bloodsports is a New York-based four-piece made up of vocalist/guitarist Sam Murphy, guitarist Jeremy Mock, bassist/vocalist Liv Eriksen, and drummer Scott Hale. The first iteration of the band came together while Murphy and Mock were going to college in Denver, releasing their self-titled EP in January 2023 and playing around the city before relocating to New York. Hale, offering up his practice space to audition, soon joined the band, followed by Eriksen, who had been playing music with Mock back in high school. From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for bloodsports to record their blistering debut LP, Anything Can Be a Hammer, which arives this Friday. Produced by Hayden Ticehurst, the album innervates the band’s slowcore foundations, its volatile songs often beginning with spare, somber guitar parts before bursting with noise, though never exactly in the direction you expect them to. Murphy’s lyrics teeter between sweet stream-of-consciousness and nightmarish dejection, blurring the line between fragility and confidence. “It forces an odd reaction/ Coarse and affirmed/ Cuts like a razor,” he sings almost self-consciously on the closing title track, which might leave you feeling the same way: no less alone, but strangely moved by the ever-evolving chaos.
We caught up with bloodsports for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about their earliest musical influences, moving to New York, making Anything Can Be a Hammer, and more.
Your upcoming release show is presented by Stereogum. What does that collaboration mean to you? Did you grow up reading music blogs or magazines?
Liv Eriksen: I’ve been reading Stereogum since I was little. They do really great work. Me and my mom would go to Randall’s, which is the grocery store in Texas – the really fancy ones with the thick paper were $25, so we would never buy them, but when my mom would go around the store, I would just sit and read through all the different music prints. I think we’re all excited.
Sam Murphy: Yeah, it’s really cool. I don’t think any of us really expected that to happen. It makes me feel pretty good about the songs we’re writing.
Jeremy Mock: Whenever we’ve gotten written up, I’ve sent it to my parents, like, “Not a failure. [laughs] Here’s proof.” I’m just kidding, but it does feel pretty good. The writing, too, that they did about us is very flattering. It just feels good to feel like someone out there is listening, because I think a lot of times, even if people really like something, they generally don’t say anything.
LE: I think sending my dad the Stereogum link was the first time he said anything other than, “Cool.” Every time I send him a song, he’s like, “Sounds great,” but I sent him that, and I finally got a real response. Like Jeremy’s saying, this is something they can quantify.
Scott Hale: To echo Sam, did not expect it or see it coming. But I grew up reading about music online, figuring out what I liked, what I didn’t, kind of based on music publications. I remember when I was in eighth grade, I found the KEXP Song of the Day podcast, so you could download a song as a podcast for free. That was when I got really into Merge Records and Superchunk and stuff like that. But we’re stoked that people care. A lot of times, it feels like screaming into the void, being a musician, especially doing indie rock.
What else do you remember shaping your musical tastes and interests early on?
SH: All of the first music I listened to was definitely from my dad. He showed me the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel and Pat Metheny. From there, I used the internet to find my own taste – I made some friends through, I think it was Tumblr, and they were like, “Come to a show.” Because I grew up in Nashville, and the DIY scene was really big then, and I just started going to house shows when I was in high school. That was how I found my community with music. I think the first step definitely was just grinding on Spotify or music blogs to try to find new stuff.
SM: For me, it was definitely my dad and my sister who showed me music when I was a kid. When I was like 5 years old, my dad would be driving us around and playing Radiohead or My Bloody Valentine or the Melvins. And then my sister always was sending me music that is just way cooler than anything I would ever find on my own.
JM: I remember finding that Ween album, Chocolate and Cheese, Spiderland, and Loveless. Those are the three indie rock albums that I SM: The Strokes.
JM: I actually didn’t get into the Strokes until way later. I was pretty late to that.
SM: I feel like the Strokes were my first love.
