grandson blends genres, sculpting rock, hip-hop, and electronic into a vision of alternative you’ve never quite heard, seen, or felt before. Amassing a staggering 3.5 billion streams globally, the platinum-certified Canadian has collaborated with everyone from Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park and Steve Aoki to Travis Barker, Kesha, K. Flay, X Ambassadors, and Tom Morello and toured with Bring Me The Horizon.
He infiltrated culture as a sonic insurgent with a pair of EPs - a modern tragedy Vol. 1-2 - and the 2x platinum single Blood // Water. In 2020, he continued to engage with his epically enigmatic full-length debut, Death of An Optimist. This year he turned the lens inward on his latest album, I Love You, I’m Trying, resulting in his most introspective and vulnerable collection of songs yet. His work has earned the applause of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and many more as he continues to quietly reshape alternative music.
A rare outlier who can appear with Senator Bernie Sanders on a live stream and contribute two songs to James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, grandson also joined forces with Tom Morello for Hold The Line and performed it with the legendary guitarist on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
On the live front, the shapeshifting artist has also shared stages with Bring Me The Horizon, Avril Lavigne, Imagine Dragons and more. grandson has spent a good chunk of 2023 taking the I Love You, I’m Trying tour across the Northern Hemisphere and it’s finally Australia’s turn to experience the alchemy and community when he hits our shores this month.
Ahead of his arrival, we caught up with this musical maverick to try and unpick what makes him tick and solve the riddle of how his truly unique take on alternative music came to be.
grandson, you’re headed down under for the first time, are you hyped?
“Of course, I am hyped! How could I not be? After all these years, I never thought it was possible. Now we're a week away. So I feel really good about it. I feel excited. It’s always special to go somewhere for the first time, especially when I've been making music now for six, or seven years. To have a chance to meet a community of people who have been searching for music on the underground, that’s so cool. What better place to do it? You know? The weather will be gorgeous, hopefully, fingers crossed there and we'll be throwing down all night.”
When you first started making music for this project, did you ever think it would catch on with people on the other side of the world the way that it has?
“To be honest, I was pretty high, I was pretty out of it when I started it, as far as understanding how the internet works. I would get messages from people that said, ‘I'm listening in Australia, you should come here’, but t I didn't put two and two together that that's a real place that people are listening to my music and those numbers that are going up, that's people listening. So that that took me a while. Now that I've been doing it for a minute, I'm like, ‘Oh, yeah, no, that's happening’.”
“I do think that maybe because of the geography, fans of rock music in Australia and New Zealand are a little more online than fans in mainland North America or whatever. There is this real interest and passion in music discovery still in Australia, and I think this genre of music rock and roll, has not always embraced change like that. So I have always noticed a disproportionately high number of fans telling me to come to Australia, and I'm excited to finally do that. It's gonna be awesome.”
Australia is kind of like the third comment on every post after ‘Come to Brazil’, right?
“Yeah, yeah I mean there are a lot more people in Brazil, but you still have pretty good representation. If you want that number one spot, you guys have to wake up a little earlier in the day, you know? I think Brazil has got the throne for now with South Korea at their neck, you know?”
What you do is a little bit different to standard rock music, to the extent that a lot of listeners might be a bit thrown when they first hear it. How did you come upon this truly unique blend of styles you have going on?
“I just didn't think about it too much. I loved lots of different kinds of music growing up and I just didn't want to have to choose. You know, I love rap. I love rock. I love electronic music. I was always interested in how they can connect. I felt that a lot of the dance music I was listening to that had rock singers or anything like that, it was just missing the edge, it was just missing the anger and the frustration and I feel that you know, using the lyrics to blend, how those different genres of music all relate to and interact with like us. The spirit of rebellion and anger, like that, was interesting and exciting for me as a music fan first and foremost”
“So, you know, if I started making something that felt like a cover of a band, I didn't want to do it, If I started making music that felt like I was trying to impersonate a rapper, I didn't want to do it. I've never been good enough at producing the DJ. So here we are, you know, this weird mash-up of sounds. It was also a lot of trial and error with the people and made music with you know, I've always made music with community with other songwriters and producers, who gave me a lot of their time. And so now I'm in a position where I know that even though it's all over the place, you can kind of expect it to be all over the place. Alternative music is a very vague and broad genre that I'm proud of and excited to be part of.”
Who would you say, the formative influences were on you as a musician? I can see you’re wearing a Deftones shirt, were Deftones one of them?
