Features : Spoke’s new album offers different take on punk, but the man behind it doesn’t want the attention

Spite is a motivating factor for Spoke, the artist behind the one man band Spoke. But when he set out to record his first album four years ago – out of spite, of course – even he didn’t expect to finish it.

“It seemed like it would never happen,” he says, “but it did so I think I should just keep going. It started off just to prove other people wrong but I actually finished it so I decided to see if I could make an actually good one.”

He’s now onto his third album for Spoke: the six-track Rezent released in April, which he describes as something of a new take on punk that shares similarities with post punk and pop punk sounds.

“It’s not really 100 percent new, it’s just different,” he says.

Spoke recorded every instrument for the project, including guitar, drums, keyboard and auxiliary instruments. He also plays trumpet and harmonica, but not on this release. And while the lyrics are emo and depressing, the overall sound is upbeat.

The album’s opening track, “Come My Way,” complains about how the music industry finds people with the biggest social media following and props them up, not caring whether the music is actually good.

“I believe a lot of my earlier albums were better than a lot of these kids getting picked up,” Spoke says. “I kept trying to be picked up but since I didn’t have a following I kept getting pushed aside.”

He doesn’t even want to get signed after coming this far and says record labels aren’t very relevant anymore. Spoke, in fact, doesn’t even want a lot of attention for his music.

“But I know I need some to stay relevant,” he says.

He plans to release a new album every year but don’t plan on ever catching him on tour.

“I don’t do live performances,” he says. “I’ve done them before but I just don’t do them now.”

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