Kronstadt – A Punk Revolution

I dare say it is easy to see that I enjoy French Hardcore and Punk, a lot. There is something about their way of writing, of composing melodies, which are right on the money! The fact they choose to sing in French is another win in my book. North to South, East to West, all around the geography of this beautiful country there is, at least, one Hardcore Punk band that is killing it!

This time I head off to Lille, to speak with the very nice lads of Kronstadt – go search the event if you are not aware of it already – and their latest release, "Quai de l'Ouest", which is on my Best of The Year List (my list is long as f@ck ahahah)!

Ladies and Gents… Kronstadt. 

Greetings from Portugal. How are you living these moments and, more important, how are you thinking of promoting this album – "Quai de l'Ouest" – given the pandemic we are going through? 

Hi, from Lille, thank you for your interest, it's nice. We have indeed just released our second LP and we are now asking to ourselves the question of promotion. In fact, thinking about a tour as we have already done before, across the borders is a little unimaginable. We are even hoping for a local concert. Nevertheless, even that is complicated. However, it is not impossible. We just have to wait a little bit longer, for the reflexes to come back and to be a little sure that we are not doing something wrong, taking care of each other. At least in the Lille metropole.

The less affected areas in France have other logics and they are very lucky. But we do not give up, and we will be there, when the time comes to celebrate it all together or just to do a good rock concert! The album is now released in physical form after a month of being made available on the internet and the labels will take care of the promotion while we will succeed, us, in distributing them across the city and the country, from hand to hand in going to meet people you haven't seen for a long time and get news at the same time. 

I read in your Bandcamp that the album was recorded during the 2nd confinement, mixed during curfew, and the 1st draft during the 1st curfew... the creative part, that part of the jams and the joining pieces, was done how and when?

We had been preparing this album for a long time, maybe originally we did not know if it was going to be an album. A split, an EP, what else? However, we came to make an album. We must have started seriously to take an interest in this form at the end of 2019 to say to ourselves, that we would record well in March 2020. Coronavirus requires, we did not record but in real, it was bad for good. We did not rehearse for a while either. That was less cool. Nevertheless, we remained determined to refine, arrange, compose more to finally make up eight months later and be able to record this album. We still finished things late, made arrangements in the studio, wrote a text on the edge of a table at the end of the recording, rethought things and dared to never be satisfied. But hey, we have to let go of the ballast at some point and tell ourselves that we couldn't do better. Just as we had the time, we took it well and it was hard to tell ourselves that we had not anymore, if we wanted to see it released before the summer of 2021.

What is the theme of this album? The artwork itself... the black and white, the lines. There is an intention, here, to create a very harmonious set, right? Nothing was left to chance.

We do not know if there is a general theme to this album. Just it is imbued with our daily lives, our environment, the time that passes for us, political life. We started writing two years ago, but there is still a part that talks or can talk about the health crisis that is taking place, especially in the texts that friends have written to us. But others are witnesses to the movement of “Gilets jaunes”, demonstrations, parties that do not want an end, ecology, aging, running away or not... I think that we feel a periodicity in the texts and also, when it is known, from who gave the text. 

But we found the whole to be very homogeneous. The cover is a reflection of our environment as we said above. We rehearse in the old Lille water station. These are large warehouses on the edge of the canal, quite cold, quite dirty, well polluted. There is an old house next door that looks out of place and time between the dump and a scavenger. Just a few weeks ago, you have to believe that it no longer had its place; the cranes came to destroy it. At least we managed to put it on a sleeve in time. Like what, time flies, the memories remain!

Going back a little bit, to the start: how have these years been, for you, as a band, and where do you come from?

We come from Lille, a city at the crossroads of European highways in the north of France. It's not very beautiful but we are still happy to live in a flat country where nature is ultra-domesticated. 

From the ashes of old bands, we created a new one, Kronstadt, and we followed the traditional journey of a few bands. We did tours across Europe, two records, no t-shirts, a few compilations, many concerts, stickers to stick everywhere on gas stations and tolls and we always enjoyed do it. We already had a good network before we could really start promoting this project so we didn't have too much trouble to quickly becoming active even without a demo. And we thank everyone for that.

Your name. I am very curious to know why this choice. I suppose there is a connection to the historical event, right?

This name is a bit of a discussion. As we cannot agree on visuals to make t-shirts, the name of the band did not come up right away. But the group was born at the time of the movement “Contre la Loi Travail” (Against the Labor Law) a bill that reversed the rights of employees and gave more rights to employers in short. Although the bill was passed, we found our account in there. And making a punk band after that, after we had each other bands like Traitre, Makach, it made sense to give ourselves a name with a more political, more unifying connotation. And also some difficulties in pronouncing it. 

It was also the 100 years of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Left made mountains of it and we preferred Kronstadt, to their symbols and their references to 1917. This name is a humble attempt to recall the history of the repression of Kronstadt in Russia, in 1921, that the end does not justify the means, no offense to the worshipers of movement figures, however charismatic they may be... We are not the only ones to carry this group name, and that is good if it can keep the memory alive and not make us repeat the same mistakes.

Apart from the association of your name to such a politically marked event, what is your association – as musicians, as individuals, as agents of Society – with the theme of Politics? 