“Deftones, honestly were a bit of a later discovery for me. A lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dave Matthews Band, Ben Harper, G Love, Audioslave, and Rage Against The Machine. A little 21 Pilots. Those were some of the artists that were singing, and I could do a laundry list of rappers and DJs but as far as you know, rock fans trying to hear where my sound came from, it was a lot of blues and alternative music that was very melodic. I could only really listen to what I could steal from my parents or my sister's iTunes and they were never really ‘down with the sickness’, so to speak, they weren't going to listen to screaming metal and I wasn't yet smart enough to figure out how to have my music taste.”
“Linkin Park as well. AWOLNATION, you know, and pop music was such a big part of my inspiration growing up. And then once I started smoking weed and rapping, I was just like, kind of lost for a while and doing that. Only when I moved to California and wanted to start making music more seriously, did I revisit guitar guitar-driven music and have been doing it ever since”
There's no wrong way to do it, that’s the beauty of creating music in the modern world. Given how much is going on in your music, stylistically, did you find it difficult to convert what you were doing in the studio into an attainable and cohesive live performance?
“Yeah, that was hard, I mean, the tools are the tools, as far as my ability to mimic the studio. It was more a matter of how I comfortably do it. It was important for me to play 100 shows and understand how that works and what it requires and what goes on behind the scenes, how I can do that every night. I had to learn how to forget all that responsibility and maintain the connection to the lyrics and to that sense of feeling that was there when I record the songs that people are here to listen to.”
I want to be an immersive artist and my best shows are where I feel what the song I'm singing is about completely. And in that sense, it requires a real commitment that it took me I would say a little bit of time to connect with like, you, you write the songs, you start playing them in local, you know, competitions or whatever it is with a million other bands and then and then at a certain point you try to do this yourself and you have to make hard choices and figure out how to get a band to travel around the world and stuff. And then you still got to just put on a great show and stay mad. You know, like the Hulk you just got to stay mad. And it's been a really fun, fun journey.”
Along that journey, you have been fortunate enough to play with some quite interesting acts. Bring Me The Horizon, Avril Lavigne, and Imagine Dragons to name a few. Did you learn anything from these acts that you were able to put into your performance?
“Of course, everyone that I've worked with, I've taken something from. Not everyone's always in a friendly mood, so that is what it is, but you know, sometimes people have a spirit of generosity, they've been an opener before they've been there or they can make life easier or give you some tips. And those moments are invaluable, you know, like how lucky am I to like get to kick it with these legends? So I've learned a lot about making music on the road about you know, being present with the experience with fans every night while also having responsibilities back home, and that juggle that dance of like maintaining your mental health and your sanity while you are so committed to doing something that doesn't make any sense. And that two generations ago was impossible. To do yeah, I've learned a lot it's been a cool journey and I'm excited to keep learning shit from people.”
You've collaborated with heaps of people Mike Shinoda, Steve Aoki, Travis Barker, basically a dream team of collaborators. Who blew your mind the most?
“Who blew my mind the most? I mean you know being able to work with Travis in the studio seeing his process watching him drum live in a tiny little room. That was cool. Being able to see Tom Morello, those 50 guitars and picking the perfect one for that song and knowing why, like everyone brings something different to the table and fuck yeah when you put it like that I have got to work with some cool people and I love nothing more than just giving them space to operate and sometimes to a fault. I feel like I'll go make a song Travis that, you know sounds like blink or I'll go make a song with Tom that sounds like you know, his music like there's a part of me that just wants to see those people do what they do best. But I think the best collaboration comes when I can bring that out of them but still keep it in my world and what I do which is something I'm learning as I go.”
Before you go and get on a plane to head down under, I have to know, what is your walkout song, what song would you play whenever you enter a room to announce your arrival and why?
“I do have that song actually, every grandson show we've been on this whole world tour. We've been walking out to one of two songs, all right, we got Bohemian Rhapsody. Just if the aliens came down and said play us a song. That's what you play them. 100% and then Lose Yourself by Eminem because it's the most iconic guitar riff in a rap song ever, and that gets you hyped. It doesn't matter. Whether you're on your way to the grocery store, you're going to the pokies late at night, or you're taking out the trash or you're going to the gym. Put on Lose Yourself by Eminem. You'll be excited and pumped up when you get there.”
𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐒𝐎𝐍
𝐈 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔, 𝐈'𝐌 𝐓𝐑𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆
𝐀𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐀 + 𝐍𝐙 𝐓𝐎𝐔𝐑
Tuesday 30 January
Powerstation, Auckland 18+
Thursday 1 February
Princess Theatre, Brisbane Lic AA
Saturday 3 February
Liberty Hall, Sydney Lic AA
Sunday 4 February
170 Russell, Melbourne 18+
Tickets from www.destroyalllines.com
Shop for grandson Merch
Listen to grandson
