by Jim Testa

Faulkner got their start on the Sunset Strip, but they’ll quickly tell you that they much prefer New York City. They look L.A. through and through, though, grom lead singer Lucas Asher’s omnipresent red pleather jacket to the rest of the band’s distinctive style (which looks cadged from a New Romantic thrift store.) They’ve got a song called “I Only Wear Black” that they sing very seriously, and another called “NY Anthem” produced by no less than RZA of the Wu Tang Clan, which gets played at Yankee Stadium. Their track “Revolutionary” has 2 million YouTube hits (if you care about that kind of thing) and the cover of their debut EP shows a topless girl in a black leather jacket with her boobs out. Rick Rubin, producers Mark Needham (The Killers) and JP Bowersock (the Strokes,) and KCRW-FM tastemaker Jason Bentley have all taken an interest. All of this has Faulkner perched on the edge of Next Big Thingdom, with a debut full-length (produced by RZA, Bowersock, and Needham) coming this fall.

Lucas Asher (vocals), Eric Scullin (vocals, synth), Dimitri Farougias (bass) and Christian Hogan (drums) came together while they were individually playing the club circuit in Los Angeles, although the story of how Asher got there reads like updated Dickens. As a teen, Asher ran away from an orphanage in Oklahoma, lived on the streets of Manhattan while getting a foot in the music business, and eventually migrated to L.A. Asher's homeless experiences in New York shape much of the lyrics on Faulkner's debut EP. Although the band claims the Clash and Lou Reed as influences, the sound is modern, clean, synth-driven, and eclectic.

None of these guys are kids anymore, and damned if I know who their target audience might be. But given the logistics of the industry in 2016, they’re doing what needs be done, whether that’s playing ball with iHeartRadio (basically competing with Selena Gomez and Shawn Mendes for tween ears) while giving interviews to little music blogs like this one. I met them outside the Mercury Lounge before a performance last week; they’ll be back in NYC at Piano’s on Friday, September 16, and Friends And Lovers in Brooklyn on Saturday, September 17.

JB: Your bio says you’re bi-coast, with Lucas from New York and the rest from L.A., but it didin’t say specifically how you all got together.

Lucas Asher: In the L.A. music scene. We all had common music connections. And once we started playing together, it felt great, so we just kept doing it.

JB: How did you wind up working with RZA? You’re a rock band, not hip hop, so that’s an interesting combination.

Lucas: We hit him up. He gets approached all the time, and we were kind of shocked that he not only wanted to collaborate with us, but produce us and write with us. We worked together on ‘NY Anthem’ at Rick Rubin’s studio, which the Yankees have played since. And now he’s produced some songs on our album for us.

Eric Scullin: He got into the writing with us, he was very, very involved. Everything from the get-go, from the tempo to the synth sounds to the lyrics. Super involved. He’s got a very, very cool philosophical approach mixed with math, which is really mind-blowing.

JB: Is the band overall pretty collaborative or is the Lucas the songwriter?

Lucas: We’re very collaborative. We couldn’t exist if one member wasn’t a part of us. I think our sound is defined by all of us. I do write the skeleton structure of songs, usually on acoustic guitar, but then the band all adds their own touches to it.

JB: Christian, how about you? Drummers never get credit for writing their own parts.

Christian: We all work together. There’ll be parts where they’ll come up with a beat for me, but then I’ll lay down some ideas of my own. We all really work together and get to input our own ideas before we consider a song done.

JB: Lucas, can you tell me about the Music Foundry classes you were invited to?

Lucas: Yeah, Fader put it together. We did a really intensive interview on camera for YouTube as part of it. We talked a lot about the Clash in that session, because we’re really influenced by the Clash. We got to collaborate with a lot of other artists and we got to go to the YouTube studio, which is fabulous, and actually worked on some videos.

JB: How would you compare scraping by as an indie band in Los Angeles as compared to New York City?

Lucas: You have to cover more distance, for one thing. You can’t be a band in L.A. without a car. We like New York a lot better. The girls are a lot better looking in New York.

Dimitri Farougias: There’s really no place to play in L.A. There’s still a lot of pay to play on the Sunset Strip.

Lucas: Basically you have to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

JB: That kinds of brings me to my next question. I saw you did a session for iHeartRadio, where you’re competing with people like Ariana Grande for listeners. Is that just the nature of the business now?

Lucas: Well, Jason Bentley (of KCRW) presented it, and he’s actually really cool. But yeah, we premiered a song on iHeart. We don’t really distinguish genre and category, we just want to connect with people. And we’ll do whatever we have to do to find an audience. It’s funny you mentioned Ariana Grande. When it comes to our influences, we’re really into David Bowie and Lou Reed and Joe Strummer, and on the hip hop side, we listen to a lot of Wu Tang Clan. So yeah, it’s alternative, what we’re into, but we’re not going to worry about what else people are listening to. We just want them to listen to us too. They synths are an important part of our band so we’ve been called electronic. There’s a lot of electronic music that’s every bit as hard as punk rock. Nobody ever thinks of electronic music as hard but there’s stuff out there that’s just as hard as anything the Sex Pistols did. We call it Mono-Genre. There’s really only one audience out there in the digital world. We want that audience to hear us.