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Prop House Aren’t Nostalgic. They’re Pissed.
Fresh off a split with Brackish, the Jersey post-hardcore band explains why DIY is a future-facing fight.
Hailing from the one-time emo mecca of New Jersey, post-hardcore quintet PROP HOUSE learned the ropes through DIY VFW hall shows, mail-order catalogs, and the columns tucked in the back of Alternative Press. That upbringing still shapes how they work. Vocalist Ian screen prints and handles all the band’s design, guitarist Rudy is an audio engineer, and Biff shoots video, so nearly everything with the Prop House name on it is made in-house.
The band moves fast. They released three EPs in a single year, then chose a 10" split with Brackish over a full-length. The split is out now on Sinking Ship Records, and it’s the most confident thing they’ve done so far, pushing further into screamo and hardcore since drummer Tom joined from a mathcore project. They also have a clear reason for making it. In a time of AI slop, screen-driven isolation, and sterile, quantized imitations of rock and roll, Prop House want to remind people what shredded vocal cords, broken strings, shared sweat, and handmade things are worth.
We talked with Ian, Eric, Rudy, and Biff about how the lineup came together, why a full-length would be premature, and why calling their hands-on ethos “nostalgia” misses the point.
You’ve all been part of the Jersey scene for a long time. How did the five of you end up in a room together, and when did it start to feel like an actual band?
Eric: Ian initially assembled the band. He had some shit to say and a desire to front a band. But Rudy is the only other person besides him from the earliest incarnation of the band. Both original guitarists quit. I can’t really speak for them, but it seemed like neither was sure how to execute the vision that Ian had for the band. Rudy moved from bass to guitar, and then he brought Biff and me in. The three of us have years of intertwined history playing in bands. At that point things started moving.
Biff: As we’ve aged, you start to take note of anyone who is really about that DIY lifestyle. Ian is a screen printer and graphic designer, Rudy is an audio engineer, I’m a videographer. We are able to be fully self-sufficient, which makes the creative process way more rewarding and expedited as a collective. Once we started talking about artwork, design choices, merch ideas, and overall visuals, that’s when this started to feel like a real band.
Eric: For me, it feels like Prop House is still in the process of becoming itself. I didn’t know Ian at all when I joined the band, but we’ve since bonded over a shared love of bands like Ink & Dagger, Orchid, Hot Cross, and Born Against, as well as a desire to be agitators. Our original drummer wrote and performed on the first three EPs, but he left the band before the second one had even been released. I brought our current drummer Tom on board from a mathcore project we had been working on with a mutual friend, and it really cemented a shift in the direction of the screamo and hardcore that Ian and I have connected over. The songs on the split with Brackish were written before Tom joined, but he really elevated them with his playing. I think the next material we write will see us continuing to metamorphize.
Between you, you’re in about a dozen other bands. What does Prop House represent for you that those other projects don’t, and how did you land on this sound, the At the Drive-In, Thursday, Cursive lineage, as the way to do it?
Eric: Well, Biff and Rudy have about a dozen different projects between them, but this is the only band that Ian, Tom, or I are actively part of at the moment. This is my sole creative focus. I am continually impressed with how prolific and productive my bandmates are, but I don’t think their other bands have much to do with the music I bring to the table or the way Ian writes.
When I was asked to join the band, I said I was only interested in writing music that had a certain amount of teeth and muscle to it. I had been playing in more indie-leaning projects for years before this, and I was just so bored, and angry about the state of the world, and itching to write very physical music that centered live performance as a salve for feeling like the tide of society is increasingly pulling us to a place of alienation from the material world and physical interaction.
Rudy: I don’t think we ever set out to specifically sound like ATDI, Thursday, Cursive, etc., but those are all bands that we all grew up loving, so once we got together we started to gravitate toward those aesthetics naturally. For Biff and me, Prop House allows us to explore a darker, heavier, more dissonant side that our other projects largely don’t.
Eric: If anything, we might mention those bands as a reference because we understand that those are more widely known names, but we’re as inspired by the current wave of screamo and hardcore bands like Nuvolascura, Soul Glo, Hundreds of AU, and even more melodic stuff like Militarie Gun and MSPAINT, as we are by the bands of our youth. This is an excellent time for weird, fucked-up punk music. You don’t have to look backwards for inspiration.
You put out three EPs in one year, then went to a split instead of a full-length. What’s behind moving that fast and that short?
Eric: Immediately jumping to a full-length feels wildly premature for a band as new as ours, one that’s still finding its identity. On the first three EPs, I think you can hear a band that isn’t sure what it wants to be. The songs on the split that we just released with Brackish are more confident about the direction we’re moving in, but I think in hindsight we’ll still see it as a transitional work. We still haven’t captured the intensity of our live performances, and our live performances keep getting more intense. We’re chasing something.
We don’t really see the point in writing a full-length album until we’re prepared to release a coherent, definitive statement. For now, it feels wiser to keep moving, keep growing, and approach releases like frequent broadcasts on our evolution. Also, a lot of the bands that influenced us in our formative years were similarly heavy on 7-inches, EPs, and splits, and I think that approach just feels natural to us.
Your bio leans hard on the anti-AI, made-with-your-own-hands idea. What would you say to someone who calls that nostalgia dressed up as a manifesto?
Ian: If I was twenty years old, it might bite. That feeling is reserved only for those that wax nostalgic and are looking at what we do as something only rooted in the “memory of.” There’s no playbook. If there was, it would be written in invisible ink.
Everything that was steering the ship here came with its own caveats. Some for worry, some for want. I’m not fondly remembering the tougher paths that I walked. I think of them. I use them. No dwelling. There’s a future waiting, and we’re trying to leverage a pry bar to peek inside.
Eric: I would probably eye that person with a fair amount of suspicion. That’s someone who doesn’t share my values, or someone who is allowing themselves to be led on a leash into a future of someone else’s design. I’m inspired by art from every era, but I don’t have much use for nostalgia. This is about intentionality in how we contribute to the future we’re collectively building. It’s forward-facing.
As a tool, the novelty of AI is that it exercises agency over the process of creation. It thinks for you and makes decisions for you. If you value self-expression and the mutual construction of shared meaning, and if you love the way an individual’s limitations and influences and environment shape their artistic voice, there is nothing appealing about outsourcing the creative process to a machine. Participation in the act of creation is one of the most sublime aspects of being human. It isn’t a labor that’s worth automating.
If you value profit over art, then the appeal of the content-producing machine that shits out endless product is obvious. But I think that value system is and always has been a cancer on meaningful culture. We want to participate in culture that exists apart from and in defiance of that.
Ian, you sing and you also handle all the band’s design work. When you’re making something people hold in their hands, like a 10", which comes first for you, the visual world or the words?
Ian: The two songs on the split were actually written a while back. We didn’t have the idea to do a record until it came time to figure out a home for the new stuff. The words were informing the world we were building and the weather in it. We sprinkled ourselves into that art and let it reflect what the inside is experiencing.
That’s not to say that a visual world doesn’t exist inside my brain at all times. There are ways I want our art to be displayed, and there are definitely ways that I don’t believe mesh with what Prop House is about. Expect none and accept no substitutions.
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