Slow Hollows are a band based in LA. They are still in grade school – most in high school. They are wise beyond their age and have a great sound. They’ve played along the likes of The Garden and Beach Fossils and we recently hung out with them and got to the bottom how you juggle Skrillex shows and homework.—Kate Langland

AJ: Aaron Jassenoff

AF: Austin Feinstein

RK: Reed Kanter

DT: Dylan Thinnes

NS: Nick Santana

Listen to their latest single “Again” here: 

What Youth: You guys played a set with Skrillex?

AJ: We played a show at the Ace Hotel for this Broadway thing, they were doing a Night on Broadway and Skrillex played.

AF: It was a big collection of musicians.

DT: We technically played on the same line-up as Skrillex, which is kinda tight.

Do you guys go to school with each other? AF: Dylan and I go to school together, and Nick goes to Number Nine which is an arts school in Downtown.

AJ: Reed dropped out of college to help with this band, his other band, Casinos, and Danger Collective Records. Danger Collective is our record label.

AF: He’s getting really good at fingerboarding.

RK: If music doesn’t work out there’s always fingerboarding.

Do kids at your high school treat you differently at all?

NS: No, they still treat me like shit.

DT: With me and Austin, it happens a little bit. There are a few people at our school that are fans of us and stuff, but it definitely doesn’t lead to anyone treating us differently. A lot of people at our school knew us before the band had any sort of popularity.

I’ve been to a few of your shows and I see Austin, Nick, and Dylan, but are the rest of you in the band or how does that work? 

DT: The thing is me, Austin, and Nick are the ones who recorded on the last album. Austin and Nick have been in the band for the longest and I’m in it for the next longest. Aaron and Reed are recent additions but they’re in the band. Everyone plays an equal part.

Your short film Atelophobia recently came out. How are the reactions that you’re getting? DT: It’s really hard to get a gauge on the reactions from the film because we only premiered it in person.

AF: Yeah, I feel bad because a lot of people literally couldn’t come because they live in different states.

How was filming it? Was it fun?

AF: No, this whole process was just supposed to be a music video that was going to come out a year ago. Then it’s gone from that to a short film. Like in the middle of shooting a music video we were just like, “Let’s just do a movie!” We filmed three different plots and just went through so many fucking changes that it was just not fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it, but that shit was not fun at all. I wouldn’t want to do that again.

DT: I can understand why it wasn’t fun for Austin because he was there for like all of it and I only had fun because I was there for a total of like two or three hours of the filming process.

AJ: I did a party scene and got free pizza. My experience was excellent.

“The thing on collaborating on songs is I feel like it takes away the individual creativity for each band. I think it’d be cooler to do a really tight split 7″ with someone. Then you preserve the creativity of each artist”

I take it acting is not in the future for you?  

DT: Maybe for Nick.

AJ: Yeah, he was already in a P.O.D music video.

P.O.D as in the band from the early 2000’s? 

DT: Yeah, Nick plays a bully that throws someone in a dumpster.

NS: And then the kid gets picked up by some steam-punk monster and attacks the bullies.

What song?  It’s called “Beautiful.”

That’s so funny. You guy’s also recently played with Beach Fossils, how was that? 

AF: Thomas [Davidson, Beach Fossils Guitarist] and I have the same guitar and after the show I accidentally took his. I got a text from him saying, “Hey man, I’m pretty sure you took our guitar”. This was at fucking one o’clock in the morning. They were like, “Yeah, we’re flying back tomorrow morning, is there any way you could get it to us?”. Everybody was pretty much asleep and I didn’t know what the fuck to do because we had school the next day. Reed drove it to them.

RK: I had a flight the next morning to New York at 6 am. So I was in bed and so stoked to get like three hours of sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to that and I was like, “All right.” I was listening to like really loud dance music to keep me awake.

DT: I’ve been told I look a lot like Dustin from the back. We both have the same shoes, same pants, and the same kind of hair in the back. It got to the point where when I first walked in to the venue, Beach Fossils was setting up their stuff for soundcheck and I looked up and I saw Dustin from the back and I was like, “Wait what the fuck am I doing up there?”

