UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
Photos Courtesy of Big Chompers
A group of rodents from Vermin City, B1G CH0MP3RS is a multimedia project making hyperactive, genre-hopping music and Internet Content. The band chatted with UCLA Radio about their debut EP D3V0UR, their explosive live shows, their pizza business, and what’s next for the group.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes.
Interviewed by Chloe Gonzales and Elaina Marino
CHLOE: Heyyyyyy.
ALL RODENTS: Heyyyyyy.
CHLOE: Could we have everyone’s name, pronouns and what you do in the band?
SPICY: Spicy the Mouse. Any pronouns. I’m the keyboardist. We all make the music.
STINKY: I am Stinky the Mouse, they or she, and I play guitar and yell and stuff like that.
SPEEDY: I’m Speedy the Mouse. I use he/him, and I play the bass in the band, and we all write.
EMOLE: And I’m Emole the Rat, and pronoun area is a little unclear, but let’s just say they/them, and I do the the vocals and play a little bit of the keys,
CHLOE: Sick. So, what’s a little elevator pitch of y’all?
STINKY: Well, we come from a place called Vermin City, and all of our music and our #content is about our lives there and all of the wonderful people in our lives.
SPICY: And we own a pizza shop called Trash Pie Pizzeria, and we play music in our shop, and we don’t give a “bleep redacted” about anything.
EMOLE: It was pretty quiet before, but now we got plenty of visitors. The grease cheeseburger has been pretty popular as a plate along with a banana peel salad.
STINKY: Sometimes we can’t even play the music because we’re too busy serving the pie.
ELAINA: So if someone were to come to the shop and ask about your music, how would you describe it?
SPEEDY: We pull from a lot of different styles. A lot of it is electronic music – hyperpop, more hard electronic stuff. But then there’s also punk, and we sometimes do funk and surf rock –
STINKY: Jazz, new jack swing –
EMOLE: Name a genre, and we can. We’ll do it.
CHLOE: Wait, I was just, really curious – do you guys ever run out of cheese because y’all are eating it? Or is that like a stereotype that I shouldn’t be touching on?
STINKY: Yes. I mean, it does happen, super problematic stereotype, but yeah, we eat all of it,. That’s actually, like, a really common issue. We go through so many ingredients at the restaurant, and we don’t have that much money to get by, you know, because we’re artists living in the big city, so we often have to be stealing ingredients all the time, like, every night.
SPEEDY: Pretty hard, um, to get cheese recently, because we started seeing some mouse traps so…
STINKY: It’s pretty fucked up. That we have to face these things on a daily basis, you know?
CHLOE: Yeah, like Jaden Smith said, can we talk about the political, economic state of the world. Because what the fuck y’all like, crazy.
How are y’all doing? What’s life been like since D3V0UR?
SPICY: We’re working on some new material right now, which is very exciting. We got some new songs coming up. They’re crazy. They got a lot of slap bass, and we’re talking about our life more at the pizza shop the day to day. And you might find out a little bit more about where we’ve come from. We don’t really like to talk about it, because we hate all of our ops that in the past, like, like redacted, all those guys with a big middle finger to them, but you might learn a little more about where we came from and stuff like that.
STINKY: We’re getting emotional on this music.
EMOLE: We also get silly. We recently saved up enough to buy a chomp mobile, and we’ve been driving it around and going on a bunch of drives, and it’s been really fun. And we go really fast.
STINKY: You go fast in the car.
ELAINA: How has the band dynamic changed now that you’ve been a little more established for a little bit, that you’ve played more shows and recorded the EP?
STINKY: We’re trying to get more theatrical as time goes on. You know, really have our showmanship kind of come through.
EMOLE: I’m a pretty angry guy, and it doesn’t really show a ton, because I don’t have the most performing experience. So my anger kind of just gets absorbed by the set. But I would like to release it towards the crowd.
SPICY: As we’ve been performing more and playing more gigs, we’ve made some changes to the gear that we’ve been using, too. We have a vocal auto shift pedal for Emole. We’ve been changing up some of the covers and different music and styles that we’ve been leaning in the past – a lot more fast hardcore punk covers, but sort of getting into more, like, jazz fusion, wacko type songs as of recent So, yeah, the energy every set is different, and we’re always changing the way that we play live.
CHLOE: How do you guys figure out the genre and sound you want to do if it’s always evolving? Is it like you guys pitch something and then it’s like, “Oh yeah, I fuck with that,” and then you do it? Or are you guys always on the same page with that, etc, etc?
STINKY: I think we always try to do one thing and kind of make an actual single, like a commercial single, and then it ends up being like five genres.
SPICY: And I think it’s also depending on where we get booked, like, you know, if we play at our own spot, we can play whatever we want, but if we’re playing out at a specific place, we want to curate the set to fit the vibe of what’s happening.
ELAINA: When was the last time you played live and what was the vibe of that set?
SPICY: Junior High for a Halloween show. We played the debut of our song, “Tricked Ya”, which is our Halloween song. It was super fun.
EMOLE: And we played lots of spooky tunes, and people got tricked.
STINKY: People were scared.
EMOLE: They were running out the door screaming by the time we finished our set.
CHLOE: Whoa.
