Seeing iconic guitar/drum duos like the White Stripes and the Kills left a big impression on Demi Demitro, the mastermind of the Velveteers’ off-kilter, grungy sound. Even before she picked up a guitar, she was already envisioning how her band would sound.
“When I’d watch Meg and Jack White on stage, her just pounding away at the drums, and having those two pieces, it felt really inspiring,” Demitro says.
The next move for the Boulder, Colorado, native was to up the stakes. “Eventually I thought, what would it be like if we added another drummer? And then it got fun. I just love the raw energy of that. It opened up more room for us to express our creativity.”
Demitro’s vision for the Velveteers is split between her melodic instincts and love of grinding, fuzzed-out baritone guitar riffs, tuned to C standard and played on .013s. This dichotomy is loaded with notes and voicings that thread mystery and unease through the band’s sophomore album, A Million Knives.
While Demitro covers a large portion of the sonic territory, the group’s two drummers pound rhythms behind her wicked riffs while also adding synths to the mix. Working with Dan Auerbach, who also produced their 2021 debut, Nightmare Daydream, Demitro and her crew were keen to experiment with sounds and arrangements on their latest album.
The results are evident 12 seconds into the opening song, when the lead riff of All These Little Things slices like a sonic laser, eviscerating the doomy stomp courtesy of a pair of octave pedals. On Suck the Cherry, the guitar tone – not scooped so much as scraping – sets the baseline for her wide-ranging vocals.
Sonically it’s all related, and within those sonics, Demitro finds plenty of expression. “Sometimes the riff kind of said what I was wanting to say, which is a really cool feeling,” she says.
The group dug deep to focus their energies on the songs that became A Million Knives, a process that allowed them to “get back to the simplicity of making something,” she says, after becoming a bit jaded by the music industry. But once the creativity and chemistry began to flow, the magic that all musicians chase followed.
“Those moments were fun to figure out in the studio,” she says. “We didn’t really know what was going to happen – but I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted the soundscape to be.”
- A Million Knives is out now via Easy Eye Sound
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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