LE: My mom is European, so she only listened to super crazy Europop music, so I didn’t really love music as a kid. I guess I realized later that’s just not my thing. [laughs] And then, on weekends, when I’d see my dad, similar to Sam, we would just drive around and he’d be playing different classic rock bands. It piqued my interest. And then in high school, I met a friend named Reed, and we went to Austin City Limits Music Festival. I just wanted to be cool and hang out, but then it turned out that Strokes were playing. That’s the show that he took me to, and these guys know I’m always yapping about the first-love-Strokes-syndrome, but it was actually probably the most life-changing experience I’ve ever had. We’re still friends to this day, so it was super sweet. From then on, I delved into all the albums everyone else has already mentioned.
Sam and Jeremy, being back in Denver, did your friendship revolve around music around the time that you formed bloodsports?
SM: Jeremy and I initially became friends through our both liking indie rock music, basically. Jeremy was in a band in Denver called Antibroth – sickest band ever – and I just started going to their shows a lot, mostly because I didn’t really know there was a scene. I wasn’t really a part of it. I thought Jeremy’s band was cool, so I just started going to shows, and we started hanging out more. I showed Jeremy a song I’d been working on, and he was like, “We should record it.” It was ‘Sustain’. I feel like that’s how it started. We would just talk about music a lot, and we found out we had similar tastes in a lot of ways.
JM: I mean, we were the only two people into slowcore, I feel like, in the entire city. [laughs] There were some others, but felt like it, so I guess we came together because of that. bloodsports very much started out as a fairly straight-ahead slowcore indie rock thing. It’s shifted a little bit more into kind of post-punk territory, or more noise rock, but I do still think of us as a slowcore band. For me, a lot of the music from growing up that I think still holds up is a lot of the slowcore stuff, bands like Bedhead, Slint, Low.
I feel like your song ‘Rot’ is an interesting encapsulation of that, in that it has that slowcore foundation but expands in a way that speaks to your growing interests. What prompted you to move to Brooklyn, and what were the biggest shifts you felt when you did?
SM: We moved in October 2023 – actually two years ago, almost to the day. It’s obviously a pretty different city to Denver in almost every way. But the thing for me is that the sheer quantity of things in New York is kind of overwhelming sometimes, especially in music. There’s so many bands, so many shows every night, and trying to keep up with it, and also trying to find time to write the stuff you want to write and have it stand out when there’s a hundred good bands that are also trying to do the same thing – it’s such a different type of thing from Denver.
JM: It’s really competitive, and not in a direct way, I think, but I at least feel like I only started writing good music when I moved here, honestly. Because there are just so many good bands to look up to. And even just bands that we’ve played with – you watch them, and it’s like, “Oh, we gotta step up a little bit.” [laughs] There are really great bands in Denver, but I never experienced that to the same degree as here, where I was just like, “Holy shit, people are actually really good.” And I have really enjoyed that, because I am just a genuine fan of a lot of the music that our peers make.
SM: As you’re saying, it pushes you to want to be better and doing something more interesting. It feels like there’s some urgency to it, which is really cool.
JM: I see that in New York bands a lot. Of course, generalizations are never really the way, but I do think that there’s an urgency to bands that come out of New York. That’s not always true, but I think it is probably because it’s also just because it’s so expensive to live here these days, and you can’t really just hang out and play music in the same way that maybe you can in other cities. It’s just more difficult, so I think that comes through in the music in some ways.
SM: I agree.
LE: It’s like a little pressure cooker.
It’s interesting to hear the restlessness in your music as a response to that New York environment. I’m thinking of a contemporary slowcore band like Teethe, who are from Texas and their music retains that lethargic pace. Liv, did you also move to Brooklyn around the same time?
LE: I moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2022. My best friend was moving up here, and I followed him. I lived in Bushwick for a while, and now I’m in Queens. That’s where me and Jeremy reconnected, and then he introduced me to Sam. That’s where the full circle thing came in. I was here a year or two before Jeremy and Sam. Scott was first, but of course Sam grew up in New York. I didn’t come to New York specifically to do music. I mean, I’ve been playing music my whole life, but I kind of just came to do something new. I was bored of Austin, and when your best friend’s moving somewhere and you don’t really have anything holding you down, you might as well go on an adventure. Which very clearly worked out in my favor, couldn’t be happier. But I didn’t have some major plan or anything like that by any means.
