Today we’d like to introduce you to Zach Starkie.
Hi Zach, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Tooth Lures a Fang started playing together in 2014 as a three piece. The project began as a small collection of songs that Nic helped Zach record, but we wanted to play live so we found a drummer and started playing shows in Cincinnati. Since then we’ve put out three full length albums, played countless shows, and have toured regionally. Some highlights have been opening up for Rozwell Kid and Signals Midwest. We grew to include a second guitarist, Katy, in 2024 when we released our third full-length, Fake Control.
We are a pretty proud DIY outfit. We print out own shirts, shoot and edit our own music videos, book our own tours, and record and mix our own music.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We have played with at least nine different drummers on stage for various reasons. It’s a hassle but we like to have an actual member playing with us instead of just someone who knows the parts the last person wrote. Other than the challenges around finding the right person each time, playing and recording has been a fun and constructive process.
Other than that, being a DIY outfit presents its own challenges in that the responsibility for everything is solely on the members of the band. This means that booking in new cities can be a challenge when we don’t know anyone, and sometimes getting our music out to fans can be difficult as well.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We’re really proud of the way that when we write music, we’re not writing for a specific “sound” we want the band to have, we write to develop the aspects of each song that we find interesting or challenging! This gives us a lot of creative freedom and direction, and we can explore different aspects of music that we find interesting. It does sometimes make it more difficult to describe the genre we fall under. We recently landed on “Lightly Hinged Power Pop,” which does seem to fit the sort of strange but familiar sounds we make.
We often try to write things that are “satisfying.” Those are generally musical moments that might at first be surprising but land in a way that the listener (or at least the band) feels is right.
How do you think about luck?
I don’t know that we’ve had a lot of good or bad luck! We’ve worked really hard for everything so far, and all of our successes and failures are pretty easily traceable back to some amount of work that we’ve done.
That being said, Cate Blanchett bought a shirt of ours from a store that was selling it, and that’s kind of a “stars aligned” kind of thing!
Pricing:
- Shirts at like $20 online and $15 at a show!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/toothluresafang
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/toothluresafang
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/toothluresafang
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/toothluresafang
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU7OUbpzgPpbdKv7bh81hiQ
- Other: https://tiktok.com/@toothluresafang