Lille is not so big so we all know each other a little bit and we brew a bit in the same places, there aren't that many, we are not so much! As musicians, we are well mixed with other groups from Lille who rehearse in the same room. We did a compilation together at the beginning of the year to support the local legal self-defense fund because we could not do support concerts and which can be listened to here: www.onmarcheencoresouslapluie.bandcamp.com/. Outside of Covid, we organized a lot of Punk, Rock and other concerts, Techno / Acid evenings to support various causes and struggles, we opened places... We will do it again!

After that, we each gravitate independently in different things and groups that animate us, because that makes sense, the different struggles in progress, the strikes, the rights of migrants, the antifascism, the fight against confinement, printing various and varied propaganda ... .but as a citizen, we do not do much here. We don't care about the little ballot game and political politicians at all. We hope we understood the meaning of the question.

Since Hardcore Punk is a style with close links to revolutionary and politicized issues, do you feel that there is now urgency for politically active messages that draw the attention of those that are "asleep", to what is happening in the world?

We are not particularly fan of slogan songs. It has always an effect in concert, that everyone sings together a punchline that unites us during a concert. But it's always time for a concert and quite often it doesn't go further for some. So we prefer to be sincere and play a little bit on this field. We have already done it (Like NLK, Exil,...) but there are always things beyond music. We like to go on concert and tour with a press table, books, essays, stickers, brochures to go further if we want to get into it but not make our set a political pamphlet. We want to have a good time, that it brings us together, that we know why we are here, what bring us alive and count but not to be the voice of all the ills of society.

Your Music, like many others – brilliant – French groups, is sung in your mother tongue. Have you ever thought of creating music that was not sung in French?

We have done it in the past, but rather when we played in Crust, Fastcore, Hardcore bands but for this project, we find it good to be able to sing our daily lives, our struggles, our loves and our hatred with more sincerity and naturally than by trying to translate it to sounds correct. We are not good enough on syntax, formulations, English expressions. I mean English, but we do not really know how to speak other languages either. Basics in Spanish, Portuguese, German or Dutch are not enough to be able to make songs and be understood.

Beyond the language, there is a whole sound that is very French, which is fantastic! Still, the French scene lives on a sound diversity that makes it demarcation from many others. And Oi! The Punk Oi! tradition, in France, for years and years. Is there an explanation for this adoration of the genre? Your sound is based on melodic lines that sometimes remind me of rainy days when the sun lurks in the distance. I do not know if this makes sense to you ahahah but in a way it is a dark luminosity. How do you describe your sound and, of course, what themes, bands, books, movies, whatever, influence you to create?

We spoke about it above with the language already. I think the diction in French, the way the words sing together, the accent, must play for a lot. But we cannot explain this sound. It must surely come from all the bands that have played before us, since the wave of what we call "Punk Français".

Some bands are very influential in the choice of sound for example like Camera Silens, in the way of writing like Les Rats. But I understand this feeling of cold light, dark luminosity. The sky here is not often sunny. It rains often but more often the sky is low, in constantly a different gray. In addition, it maybe gives that atmosphere that lives in us. The gray in the sleeve is a reminder of this. In terms of influences, like many, it is the basics of Oi and Punk-Rock with Camera Silens that we have already mentioned, No Hope for the Kids, La Souris Déglinguée, Criminal Damage... 

But we look in others directions. We spread out; we listen to Manchester rock bands as much as the Colombian Punk scene. “Big Up to them! Never give up!”, and often, on evenings, we abandon ourselves in the Techno Gabber scene which tints our identities, our youths and our nights of abandonment.

We read Cometbus like Akira and we watch The Firm, the movies of Ken Loach, Bertrand Tavernier, as much as a documentary on Rojava, WWI.

We are 4 in the group, with a common culture, but each one brings his touch, which he likes to make it sound that way!

"Quai de l'Ouest", the 6th song on your album, appears unexpectedly (unexpectedly equals GOOD). What was your intention when you decided to insert, in the middle of the album, a track like this?

We can say that this is our first album; the previous was only a mini album according to the experts. Therefore, in any album, you can afford to do whatever you want. We wanted to create an atmosphere that symbolizes the docks of the canal, something haunting, with the noise of caterpillars and ducks. It is a taste of all of that. To break the Rock n' Roll a few seconds, take a break from listening. If you do not like it, you turn the vinyl, it's the end of the A side! We could have done a piano loop in the Locked groove too; it would have been crazy too! But we’re not enough mean.

What will the future be like? What can we expect from you?

Well, we are waiting for the come-back of tours across borders and coutries but it does not seem that it is for the moment so we are waiting for the comeback of concerts in our sector, in France and near belgian border, we have to wait for the conditions with the vaccines, the tests and when we feel we can really share it without risk. We hope that the album by then will have time to circulate everywhere, will have good feedback or not, but that it is listened to. And then we'll do another recording with maybe an EP or a split this time, for real. And maybe even T-Shirts! Who knows ?

It has been a pleasure. Your album is fantastic, and I hope you can promote it, regardless of the current situation. Gentlemen, congratulations and thank you.

Thanks to you for asking us! It was a pleasure.

 Kronstadt Official Bandcamp