Interview: Spiritual Cramp talk Rude

Spiritual Cramp return with RUDE, their sophomore album released last week via Blue Grape Music (helmed by the team that propelled Turnstile into the spotlight) and Civilians in Australia. Known for their high-energy live shows and genre-blurring sound that spans punk, dub, new wave, and indie rock, the San Francisco-based band have spent the last few years honing a record that’s both personal and daring. Frontman Mike opens up about what went into making RUDE, from sharing the songwriting process with the whole band for the first time, to working with John Congleton and Carlos de la Garza, and how the record reflects a more authentic side of him than ever before.

Hi Mike! Thank you for chatting with us. I want to start by talking about your latest album RUDE. Give the readers a bit of an introduction to Spiritual Cramp, what you’re all about and what you were going for with this latest record?

Mike: Yeah for sure! The band as it stands on a day-to-day basis is truly just a reflection of me and what is going on inside of me while I’m writing these songs. And a lot of the songs on this album are about moving away from San Francisco, traveling all year because we’ve been on tour for two years, watching the current state of politics in the United States absolutely fall into a vat of acid and what it feels like to experience all of that and try to keep your feet on the ground. 

I changed my whole life around. I had a great career with a normal job and then I quit this job to be in the band full-time and work in music, move to LA and it’s kind of scary and shitty sometimes. And the theme is all the parts of me, the parts that are kind of mean and kind of loud and rude and also kind of nice and worried all the time. It’s just an all encompassing version of me and everything that I do and experience on a day-to-day level and I just want to sing about it and see if people can relate to it. 

Would you say that RUDE is a record that is sharing a more authentic side of you compared to your first record? 

Mike: I think the first record that we did is definitely more of a character of someone that I want to be. That record there’s a lot of songs about fighting and violence and lying and stealing and being a bad boy. And I think that this new record is less about the character that I want people to see and more about who I really am. Instead of this one dimensional character that is tough and strong and kind of a bad boy, it’s like, that’s what I want people to think I am, but that’s not who I am. 

You’ve opened up the songwriting to the whole band for the first time. What inspired that shift in the process for this latest record? 

Mike: I think the first record and all of the 7 inches before that, it was me doing me. And that was cool. And the band did see some growth from that and people were into it. But I do think that at a certain point, there’s only so much I can do. I only have so many tricks in my bag that I can pull out and be like, “here’s this trick again.” I think that I just got kind of sick of trying to do everything myself. I needed help, I needed other fresher ideas for the band. And I’m in a band full of really talented musicians and they wanted to help. They were like, “Yo, let us write this record with you.”  

I imagine it gives you different musical perspectives, in the instrumentation and the arrangement of the songs, but also allows more space for you to be you in the lyrical content. 

Mike: Well, it allows me to focus on writing lyrics and not worrying about the guitars. Because when I write lyrics, I’ll write these ideas, right? Something comes out and you’ll be like, “Oh, that’s cool. I like that.” But not everything that comes out right away is good. Sometimes it needs to be treated and reworked. And when I’m so busy writing these guitar parts or so busy worrying about all the production on the record, I don’t really have the bandwidth to sit and rework those lyrics. I do think that it has given me more time to dissect the lyrics that are coming out and make them better and make them more honest and be more thoughtful about it. 

So you worked with John Congleton and Carlos de la Garza. Who have both worked with so many great bands, how did working with them come about and how did their perspective shape this new record? 

Mike: Yeah, Carlos mixed the record and he knows how to mix our band. Carlos is a friend of mine and he mixes the type of records that I want our band to sound like. I want it to be big and crisp and clean but still sound kind of dirty and real. So we just hand it to Carlos and Carlos mixes it and we don’t worry about it. And John works with bands who we want to be, like that Wallows record. I love that music and I want to live in that world. And when we met with John to talk about producing the record, he was talking about bands like The Stranglers and Rose Tattoo. He knows the punk bands that we are trying to sound like and so I think that he was able to dig in with a really interesting perspective and give us his take on what he thinks our band should sound like. He’s a guy who does a lot of really cool stuff so I want that guy to tell me what he thinks my band should sound like. 

There were times where he would say, “I don’t like that at all, I think you need to change this whole song completely.” And times where he’d be like, “take the snare out of the whole song.” There’s a song on the record, it’s called Crazy, and it’s just hi-hat and kick on all the verses and then the choruses have the driving drums. And he would do stuff like that where he would pull all of the snares out of a whole verse and be like, “what about this?“ I never thought about that. The songs are all completely different because of John. 

