EPIC : Can you state the name of your band and it's current members?
DUSTY: We are Kill Matilda - Dusty Exner, Mykel Exner and Marcus Luk
EPIC: How did the band come about and how long have you been a band?
Dusty: We have been playing together since 2008 and we all met through an initiative enacted by the Canadian government to curb the raging zombie epidemic. Not a lot of people heard about it but it was a real problem for awhile! CSIS (the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service) hired a lot of people in the field of Zombie Management. We soon found working as a team that posing as a "rock band" made moving from town to town a lot easier and kept the hysteria at a minimum. I mean, nobody likes to hear that their town is infested by zombies, right? It's much more pleasant when a stranger comes to your town to bring you the gift of music. So we roll in, entertain the people, send them all home drunk to sleep it off, and then quietly exterminate any undead they may have roaming around.
EPIC: With all of the genres available in rock music, what drove you to pursue Punk Rock? What do you feel is appealing about this particular genre?
Dusty: I had always been really attracted to the style and attitude espoused by punk. I really admired all the punk kids in my high school and hung around with older kids that played in a Misfits cover band. Mykel and I started a band many years ago with a roommate of ours that never went anywhere, but he was really into punk and that was sort of our first introduction to it as an option to play. At that time, Mykel and I were much more into industrial and hard rock and the early Kill Matilda songs reflected that. They were also an iteration of the other past members backgrounds as well. Our former lead guitarist, Marlene Lau wrote and influenced some of the earlier tracks. The guitarist who took over for Marlene, Dave Roberts, I think was the final piece we needed to push the songs and the band in a really punk direction; although Mykel and I both really liked punk, and at that point I had been listening to bands like the Distillers and the Misfits for years, it wasn't until we brought Dave in that it just made sense to go that route. We all wanted to do something catchier and more high-energy and Dave naturally brought that flavor in his solos. Mykel began contributing some songs that were a lot faster and more high energy as well so the whole sound really just started to transition. We found that punk music represented us more than grunge or hard rock or metal; the DIY ethic really reflected our personal journey in music and we had more fun playing it. We feel we're more influenced by and sound similiar to early thrash and proto-punk like Iggy and the Stooges, Death, old Metallica and early Offspring but I think for us the label 'punk' isnt so strictly about the style as it is about the overall feel of the band.
EPIC : For all of you growing up, what were some of your interactions with music? And have any of you had any training musically or vocally?
Dusty : Marcus took choir in elementary school and studied classical piano growing up. In high school he started getting into bands like Rage Against the Machine and took up the drums without any formal training around the same time. He's also into hiphop and composes some of his own music and raps. Then years later things came full circle and we had the opportunity to work with the producer (Garth Richardson) who recorded the RATM album that initially got Marcus started on the path of rock and roll! Mykel heard a lot of R&B and Motown as a child and started using music as a performance outlet as a natural progression from acting in high school. Mykel wrote, recorded and released over two hundred songs under his own named released over 200 songs under his own name before we even met him! He went to postsecondary school for Recorded Music Production and played in a lot of bands before coming to Kill Matilda. Other than his training in theory and production he's never have any training in actual music making (ie guitar, vocal lessons, etc). He's completely self-taught. Dusty took classical violin lessons through her teen years and sang in the school choir. Music was something she got into more as an avenue to make friends and fit in; she had a group of older friends in high school who were all in the local music scene. She really looked up to them and started learning guitar and writing songs but was too shy to debut them in her hometown and decided to move to the city to play music. Once she moved to Vancouver and started playing in a band she also pursued some formal vocal training for awhile. Since then we've all grown in our musicianship and ability as performing artists through our experiences playing so many shows together.
Zombie hunters by day and sweaty dance punkers by night, Kill Matilda is a sexy band of nomads that have played over 181 shows coast to coast across Canada since 2008 Kill Matilda has been featured at festivals such as NXNE, Hamilton Spring Music Festival, Soreal Fest, Grindyourmind Drummondville Metal Fest, and many more. The band has opened for such legends as the Vibrators, Guttermouth, the Brains, Die Mannequin, Econoline Crush and Powerman 5000. Their relentless DIY work ethic has seen the band call Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto home over the last four years and has won them the attention of industry giants..