Love Letter To A Record: FeelsClub's St Jonnie On Death Grips' 'No Love Deep Web'

Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.

In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.

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FeelsClub’s St Jonnie – ‘No Love Deep Web’ by Death Grips (2012)

Dear No Love Deep Web.

You really changed me. Hell, maybe it wasn’t you the more I think about it but fuck, were you there holding my hand.

The year was 2012, I was at uni trying to turn my life around and study engineering and that’s where it all just crashed. Maybe it was too many long nights sitting in front of confusing equations that made no sense to me, maybe it was the boring long lectures about the ductility of plastics after even longer shifts at McDonalds and even longer nights at the RE; either way, I broke. I came hurtling to earth so fast, the only way I could get back to the sky was on a ride of prescription meds and caffeinated beverages and the whole way you held me close and yelled into my ear that you “have some shit to say just for the fuck of it”.

When I honestly should have been crawling through pages of physics text books and finishing assignments, we ran together, skateboard in hand and joint in mouth, from party to after party to after after party and straight to work again. You were there blasting through my speakers as we sped down rural backroads late at night, racing our friends in shitbox deathtraps at insane speeds, gear boxes spitting teeth. You were there for me after we crashed a high-class 18th and got into a fight with a car full of guys over girls my friends and I didn’t even like. You were there as I lay passed out in my parents pool, drink in hand, and when my girlfriend left me and I had to stay in my mates uni accom for a week.

But that’s sort of the problem isn’t it, you were only there when I was at my worst. I’m not saying it’s your fault, after all, it was me who did all this. But with your dark, heavy, anti-everything industrial sounds in my heart I felt invincible. You taught me the punk music I grew up loving in those clogged highschool halls never died, it just changed skin; and it was going to change skin over and over again. It was with you charging through my car stereo that I realised I wasn’t meant to be where I was and music is all I cared for and loved. I had to have that electricity of playing live and writing raw music in my veins every damn day.

So all these years later, sure, we bump into each other every now and then… it’s usually on a wild night or a down day that you pop back into my playlists when I just want to feel, but the best days between us are surely done. I know I didn’t go on to make the music you showed me, but the way I thrash around live and scream my heart out were thrust into me by your violent bass and cryptic lyrics. The reasons we didn’t last longer and why I don’t follow your new music like I used to follow the older stuff? It wasn’t you. It wasn’t me. It was just the wrong time. It wasn’t meant to last. We both grew and that’s ok because I will never forget –

“You’re fit ta learn the proper meaning of a beatdown

Madness chaos in the brain

Let my blood flow, make my blood flow through you mane

You got no business questioning a thang

Swallowed way too much

Couldn’t handle it, I fell

Down a spiral staircase winding ta hell”

Yours truly and forever,

St Jonnie

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Brisbane’s FeelsClub have just unleashed their dance-pop instalment, ‘After The Fall’, ahead of the release of their forthcoming debut EP of the same name on October 18.

The band are also heading out on a headline interstate tour, including dates in Brisbane, Newcastle, Melbourne, Sydney and a spot on the Sunshine Coast’s Yonder Festival.

Catch all those dates — and listen to ‘After The Fall’ — below.