The record draws from a lot of different influences and the many corners of the punk genre while exploring sounds from dub music, hip hop and new wave. How do you as a group make sense of the eclectic influences and how does that inform the sound of Spiritual Cramp? 

Mike: I just want to make something as an artist that I would be excited to listen to. If there was a band out there that kind of sounded like a skinhead punk band but also had elements of post-punk and indie rock, that would be made for me. The dub elements as well. I just want to do something that sounds like what I love. And there’s no bands who do that, there’s no bands who have dub influence and indie rock influences and so when you put a Spiritual Cramp record on, I know that people are gonna be like oh that sounds like Spiritual Cramp. We have a sound and it’s unique and it incorporates all of those elements and sometimes I think “this song should be more dubby” or “this song should just be more of a straightforward ass kicker punk song.” And then when you put them all next to each other and you mix them all the right way, it sounds like the same band. So I just try to be honest about what I want to hear and be unafraid of mixing those genres. 

So, between the three singles, we’re hearing a lot of different shades of the band. Would you say these singles give an accurate snapshot of what the album sounds like? 

Yeah, we tried to release the singles that will give a picture of what the whole record will sound like. There’s a couple of songs on there that are actual dub songs. Like they’re reggae tunes. And we didn’t want to release any of those as singles. It just felt a little silly. But I definitely think that it paints a clear picture of what the band is going to continue to sound like for sure. And what you can get from the record. 

How and where would you like listeners to experience RUDE for the very first time? For example, at home, driving on a sunny day, picnic, holding out for the live show? 

Mike: I want to take it and shove it in their faces live while I take off my shirt and walk on the crowd with my boots. I want to punch them with brass knuckles in the face with it. 

I think front to back is good. If they want to. We put thought into the way it feels front to back. But if they just want to listen to singles, that’s fine too. It doesn’t matter to me.

Did you design RUDE for the live show? 

Mike: I think that we’re just a live band. That’s kind of our thing. People talk about the fact that we’re a good live band so we just wanted to write some music that we felt was good to play live. 

How do you see the current state of punk and DIY culture in 2025?

Mike: I don’t know. There are so many bands. There’s so many people fighting for the airspace right now. It’s so hard to get people’s attention. And I think the harder you work at being an artist and making whatever you do poignant, people will pay attention to you if what you’re doing is good. I think it’s great there’s so much. There’s just so much music it’s hard to keep track of it all. So I think that’s a good indicator that things are going well in the punk and DIY community. 

I mean, I for sure am tapped into underground music and I go to lots of DIY shows and there’s so many good bands. So I think it’s thriving, to be honest. I don’t necessarily think that we’re like a DIY hardcore band. But that’s where we come from. You can smell it on us. People will be like,
“Oh, what’s that smell? Is that punk smell?” You’re like, “yeah, it’s punk smell.” But, you know, it’s like, I got new clothes on. 

Do you think that the punk scene is different in the Bay Area compared to L.A. and other parts of the West Coast or the East Coast? 

Mike: Yeah, I think that L.A. is really gnarly and violent, kind of a scary place. It can be way gnarlier than the Bay Area. The Bay Area is soft and chill and nice and easy. LA is a savage place. 

I mean every punk scene is different. New York – it’s like there’s all these bands who are from there who are huge in New York only and then anywhere else in the world no one cares about them. And it’s the same in LA, there’s some bands from here who are pretty popular but anywhere outside of LA, they’re not. I think that every scene is different. San Francisco is more like indie pop and there’s some hardcore. I think that it kind of differs from neighborhood to neighborhood instead of city to city. 

You’re off to tour Europe and the UK for the third time this year, this time supporting The Hives, how do you find overseas audiences, particularly like in the UK? How does it translate to the home of the mod movement, considering how you identify as a “hard mod” band? 

Mike: Yeah. The UK loves us. We went over to the UK and the first show we played in London, we got offered to play Reading and Leeds the next day and then the next morning went to the BBC and did a BBC session. They like what we’re doing over there because I think that so much of what we’re doing is taken from bands who originated in that space. Even mainland Europe too. Germany, France, they come to our shows over there. The first time we headlined in Paris there were 250 people there, it’s crazy and we just played in Germany and there were a lot of people in that room and they’re very receptive.

Have you got any plans to tour Australia off the back of this new record and if so, what would be on your Aussie to-do list? 

Mike: I think we’re gonna come to Australia in 2026. On the Australian to-do list is having some Melbourne coffee. I don’t want to touch a koala, I don’t like that. They’re all drugged, right? 

And what are they called? HSP? Yeah. Maybe I want one of those. Bondi beach. I love Australia. It’s like weird United States. I like Australia.