Liv and Scott, what were your impressions of the band when you were about to join?
SH: I was already listening to bloodsports before I joined the band, just because Jeremy and I have a mutual friend who I met when I lived in Memphis during college, and he had shared the bloodsports EP on Instagram. I was lke, “This rocks.” I had followed them on Instagram, and they were looking for a drummer, and I had been here for a little over three years by that point. I moved up here with my kit during COVID, so I wasn’t using it. Then I got a practice space when I moved to Brooklyn, and I was ready to move out of that practice space and save some money, just because I didn’t have a band at the time. And then I just DM’d them and was like, “Hey, come to my practice space, I’ll do an audition.” And then we just played the EP start to finish, the three of us. This was before Liv was in the band. We got along really well right off the bat. I was like, “Maybe these are also people I could be friends with.” That was the big thing for me: enjoying the music and being with people that I enjoy.
LE: I just got roped in because Jeremy and I went to high school together. We hadn’t talked the whole time he and Sam were in Denver – we just lost contact, and then I get a text from Jeremy Mock that said, “Hey, I just moved to New York.” We hung out a while, I met Sam – of course, they were roommates – and I got requested to play some bass.
JM: We used to play open mics together growing up.
LE: Yeah, in high school.
JM: So we would play music for a long time.
LE: We played at a place called Monkey’s Nest on Burnett, right next to our high school. But I really didn’t play bass before this, and I think Jeremy didn’t understand the extent of what I meant when I said I didn’t really play bass. [laughs] So these lovely fellows had quite a lot of patience and tips as I joined their musical prowess, and I figured out the bass. They stuck with me. But I really didn’t know what kind of band I was getting into. Obviously I’d heard the songs, because I was learning them. But I didn’t have that foresight of what it all would entail and all that, but I think that made it all the more fun. Like Scott said, these are my best friends ever, so to just have a reason to hang out with them a bunch of times a week – it’s super great. It was a really large learning curve of going from that to recording the album.
JM: It all took place in less than a year.
SM: Everything happened really fast.
SM: We played our first New York show in January 2024, and then we recorded the record November 2024. Now here we are a year later, and the record’s coming out.
LE: We even had our first practice December of 2023.
During those months when you were fleshing out the songs for the album, how much of the collaboration or discussion around them concerned when to simplify or embellish things? Was that part of the tension of getting a song right?
JM: For me at least, what I was into at the time is I just wanted to pile on as much as we possibly could. I love a big orchestral arrangement, so with the limited time and tools we had, I just tried to do as much as I could.
SM: I think I generally lean towards writing more minimal or simpler things. Combining that with what Jeremy was saying, these more orchestral, composed arrangements, I think works really well. And then Scott just nails the drum parts every time we write anything. It just always works.
LE: First try.
SM: It’s really annoying, actually. [laughs] We’ll just be writing a riff, and Scott will just play on it, and we’ll be like, “That’s good, actually.” I think we found a really good workflow of writing in terms of, we all have our own things that we like, but I think they all play off each other really well. It makes the writing process pretty fun now. Especially the new songs, the ones that are on LP2, especially, are gonna be even more more collaborative. There’s just more, I think. More maximal, more dynamic in whatever way we can.
JM: I think with this record, we were trying a lot of stuff out for the first time and just seeing how it went. This next record, I think, is gonna be a full 25% split, creatively, between the four of us. That’s what it feels like at the moment, where most things have come together when we were in the room. It’s a little bit more sprawling, and Liv, I feel like you have a lot more of a direct presence in what we’ve been writing. It feels a lot more Beatles-esque.
SM: We’re basically the Beatles.
JM: [laughs] Jesus Christ.
SM: Yep, print it.
JM: End it right there.
I can’t wait for the Get Back documentary, where it’s nine hours of you making bloodsports LP2.
