Upon first listen, torpor, the debut EP by the San Francisco-based band Demora, sounds like the entire cultural memory of ’90s rock tossed into a blender. Their shapeshifting songs swerve from passage to passage, swapping between shoegaze’s dense textures, slowcore’s delicate atmospherics, and the heavy melodic and rhythmic sensibilities of grunge.
Opener “way out” emphasizes the latter aspect of their sound with a searing guitar line and crashing percussion, before the song abruptly changes time signatures for an eerie postchorus breakdown, with whispered vocals panning across the stereo field. Two songs later, on the shoegaze-y standout “thinner,” a sludgy, dense opening section gives way to a driving instrumental break with a guitar lead that sounds like it’s being played back on a decaying VHS tape.
That’s not to say that torpor is regressive. Rather, it feels like it reflects the natural decay and refraction that these genres have been subject to with the passage of time. While the sounds here would be familiar to anyone who’s spent time listening to My Bloody Valentine or Nirvana, the overall energy on torpor reminds me of more modern bands like Title Fight. While Demora often achieves a streamlined momentum, their songs tend to maintain a sort of diffuse approach, moving horizontally into new sections or ideas where other bands might build up to a big hook.
When I spoke to the band over Zoom about their inspirations and the evolution of their sound, guitarist and lead singer Johnny Banuelos confirmed this impression. “I think Demora is best described, in terms of sound, [as] grungy and alternative, rooted in ’90s aesthetic and music,” he said. “Initially, I think our interest in Duster or My Bloody Valentine, where a lot of fuzz was being used, really drew us to that sound. And then, listening to bands like They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, who are introducing that [sound] back to the community, I think that inspired us a lot.” Drummer Ben McCullough agreed, saying, “There’s a lot of newer bands that are inspiring us, that continue to push the envelope with noise as well as other shoegazey sounds.”
This sense of forward motion—of taking old sounds and bringing them back with a new perspective—is probably Demora’s defining characteristic. The songs’ multivalent structures feel like the band is constantly reexamining the melodic and structural underpinnings of their work, both within each individual track and on a song-to-song basis.
“A lot of the songs are different from one another,” said bassist Ashley Reber. “It kind of captures the taste of Demora. You’re gonna hear a really slow, melodic slowcore riff, and then it’s gonna turn on and it’s gonna be aggressive. We talked about how the differences and the contrast in the songs are really cool.” Later, via email, Banuelos summed it up nicely: “Music doesn’t have to have a linear sound.”
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
There’s a restlessness inherent to this construction that occasionally moves from the songs’ architecture into their surface-level text. On “way out,” Banuelos returns to the refrain, “It’ll take some time/To learn how to fly/Escape from these haunting days,” drawing out the words “fly” and “escape” over multiple measures. Later, closer “barehaven” moves from its verses’ reverbed vastness to a much more constricted chorus in which Banuelos repeats, “Drop everything/Run for your life/Don’t look back.” Notably, both McCullogh and Banuelos singled out “barehaven” as a song they were particularly excited to release, with McCullough calling it “our most fully-realized song” and Banuelos saying, “It’s mature… Or, more mature than the rest of the [songs] we’ve put out.”
Indeed, one of the things that struck me most about Demora was just how young a band they are. torpor is only their second official release, after the two-track Joanie/Pavement single released in 2023; with this seven-track EP, the band effectively quadrupled their catalog. The video for advance single “glue” features the band playing as schoolchildren, skipping rope and playing patty-cake before stabbing a stuffed animal with cartoonish glee. And while their musical restlessness seems core to their sonic personality, it also indicates a group that’s come up during a period where older genres have become both newly accessible and decontextualized from old scene boundaries due to the internet.
When I asked the group what it was like to be a band in the Bay Area right now, Reber replied, “I think the shoegaze, slowcore, emo-y scene is doing really good right now. Around COVID, shoegaze got really big on the internet and a lot of people started playing it, and all these bands started resurfacing from the ’90s and selling out clubs in San Francisco… It’s really fun for us, because there’s so many bands, so many people to see.”
Subgenres of music that might have felt more strictly defined in the past—shoegaze, slowcore, emo, grunge—are now more melded together, both on torpor and out in the world. As such, Demora’s music gives the impression that they’re less interested in recreating the past than in exploring the new possibilities that these genres might still have to offer, and how they can be melded and remixed in new ways.
“What keeps us interested is the manipulation of instruments with pedals to create sounds that otherwise one couldn’t do,” said Banuelos as to what initially drew them to the group to these genres. “As [we] grow, we hope to experiment with new sounds, so we’re not really sure what to expect yet.”
