With their beginnings in the early 2010’s, FIDLAR (an acronym for “fuck it dog, life’s a risk”) quickly set the standard for the bold, irreverent attitude of Southern California’s vivid punk and indie rock revival. Perhaps even more quickly, the four-piece band made their way into the angst-ridden hearts of many a high schooler within the state’s seemingly endless sprawl. Between powerful, energetic melodies, anthemic lyrics, and intensely blood-pumping guitar solos, FIDLAR established its sound as simultaneously vulnerable and charming, perfectly set to capture the omnipresent disorientation and dazed wanderlust of young adulthood.

It’s been five years since FIDLAR has released an album. Now a three-piece operation without the aid of guitarist Elvis Kuehn, the band—vocalist and guitarist Zac Carper, bassist Brandon Schwartzel, and drummer Max Kuehn—is back in the studio for their fourth album, Surviving the Dream.

For a group so tied to recklessness and rebellion, putting together an album about survival is no simple task. But growing up rarely is. “Eating Del Taco and sleeping in,” as cheekily exalted in one of the band’s very early songs “Max Can’t Surf,” no longer seems to be a priority. As the band members now navigate their early thirties, a particularly sardonic form of self-reflection begins to emerge. Surviving the Dream meets a uniquely-FIDLAR sense of disillusionment with a playfully begrudging acceptance of adulthood. In this way, the album feels like the band reaching their final form—perfect praxis to the “fuck it, dog” mentality. The record’s eleventh track finally distills Carper’s 2014 punk chants about drugs, skating, and debauchery to their essence: the statement “I don’t wanna do this” repeated thirteen times in a row.

The track “Sober” from the band’s 2015 album Too recently gained some traction on TikTok (“but it wasn’t ever a viral thing,” clarifies Kuehn) thanks to Carper’s sassy and apparently lip-syncable ad libs throughout. But the lyrics in the chorus of the song speak more pointedly, especially to younger fans who may just be discovering the band: “I figured out when I got older that life just sucks when you get sober, I figured out when I got sober that life just sucks when you get older.” On Surviving the Dream, those lyrics are recast with a sense of clarity and remove as the band matures.

Even after over a decade in the game, FIDLAR manages not to rely too heavily on nostalgia (though there’s certainly no shortage of it, especially amongst former Southern California teens). On Surviving the Dream, the band’s sound loses some of its headyness and coalesces into a lusher, more grounded soundscape—perhaps the fruit of years’ labor towards the ability to self-produce an album. Surviving the Dream is at once a return to form and an elegant reflection on the drug-fueled DIY vibes of yore. This is made especially clear by the album’s deceptively simple third track “Sad Kids,” where the eponymous claim operates both as an observation and a declaration: sad kids still like to party, and probably always will.

Just before FIDLAR set off on tour, Document caught up with the band at Balboa Recording Studio for a conversation that, for me at least, greatly emphasized Carper’s lyric on Surviving the Dream’s track “Change”: “It’s been way too long since I’ve been in a mosh pit”.

Zoey Greenwald: So I wanted to start by talking about Surviving the Dream. This is your first full album in five years. How have those five years been for you guys?

Max Kuehn: Pretty weird.

Brandon Schwartzel: I mean, I think for everyone the pandemic was really weird. Especially if you’re in a touring band. And we’d kinda been going nonstop since we started on the road, and so it was kind of a forced break.

Max: We were gonna take a break anyways, but then it just kind of turned into a five year break instead of, like…

Brandon: Like, a two month break! And then Elvis—Max’s brother who was our original guitar player—left the band. So we had to figure out the new chapter of what our band’s like [without him]. And here we are.

Zoey: How would you describe this new chapter?

Brandon: It’s kind of the three of us against the world. We got off our label and decided to self-release. We self-produced this album here at Balboa [Recording Studio]. Our friend Danny, who we’ve known forever, owns this studio, so it’s come full circle. When we made our first album, where Zac and I lived, we were recording on [Danny’s] recording gear, because Danny had some gear and—

Max: We didn’t have a studio.

Brandon: Now it’s just a more grown-up version of what we were doing back then. This felt more like the first record, in a way, because there were fewer people involved in the creative process.

Zoey: I think even just sonically, the album does feel like a return to form. Like, a quintessential FIDLAR album.

Brandon: That’s good.

Zac Carper: The reason it sounds like how we used to sound is because we’re the ones making it. We’re not hiring producers. It’s definitely an experiment. But I’m down. I’m down to get weird, try different things.

Max: I think the last record we made, Almost Free, came from a longing to be in the studio. Because we were touring so much. So that record has a messing-around-in-the-studio feeling. And I think Surviving the Dream was the opposite. It was like, We have been alone in the studio for five years, so we’re trying to feel the live stuff again.

Brandon: We’ve already played some of the songs on the new album live, which is something we haven’t always done. We were just so excited to play live again, because coming back, we were like, ‘Is anyone going to come to these shows? Are the kids still there? Are they gonna be excited?’ And then the first show we played back, it was like, ‘Oh shit. This is still rad. Let’s capture that energy.’

“The FIDLAR fans are a special breed of people. It’s not very aggro or hardcore. It’s more like, dudes are just hanging out, people are just having fun.”

Zoey: How are you feeling about playing live on this upcoming tour?

Brandon: Right now feels like the calm before the storm. I just wanna get on the plane or in the van and go. I don’t wanna think about it anymore.

Max: This will also be our first headline US tour since 2019.

Brandon: Yeah, like a proper, six-week, everywhere tour. Which is exciting because we’ve wanted to do this since 2020.

Zoey: And that’s directly after a week in Australia?

Max: Yeah.

Zoey: Wow, that’s intense.