JM: Just stick a camera in our practice space, and you can hear the deathcore bands right next to us.
SM: Yeah, you can hear the metal bands next door.
LE: We get to hear a lot of crazy tunes in there. I guess they do, too. They probably hear us do some weird shit in there.
Scott and Jeremy, your playing on ‘Rot’ is really textural on those quieter moments, even when it’s just drums and vocals. You both have some really fiery parts throughout the record, but I’m curious if it’s a different kind of challenge leaning into minimalism.
JM: Something I’ve noticed over the years is that when you get really quiet, people get really uncomfortable sometimes, and tend to get really quiet too. It’s a really cool thing to play with in a rock context, where you really can just strip it back to just the vocals, and it’ll silence the room, usually. For no other reason, maybe, than people are just like, “What’s going on?” And that’s been really fun for us to play with, the extreme dynamics. It’s just the strength of the rock band format. It’s definitely something we’ve leaned into quite a bit as a band.
SH: ‘Rot’ shows some of how I approach playing drums,, especially when I’m playing something so simple – I think that makes that whole beginning part of the song, because everything is really so scaled back and simplified. Whenever I’m kind of in that zone, I’m trying to be as textural as possible. I want to throw a bunch of cymbal work, I’m playing off of everything I’m hearing, whether it’s Sam’s vocals or a couple of little notes that Jeremy or Sam are playing. And then it’s just me locking in with Liv.
JM: What I’ve been really chasing recently – a few years back, I heard this Glenn Branca album, Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses. That’s my favorite Glenn Bronc album, and it blew my mind the first time I heard it. I just never heard those kinds of sounds come out of guitars. And on that record, there’s also this interview accompanying it of John Cage just hating it and talking about how it represents fascism. I think that came through in little ways on this album, where in certain parts of the recording maybe I was a little out of tune and just kept it. And then you put overdubs on top of that, and it creates these weird tone contradictions. Not to stray from ‘Rot’, but with ‘Trio 1’ and ‘Trio 2’, it was coming from that place of just trying to see how many notes I can just throw into one place. It just creates this really uncomfortable, but also cathartic environment. That’s something I was chasing on this whole album.
‘Trio 2’ serves as an interesting bridge between ‘Calvin’, a relatively straightforward rock song, and ‘Rot’. You talked about dynamics in the context of a song, but that’s also an example of utilizing them in the sequencing. What was the thinking behind it?
SM: For me at least, ‘Trio 2’ is what separates both literally and figuratively the two halves of the albums, because I feel like the second half is a lot darker. It sort of descends into a much darker place, lyrically. ‘Trio 2’ is a jarring track in a lot of ways, especially coming after ‘Calvin’, which is as you said pretty straightforward. I think it’s cool to have that break where you can readjust your listening ears to something else.
Vocally, is it tricky to tap into that darker headspace of the second half?
SM: I don’t know if the headspace part was difficult, but certainly those songs, like ‘Rot’, are cathartic to perform, because I feel like I’m inhabiting this role of the narrator in the song. It can be kind of exhausting to do that song, maybe, but for the other ones, I enjoy it. It kind of fuels me a lot of the time, getting into those heavier screaming sections. It honestly gives me more energy than it takes away. In terms of tracking, I think we did vocals pretty much in one day with Hayden. Lyrically, I don’t know if it was really purposeful that the second half of the record had more of the darker themes on it than the first half. But it sort of ended up that way, which maybe is kismet.
Liv, when it came to singing on songs like ‘Themes’, which also has a sweet melodic bass line, or ‘A River Runs Through’, how intuitive did it feel?
