Urine – An Interview with Liam Sweeny

Let’s talk egos. In promoting yourself as an artist, you have to have an ego, even if you don’t have one. You have to promote yourself as a good time. But take this to an extreme, and you’re arrogant. But if you start with the premise that you suck, you can take that three miles beyond the limit.
So URINE is the Capital Region’s worst band. By three miles. Don’t ask me; it’s in the press kit. But actually, they’re pretty kickass.
We connect with Jake Roberts of Urine and talk about grades of disgust.

RRX: So let’s start with the a/s/l (for those unfamiliar with the old term, it means ‘age/sex/location, and refers to seedy chat rooms in the 90s.) How did Urine start up? Where was that first jam, and how did you know it was going to be great (or awful) after that?

JR: So basically, we started as a complete joke. When me and Nick (Postal Malone) started the band the day after Christmas in 2018, we only planned on releasing one song and calling it quits. Actually funny enough we didn’t even get a “real” show in until about April of 2022. Before that everything was done by a laptop and a microphone. In 2019 we played a couple shows at our friend Beej’s shed, where it was literally me behind a laptop playing the instrumentals, and Nick and Breo (Piss Barnes) doing vocals. Our first actual show was for a friend’s wedding when we finally had our true lineup that has stuck around since: Me on drums, Nick on vocals, Breo on bass, and Stephen (Shred Durst) on guitar. We also have our secret sexy member Frank Cogliando (Dank Sinatra) on vocals as well, but the man is super busy and our practice schedules suck just as much as we do, so he hasn’t played live with us yet, but you can hear him on recordings. We knew it was going to be the worst thing on the planet after we started our first EP, we were too poor to afford any good guitar plugins, so I used a cheap cello plugin and free drum samples, just added a bunch of distortion to the cello and called it a day. Easily the first EP is the hardest to listen to, as its badly mixed, bad writing and horrible quality, but it was the setting stone of the suckiness that has become what URINE is today. Eventually we got better plugins, and nowadays we have actual instruments on the recordings.

RRX: I didn’t get drawn to urine by the music initially. I got drawn by the hype, which was exceedingly bad, and coming from Urine itself. You all made a good move with that, does it speak to the mood of the band in general?

JR: Basically yeah. See ever since last year there has been a bit more pep in our step to take things seriously. Being booked for shows almost every month for a year really set it into us that “Oh wow, we actually have to try to have a GRAIN of seriousness with this” but all in all we still know at the end of the day “Hey, we suck, we do this for fun, let’s keep it that way” There is really not many arguments that happens between us because of that. Which is really cool because I always hear about bands having irreconcilable differences due to the angle they want to take their band. We basically let anything go, We have death metal songs, beatdown songs, EDM songs, there’s Ska and Punk influences as well. Basically anything that someone wants to do in the band, we do our best to make it happen. In fact our guitarist Stephen came up with an idea for having a ten minute long, genre bending song about Nick’s day, and we said fuck it, and recorded a ten minute long song. We don’t like to be categorized into a single genre, which is probably where the whole “pisscore” thing came from to begin with. But all in all, we definitely all agree that we suck, and probably will forever keep it that way.

RRX: I’m watching your February show at the Hudson Station. It’s pretty sick. I’ve never heard of Hudson Station before, and that might just be because I crawled out from under a rock yesterday. What can you tell us about that show?

JR: That show was booked by the absolutely amazing dudes Ben and Shea of Two Dead Hummingbirds. They really gave us a big start, when they booked us for a Troy Speakeasy show with Bonginator, The Idiot Flesh, Weeping, and The Sound That Ends Creation. That show really put our foot in the door as we were the ONLY local act on the bill and it was in a small house in Troy. The Hudson Station show was just as awesome. The underground scene has always been super supportive of us for some reason, just as any show we’ve done under bigger booking names. We got to play with our good friends The Lunkheads (Who absolutely slap, they’re comedic and hard as nails) and a really dank band named Exitum. It was crazy to see how many people could fit into a small basement in Albany just to see some bands, and absolutely terrorize the place. Not to mention every Hudson Station show comes with a train conductor, free of charge, and there’s Christmas lights. It’s pretty rad all together, and we’d love to play there again soon (wink wink).

RRX: One of the things we’re aiming for with our publication is to have a good mix of covering different kinds of music, and we want to make sure we’re covering metal and hardcore. So seeing Hudson Station makes me think there are other underground stops in the local metal scene. Where should we keep our eyes out?

JR: Oh there are TONS of places present and past. We have the amazing Fuze Box and Empire Underground, but we also have Hudson Station, Troy Speakeasy, No Fun, and even the ones that are no longer with us like The Rat Den and Caesars Palace. Our entire scene is built on the backbones of “Doing things your way” and the past couple of years have made that statement more true than you can imagine. Between Black n’ Blue, 2DH and others. The scene is thriving and I’m personally just glad to be a part of it. After sitting on the sidelines for years and watching and such, this joke of a band now has some people ready to see us even out in Mass. If you told me 4 years ago that URINE would be playing live shows, let alone out of state shows, I’d tell you you’re nuts. Support underground bands entirely, no matter where or when. Everybody starts somewhere, sometimes it’s your neighbor’s basement, your friends wedding, or even a birthday party. Take a chance and go see that band you’ve never heard of before. They could kick ass, or in our case. Suck so bad you yell it out to them onstage.