ELAINA: Is that a common reaction? How are you usually greeted?
EMOLE: I think that was a one time occurrence, because it was Halloween and it was spooky season, but usually they’re clapping and cheering.
STINKY: And mouths agape in hunger, because they hear songs that make them really, really hungry to eat trash.
CHLOE: Yeah, I also love y’all visuals, the brain rot and stuff. How did you guys find that aesthetic and everything?
SPICY: We’re trying to go viral.
STINKY: Trying to become masters of virality,
EMOLE: We’re core-core.
STINKY: Yeah, media extremism. We love playing games on our phone.
EMOLE: We’re actually looking at Subway Surfers right now.
[Turns camera around to show Subway Surfers projected on the wall]
STINKY: if you see me looking off at certain points, that’s because I’m locking in,
CHLOE: Geeked vs. locked in, I get it.
SPICY: Yeah, we want people to be locked into our music so they should be locked into our visuals and and we just like, yeah, everything, any, anyone can eat, anything and everyone can, like, ingest through their eyes, everything, all at once.
EMOLE: At the start of our creative direction, we thought to ourselves, how do we best visually represent flavor explosion? So that’s what we based everything off of.
ELAINA: Which song from D3V0UR has your favorite flavor?
EMOLE: “CHILI COOKOFF” is the most straightforward.
SPICY: We met Emole the Rat at a chili cook off –
EMOLE: They were cooking up something real special, but it was missing one thing, which I just happened to have.
STINKY: And then later, we found out that a mole was also our missing ingredient. Musically, too, as a friend, that’s beautiful, right?
CHLOE: That’s so beautiful that you have, like, an inter species relationship. Like, I love that commitment.
ELAINA: Top three flavors, period,
STINKY: Sugar, um, sugar, sugar, um, stevia. And honey.
EMOLE: What about grease?
SPEEDY: I love car oil, caffeine and energy drink.
SPICY: There’s a drink from our soda fountain that’s called pee water, and it’s pee and it’s delicious. It’s pee mixed with water mixed with a little bit of pee in. Just a little bit. Yeah.
STINKY: I can see caution on your face, Elaina, but like, trust me, it’s way better than you think. It’s beautiful.
SPICY: I like fire in my mouth, like actual flames, and I like the taste of horseradish, and I like the taste of pepper extract, like, you take the pepper and then you boil it down. You squeeze like 100 Carolina Reaper peppers down, and then you eat that.
ELAINA: What’s the greatest pop song? What’s the platonic ideal?
SPEEDY: I’ll go first – “Into You” by Ariana Grande.
CHLOE: Could we get a rendition?
[Speedy sings a few bars from Into You]
STINKY: I gotta go with “A Star is Born” by Jerskin Fendrix.
SPICY: Two that come to my mind are “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears and “TiKToK” by Kesha, yeah.
EMOLE: I’m gonna have to go with either “Like a G6” or “Toxic” by Brittany.
CHLOE: So you guys talk about trash a lot.
[Rodent laughter]
STINKY: We’re definitely very trash forward in our aesthetic, yeah.
EMOLE: One of our earliest posters had a trash can with trash inside and cockroaches.
STINKY: Our first show we actually had, like a sewer, like a sewage spill. We built this stage, and then it was the day before the show, and it literally started spewing. It was getting everywhere. All over. We were covered in poop.
SPICY: We will be having more trash visuals for the EP that’s going to come out. I think that we have a lot more talking about our lives in the pizza shop and, you know, our backstories and things like that, and in the next EP. So I think there will definitely be some trash visuals to accompany our trash food in the song.
ELAINA: What does the immediate future look like for shows, for the release of this EP, anything?
STINKY: Yeah. So we have those singles that we had mentioned earlier, that we’re trying to put together right now. Yeah. EP in the summer. Yeah. And yeah, we have, we’ve been getting word from a sketchy guy that wants to book us at this venue that we’ve never played at before. He’s a really sketchy freak that likes to twist everything up. His name’s the Scrambler, and we’ve been in contact with him, but he’s a real shady guy. So we’re debating taking this deal for a really fancy gig that will be very worth our while, it seems, but I don’t know yet, so we’ll have to see. But you know, I think the future might hold that for us after this next release. So for that, we might try and debut some of our more danceable clubby club. That’ll be the big, long future after this next record. But for right now, it’s all about swerving around in the top mobile Yeah. So yeah, that’s the new music.
CHLOE: So everyone at UCLA Radio has a DJ name – what would your DJ names be if you guys had a show on the radio?
STINKY: I go by DJ Stinky whenever we DJ.
SPICY: I do go by DJ Poopy sometimes, DJ Spicy or DJ Poopy – depends on what I’m spinning. if the beets are spicy or poop. Me and Stinky do B2B sets around Vermin City sometimes.
EMOLE: I have yet to debut as a DJ, but my name would be mama queef.
SPEEDY: I haven’t DJed before, but if I were to, I would be DJ Zoomy. And the transitions are gonna go so quick, like a new song every five seconds.
CHLOE: And then you have the Subway Surfers on the deck.
[General rodent agreement]
Listen to B1G CH0MP3RS here!
& listen to the Rising Artist Spotlight playlist here!