Max: Yeah, that’ll be a lot. We’d gotten to a point where we were touring in two-week chunks. That’s the most manageable way to tour. A straight two months is not usual.

Zac: It’s a long tour, and I’m a little nervous. I’m very good at being home and being in a routine. I’ve taken a lot of time to kind of work on my mental health, and it’s not easy when you’re in random cities and with random people.

Brandon: You go through waves of, ‘This is awesome!’ And then, ‘I don’t know who I am!’ And then, ‘This is who I am!’ You can get lost.

Zoey: I feel like tour burnout is a real thing.

Brandon: It is! But also we’ve been doing it for so long—

Max: We’re pros. [Laughs].

Brandon: We all have things we do to stay healthy and stay able to perform with as much energy as we can possibly muster. I think that’s what’s kept us going and kept our show relevant. That’s how we’re able to do that and not burnout.

Zac: It’s not like we’re in our 20s anymore, we can’t just stay up all night and party the whole time. Now, we pray for eight hours of sleep, you know?

Brandon: There’s a lot of massage guns now. Liquid IVs, stuff like that. The days of waking up super hungover and stumbling into the next venue are over. You just can’t last if that’s the case. But we still enjoy it; we still have fun.

Max: We’ll throw a couple back, yeah. [Laughs].

Brandon: A couple sips, every now and then. But yeah, I’m excited for it. Playing shows, for me at least, is the absolute reward. It’s just instant gratification. You’re like, Here’s something. And you just get it back. I love recording music and making music and writing music, but playing a FIDLAR show is like the peak of the mountain.

Zac: The FIDLAR fans are a special breed of people. It’s not very aggro or hardcore. It’s more like, dudes are just hanging out, people are just having fun. I don’t really have any expectations on this tour. The mantra that’s going on in my head about FIDLAR is that I just wanna feed our fan base. Like, I love playing smaller shows. I know that sounds crazy, but there is a disconnect once it gets to bigger venues. At a smaller show, I feel like I’m in the audience with them. It’s just more fun. So I’ve kind of taken the expectation factor out. I just want to really stoke out FIDLAR fans.

Zoey: Do you feel like that crowd has changed at all?

Max: Weirdly, not really. It’s still a lot of teenage kids, which is cool.

Brandon: Somehow, after us leaving—or, having to stop for a while—our fans got younger? Which was really weird. I was like, ‘Oh it’s gonna be a bunch of old dudes with beards that were around when the first album came out.’ But it was all these young kids! There’s a whole new generation. It’s exciting for us, because we’ve been at this for a while. So it fires us up.

Zoey: I wonder how that happens.

Max: I have no idea.

Zac: I’ve always heard that Gen Z kids, like, aren’t partying, but come to our show. They seem to be getting lit there. So I think there’s always going to kind of be a lane for us in that way, just purely based on the songwriting and the material.

“I always tripped out on this: you never really remember a wave. You remember catching the wave, but you don’t remember being on the wave. It’s very similar to how I never remember the middle of playing a show.”

Zoey: I wanted to ask you about where you’re coming from in the songwriting process regarding the material for this record, how it’s maybe different from previous records, or just what’s going on in the story and the lyrics of this album.

Zac: For a while I was scared to be creative, because whenever I get creative, I can get into a manic state. And there have been times when I’ve just ridden the wave of mania, and then I’m walking down Hollywood Boulevard with no shirt or socks like, ‘Where am I?’ So I kind of stayed away from being creative for a minute because I was scared. But then when I started going to therapy, the lyrics started making sense. I started learning how to be manic, but not go too far. I started actually doing work to capture these moments of being creative. Now, if I come up with a lyric and I laugh at it, then I’m like, ‘Ah, that’s a good one’.

Zoey: I think the sense of humor is definitely palpable on the record. My favorite track on the record is ‘Orange County’, partially for that reason, and also because of the irony of sunny Southern Californian angst.

Zac: Honestly, the way that that song came about is I just thought, if I write a song called Orange County, I could probably always play the Observatory for the rest of my life.

Zoey: [Laughs]. I feel like you probably could have done that anyways. But more specifically, I wanted to talk about skate and surf influences on this record.

Brandon: I think it’s inherently in us because Max grew up in LA, I’m from San Diego, and Zac’s from Hawai’i. So that culture is just ingrained in the music.

Zac: In Hawai’i, if you’re not outdoors, you’re sorta doing it wrong. I didn’t have TV growing up in Hawai’i, so the only way that I learned about new music was surf and skate videos.

Brandon: Tony Hawk Pro Skater was very influential for junior-high Brandon and Max and Zac.

Max: Even the song ‘That’s Life’ was kind of based on a skate video.

Zoey: I was asking because ‘Dog House’ is sort of a lampoon of the genre—a surf-rock song about couch surfing. And there are other tracks that utilize surfy riffs in full-force. But do you feel that surf rock has always been an influence on the band?

Zac: I surf a lot, and I always tripped out on this: you never really remember a wave. You remember catching the wave, but you don’t remember being on the wave. It’s very similar to how I never remember the middle of playing a show. I remember going up on stage, and then I remember saying good night. That’s the creative flow state.

Brandon: So, there are surf references because that’s the culture we grew up in. But I don’t think there was a conscious effort to be like, ‘Let’s make a surf song.’ It was just like, ‘That’s fun to play.’

Max: But I do think some of the newer songs— like ‘Get Off My Wave’ and ‘Dog House’— are more surfy.

Brandon: I guess we’re organically surf/skate-y… even though none of us really surf or skate. [Laughs]. I mean, Zac surfs, but.

Zoey: Well, Max can’t, so. [Laughs].

Max: I can kickflip still.

Watch the music video from FIDLAR’s latest single “HURT” below. Surviving the Dream is available to stream on Apple Music.