Drag Sounds

with Horizontal Hold and Spirit System

Friday, April 24

Nightlight, Chapel Hill

As the train lurched onto the track, Trevor Reece settled down, headphones in, thumbs on his phone, to make the best of the short ride from D.C. to Baltimore, where he lived at the time. “The best” would be to pull into the station with a completed song. 

Reece, half of the core duo of the rock band Drag Sounds, was heading home from tour, reflecting on all the hours spent hunched over the wheel of a van, his eyes glazing as the centerline stared back, unblinking. 

This was several years ago, when Reece and his Triangle-based bandmate, Mike Wallace, were working on the songs that would eventually compose Drag Sounds’ long-gestating album IV. 

On tour in Memphis, they had visited the Stax Museum, where they gleefully beheld the mixing board that Alex Chilton used to record three Big Star LPs and his solo debut, Like Flies on Sherbert. Back in the van, Reece gazed absently at a Chills record on the floor, and the pieces of a song started falling into place. As the train barreled through the countryside, he stared at the lines typed on his screen: “Flies on the board, Chills on the floor …” What next?

“I was looking at the lyrics, I was listening to music, and the train was rocking,” Reece says. “So it was like, hell yeah, ‘We’re all rocking, side by side, we’re all rocking.’” 

A few more verses and revisions later, the song became “Like Flies on the Board.” It appears on IV, which was released in October 2019 and also features drummer Lee Hinshaw. The music was culled from separate songwriting sessions, voice demos sent between Reece and Wallace, and all the rails and highways ridden between Maryland and North Carolina for weekend practices. Like its persona, the band’s songwriting process is loose and off-the-cuff, yet the songs have a sustained heartbeat to which the duo’s chemistry and work ethic give shape. Where stripped-down meets unpretentious, great ideas collide and gel into elemental songs. 

But Drag Sounds’ days of remote collaboration are over: Reece now lives in Durham, Wallace in Raleigh. Sitting at Reece’s kitchen table, the two longtime friends and bandmates swap stories and crack beers as they reminisce about the good, the bad, and the just-plain-awful times endured over the band’s nine years of existence, which include several LPs and live releases, long tours, lineup changes, and all kinds of logistical acrobatics. Throughout it all, Drag Sounds has been a fortifying constant in their lives. 

“We had a point where it was like, ‘The worst thing we can do is stop doing this,’” Reece says. “We had toured and kept playing and moving around enough to be like, ‘Man, I’ve spent too many hours on the train and the bus to fuck this up.’” 

The goal was never to play arenas, or even necessarily to make a living as career musicians; it was to play raw, straightforward rock ‘n’ roll. If they had a little success along the way, so be it. 

It all started when they first performed as a covers act in their hometown of Greensboro at a New Year’s Eve party in 2011. They played a few more shows and cycled through some band names, but nothing stuck. With an upcoming gig, they racked their brains for something to put on the flyer. Mark Wingfield, the band’s original bassist, suggested Drag Sounds. It would go on the flyer for that night, and all those from then on. 

Drag Sounds has developed a flexible, ragged garage-rock sound that flirts with every corner of the punk and rock canon. Reece and Wallace have played in many bands together—Rough Hands, Ghost Beach, Estrangers, Pistol Crash—but Drag Sounds has outlasted them all. They’ve paid their dues in small venues across the state, shrinking from a quartet to a trio to a duo, embracing rough-and-ready guitar minimalism. Their influences, too, are fading into the background of a mature, confident sound all their own.

After touring the same batch of songs for years, Wallace and Reece decided it was time to put something down on tape. But the initial sessions for IV didn’t do justice to the material and were scrapped. They booked another recording session with Missy Thangs at the Fidelitorium and came away with something that felt right: an aural summation of half a decade on the road.

IV opens with a lull of studio noise that bursts apart as sharp guitar lines and slurred verses careen into each other in quick succession. From opener “That Stuff’s Illegal,” the band flits from short, taut punk songs to extended slow-burners, their trademark dual-guitar sleaze occasionally punctuated by volleys of horns, keys, and drums, supplied by Hinshaw and horn players Crowmeat Bob and David Schwentker. 

With their alternately brash and self-deprecating sense of humor, the band favors cheeky song titles like “Let It Me.” That’s one that Reece had jokingly stuck onto a few scattered guitar parts. A few weeks later, Wallace “woke up in a crucial daze” with a hangover at a stranger’s house, with “the sunshine so full of shit.” He found his glasses under the couch, saw 30 missed calls on his phone, and pulled up his GPS, wondering, “Where the hell am I?” Sometimes, the lyrics just write themselves.

Masters of understatement, Wallace and Reece spin anthemic yarns full of wit, homage, wordplay, and self-parody on IV.

“Now we’re moving on,” says Reece. “That’s a chapter. Put the bookmark in. We’re starting another short story.” 

After so many lineup changes, they’ve decided to simplify rather than complicate. So they’re hitting the road as a two-piece, weaving in and out of the stuttering, contained beat of a drum machine. New songs, new riffs, and new arrangements continue to shoot out of the duo’s fiery creative dynamo. 

“This next shit might not have any guitars,” Wallace says. “Might be like keys and bass. I fucking just bought a bass. I’m digging playing this fucking bass. Synthesizer-bass-drum-machine record—guess what? That’s also Drag Sounds. We can do what we want. None of your business. How about that?” 

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