The Lollipops is a Raleigh pop band with catchy melodies and fuzzy rhythms on its outer shell, but a dark and sinister core underneath. Staff writer Charlie Shelton sat down with leader Iggy Cosky about the music’s origins and the band’s sugary name.
Diversions: Were you playing with the other four guys before The Lollipops officially came together?
Iggy Cosky: No, it was very serendipitous. I met Nathan (Price, of DiggUp Tapes) last March and then I went to the hospital for this suicide attempt that I had. Right before I went to the hospital I met Nathan at this party and when I got out he hit me up asked ‘Hey man, how ya doing?’ and I told him I was writing songs. So I sent him my demos and he really dug it and he said I should put a band together.
He said he knew a drummer, so I met Mike Meno the next day at King’s. We talked that night and then had band practice the very next day. I had never met Mike and I had never really hung out with Nathan, but Nathan called Matt Stone (keyboard) and asked him to come out to practice so then Matt came out. And Bernard (Hanlon, guitar) was just a bartender at Neptune’s I would get my whiskey from.
I had never heard anybody play their instruments before I asked them to join. But everyone came in together at the practice space, we all plugged in and it just felt right, it was crazy.
Dive: What was the recording process like for the first album, Pop Narcotics?
IC: I started recording that record, or EP — I don’t know what you call it — like a year and a half ago but I didn’t know what I was doing really. I wasn’t trying to write pop songs I was just trying to record. At the time I was in two touring bands and on the side I was just trying to write little jingles. Then when I got out of the hospital I couldn’t record for about five weeks because I was institutionalized.
But when I got out I had 200 demos on my Tascam 8-track with all these ideas. I put them together in about four weeks and made Pop Narcotics. All throughout May last year, I would sit there, drink a cup of coffee in this tool shed and just sing into this microphone.
When I was in the hospital I wrote 30 poems or a bunch of lyrics so the creative process for Pop Narcotics was really weird. But right after I got that out, I immediately started working on the second one, Your Royal Masochist & The Love Crusades.
Dive: The Lollipops have pop songs but tunes like “Black Tar Carpet Ride” and “Take This Knife” have darker undertones. Are there multiple layers to The Lollipops?
IC: Overtime I have noticed that the aesthetic seems to be like uplifting and poppy but the content is really dark. That’s not intentional, it is just something I have noticed in retrospect. When I first wrote “Black Tar Carpet Ride” my family gave me a lot of crap about saying I couldn’t write a catchy melody with dark lyrics like that, but there aren’t any rules, man. You can take an uplifting groove that is really melodic and catchy but still talk about some dark crap. People right off the bat consider it to be really happy music but songs like “Wolves” are about killing yourself, but that is just what happens- it’s weird.
Dive: After researching The Lollipops on Spotify, I found that there are couple different bands with the same name. Is there any worry that your Lollipops will be mistaken for the Polish teen glitter duo or ‘60s group?
IC: Most definitely, it has happened already. I came up with the name about two and a half years ago but though it was a little too corny. But after I got out of the hospital I just said fuck it, and decided to start The Lollipops. I actually knew there was a Polish one, and but for example the Barren Girls were originally Lazy Janes but they were told by some cat in Texas to change their it because they already owned that name. So if we are ever fortunate to have that happen to us, that means we are doing something right, but I guess it’s a matter of who gets there first.
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