Greg, ‘but aggression is actually a defence mechanism in a lot of ways. You're being aggressive because you don't want anyone to hurt you. And after a while, it gets to the point where you’re like ’well, why am I so f**king scared of being hurt? Why can't I get closer to people?’ And I realised that I was pushing people away in my personal life whilst carrying around all this negativity. The Dillinger records weren't enough, as cathartic as they are. They weren't getting rid of all that negativity, it was like trimming the leaves instead of uprooting the tree … they’re just going to grow right back again! How many times can you do that? Once I got rid of it, something else was able to grow.’

The release of Fever Daydream also gives Puciato a chance to grow as an artist, to show more sides to his personality than just the giant ball of aggression that he (mainly) personifies with The Dillinger Escape Plan. ‘I needed to do this record to keep me from being put in a box and being perceived as a character that I don't always relate to. Every day that you wait, every minute that you wait, the box is closing in on you. As diverse as Dillinger is, it's still very extreme and people’s perception of who I am is based on what I do onstage, which in reality is only 10% of my personality blown up to a f**king extreme. I started to feel like people were expecting me to be that guy all the time and that felt a little weird to me. I really needed to create something that gives me more space to grow emotionally. Who knows, in ten years I might want to do records that sound like Mazzy Star or Nick Cave. Or I might want to do a record that sounds like Prurient, I've no idea, but I want to be able to have the freedom to do that.’

Fever Daydream, the debut album from The Black Queen, is available now on LP, CD and iTunes.