From iPhones and Venmo apps to Joy Division minor-key urgency — a collective interview with L.A. band Liily

Singer Dylan Nash and bassist Charlie Anastasis, half of L.A. band Liily, wish to inform you, dear reader, that they’ll answer all of the below interview questions collectively, as a united front. Only one exception. When the band played two shows in one day back in Philadelphia, both respondents report “everything that could possibly go sour did.” But only Nash testifies to “a dude doing heroin in a McDonald’s bathroom.”

The two players say they “think” they’ve played San Diego several times before this upcoming gig March 8 at the House of Blues; it’s just that “they were at our friends’ houses so we aren’t at liberty to give away those venues.”

The quartet, including drummer Maxx Morando and guitarist Sam De La Torre, found each other in the San Fernando Valley, praised by the two as “even more so than L.A. is, a huge cultural mixing pot. Growing up with kids who don’t look like you at all, we now realize, is still kind of a foreign thing in most of America.”

The minor-key urgency and paranoid suggestibility in the lyrics suggest Joy Division. Nash and Anastasis concur, but not for the whole show. “Joy Division and a lot of post-punk are part of the influence. Killing Joke, Bauhaus, but also early Foals stuff we really like….

“We usually start with an idea and jam on it or put it on Pro Tools and work with it that way, but we try and switch up our process when writing so we don’t get stuck in the same mindset and start pushing out the same product over again.”

Said pushing yielded their EP I Can Fool Anybody In This Town. They posed in animal masks for the cover, suggesting that matter-of-fact ritual from The Wicker Man. Sure, we got our iPhones and Venmo apps, it’s just that sometimes it’s time to break out the masks, and incinerate a Christian virgin. It’s like Christmas, it comes once a year and it greases the skids.