Photo by Michael Delavega
Audio By Carbonatix
Keaton Kidder and Jordan Palmer have been playing music together since they were in sixth grade. Despite the two friends moving to separate cities, growing older, and pivoting from genre to genre, one thing has remained constant: They find kinship together and catharsis in noise.
Growing up in Michigan, they spent their youth going to shows in Detroit, skating on a halfpipe in a garage and listening to Rancid.
“We’ve been playing music together since we were kids, but at a certain point life got in the way, and [music] was put on the back burner,” Kidder says.
But eight years ago, the two moved to Denver. They started hanging out on Broadway: “Walking up and down the street and hearing music coming from garages and going to shows at the hi-dive made us get back into it,” Kidder says.
They formed the band Plastic Daggers, a noise and punk-rock duo that’s been rattling Denver venues since 2015.
“[Noise] is a very visceral thing for us. You’re getting your aggression out, and there’s a kind of therapy that comes with playing loud,” Palmer says. “It just feels right.”
In 2016 the band released its debut EP, Shotgun; now Plastic Daggers is gearing up to drop a second EP, Stitches, which will be released at a show at the hi-dive on Saturday, February 23.
“Making Stitches was a lot different than Shotgun, because we did everything ourselves,” Kidder says. “We took two weeks off, locked ourselves in our garage, wrote the songs, and self-produced the whole EP. It literally has the sound of our garage where we practice baked into the mix.”
The band’s sound is raw, combining the vicious low end of Kidder’s bass playing, which artfully mimics the sound of a full band, with Palmer’s aggressive and heavy percussion. The self-production behind Stitches only renders the band’s sound louder and rawer, with enhanced grit and aggression. The band’s music nods back to 1980s punk with a sharp, modern edge.
The opening track, “No Future,” – which evokes the Sex Pistols’ “No Future (God Save the Queen)” – is a call to arms, with the band screaming the song’s title on the chorus, preaching a live-in-the-now message while also bordering on being political. “Blacktop” delivers a Rage Against the Machine-reminiscent groove and infuses it with the band’s signature breakdowns and visceral edge.
“The album is called Stitches for a reason,” Kidder says. “It definitely evokes darker, more painful feelings. We’ve always wanted to go in a darker direction.”
Plastic Daggers with It’s Just Bugs, Cheap Perfume and Fathers, 7 p.m. Saturday, February 23, Lost Lake Lounge, 3602 East Colfax Avenue, $10-$12.