AJ: I saw Dustin on stage and I screamed, “Dylan! Dylan get the fuck off!” And I turned and I saw Dylan and I was like, “Oh sorry.”

If you guys could collaborate with anyone who would it be? 

DT: I’d say Dev Hynes.

AF: Someone that’s a great vocalist. I’ve always wanted to do something with Fiona Apple.

RK: I think Future.

DT: The thing on collaborating on songs is I feel like it takes away the individual creativity for each band. I think it’d be cooler to do a really tight split 7’ inch with someone. Then you preserve the creativity of each artist.

You guys have been recording your new album this week, do you have any names for it yet? 

AF: I had a name but nobody really likes it because nobody fucking understands. It’s Luxury of Lawl. I really don’t know, it’s completely up in the air right now.

Is that a last minute thing?

AF: No, not at all. I don’t want it to be. I want everything to be thought out. Atelophobia, that was sick and it meant something to us. We thought about it and we all agreed and were really excited about the name. I don’t want to title this the name of our band or just pick a fucking song on the album. I want to pick something that I will look back on and be like, “Glad I named it that.”

DT: There’s still a lot of time before it gets released.

You brought up your previous album, what’s the deal with your first album I’m Just as Bad as You Are? Why don’t you guys like it? 

AF: I was in like the ninth grade when I wrote that which is a long fucking time ago. All the songs were just songs that I had been playing since I was like fourteen and they were just bad. The quality of the record’s not great, my voice- don’t even fucking get me started on that shit.

DT: It just puts me in a weird position because when that album was recorded I was friends with Austin and Nick, but I didn’t play in the band yet. I think it’s super unfair of me to be like, “That album fucking sucks!”. Just from playing it live for so long, I’m so over it. I hate to bring this up but when you [Austin] recorded those songs you were like fifteen. Nick’s almost eighteen, Austin’s eighteen and I just think it’s kind of a thing where that’s sort of the age range where you mature so much as a person. You mature so much in your brain between those ages. Austin is so different now then the lyrics he made at the time.

It was just a different time in your life, yeah? 

AF: Yeah, I was talking about deleting the album off Spotify today and everybody said no and I’ve kind of come around to it. At the end of the day, it’s something I made and I can’t delete that, I wish I could. At the end of the day, that’s has gotten us where we are right now, even if it’s horrible. We’re still here so that was necessary. I’m sure in three years I’m going to look back on this album and be like, “I wish I would have done things differently”. I’m already looking back at Atelophobia and just wishing I had done things differently.

What are you guys anticipating for the future of Slow Hollows? Because most of you are seniors in high school, are you guys going to go to school or are you going to stay in Los Angeles?  

AF: It’s looking like we’re going to be doing this for the most part. I really don’t know what we’re going to be doing in the future. I have the intention of still playing music. I don’t know if there are going to be five more of these albums or if it’s going to completely change. All I know now is that we’re at a very happy place with what’s going on.

DT: Nick is moving to the shittiest city in California in September. He’s moving to Sacramento.

NS: I applied to college there.

AJ: Also, he was like, “What’s the worst city I can go to?” He googled it and then Sacramento came up and he was like, “Oh perfect!” Anyone who lives there, we’re sorry.

DT: I’m not. We had to stop there on tour for like two hours to get snow chains for our van. We went to the biggest Walmart I had ever seen and they didn’t have fucking snow chains. If you’re in an area with snow, why the fuck don’t you have snow chains?

What locations are you guys planning on going on the upcoming tour? 

AF: A lot of the same places we hit and a couple of obvious spots that we missed like San Luis Obispo, Oregon and other places.

Can you guys name some pros and cons of the LA music scene? 

DT: Pros: More often than not is a lot of people living close together in a big city. It’s not too hard to book a show for your own band and play. It’s great local exposure.

AJ: Cons: We think of it as a music scene and no one specifically it’s kind of a play-by-play basic, but sometimes people try to replicate that and they don’t have the actual love or passion that we have for music. There’s some people who do it just to make money or they do it because they think that it’ll make them look cool or popular off of it. We did it because we enjoy music and this is what we really, really love.

RK: That being said there are a lot of amazing bands coming out of LA right now.

Check out and listen to more Slow Hollows on their Band Camp here.