LE: When we had the idea to have me sing along with Sam on ‘River’, I think it made a lot of sense. It has a very sweet undertone to it, very stripped-back, and it’s in this louder place on the album. Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t play bass my whole life or anything, but singing I’ve always loved to do, so ‘River’ definitely felt the most intuitive for me to sing. I love the words that Sam wrote. It was just a really pretty song. And then ‘Themes’, also one of my favorite songs. I like that singing on these with Sam gives it some dimension, and we use it sparingly. We don’t do the full duet every song or put our vocals the same place in the mix. Separating it, you really have to listen to it. My vocal harmonies or secondary stuff vocal harmonies aren’t right up there with him, and I think it makes you listen all that more closely, because there’s just something happening in the background. I was really excited that they wanted to toss me in the singing mix with them, so it was really fun to record. Although learning how to do it live was very nerve-wracking, because playing bass and singing at the same time has not come naturally to me, so all the guys have been really good with tips, being patient, and making me not chicken out on things I commit to in terms of singing live.
Jeremy, you handled the engineering on the previous releases. Do you feel like you were able to look at and play through the songs in a different way with Hayden producing Anything Can Be a Hammer?
JM: It made the process way better. I felt like I was a part of the band. We would play a song, and then we’d come in and listen, and then I would just listen. I wouldn’t have to do anything, I wouldn’t have to double-check that everything’s okay. It really allowed me to immerse myself in making the record and think about the arrangement more. Like, “Oh, there’s an organ here, maybe I could play it.” I guess it always comes back to the organ. But it freed me up a lot to just be a little bit more creative.
LE: Jeremy was like a kid in a candy shop. He was having a great time.
JM: Yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there. I set up four different amps, and we used a different amp on every song, pretty much. It all had purpose and thought, but I felt like I had the space to do that. We’re not a pedal band – I use two pedals, and one of them is literally just to make my amp feedback. And being able to use all those vintage amps really led us be not a pedal band. Because those vintage amps just break up in such a crazy-sounding way that you can really get the full spectrum of a guitar out of just the amp in a way that it’s a little harder to with modern equipment.
Going into a recording space is one of the things that can re-energize you when you’ve spent a lot of time on a song, just like playing it live. I was thinking about this in the context of something you said, Sam, about ‘Rosary’ – how you can still connect to the song despite having rekindled the relationship that it’s about. Whether it’s due to the passage of time or the amount of times you’ve played it, how do you all tune into the feeling of a song when it’s not so immediate?
SM: For me, playing the songs live keeps me connected to them. I feel like it’s a whole different feeling when you’re playing it in the practice space, or when you’re playing it for your bandmates, or even recording it, versus playing it to actual people who have paid money to watch you perform. Even if you’re bored of a song or something, you get up there and you’re like, “This is my song, and I’m gonna perform it.” I think enjoying the songs that you play keeps it fresh, honestly. And playing it live, where there’s just more chaos in some ways, keeps it fresh.
SH: I think when we’re writing a song, I usually just make it a goal to play something, even if I don’t like it. An example is the newest song we’re working on – I was feeling very lackluster about what I was doing, and then we didn’t practice for a while, and then we came back and I forgot how the song went completely, because I never record any of the stuff we’re doing in practice. But as Sam and Jeremy started playing, I sort of remembered it, and then I approached it very differently. It unlocked some sort of subconscious memory of the song, but it felt like I was approaching it freshly. When we’re playing live, I’m listening to whatever’s coming through my monitor, and I will take liberties at times if I just feel something in the moment. Kind of embrace the chaos, as Sam said.
LE: I guess I really like the songs, so it’s hard for me to get tired of them. But I think in practice, I do often struggle with not feeling in it, because I’m just focusing on getting it right. I do find my mind wandering a lot when we’re playing live, or on a good day in practice – I often think about other band members’ perspectives on the song. I think about, when Sam wrote that line, I wonder what specific thing it’s about, or I wonder what Scott hears. I’m a very lyrical person. I’ve talked to the band about this, that’s what I listen for first in music. I feel like I’m almost watching the song like a movie through Sam or Scott or Jeremy’s eyes, and then it keeps me re-interested in it if I feel like I’ve exhausted listening to it a bunch. I just really like to think about how people are perceiving it, what it causes them to experience in their mind. But I do that with these fellows sometimes, and it’s a fun game whenever I’m feeling not great at practice – it kind of snaps me right back into it.
JM: I’ve noticed that whenever we start writing a song, we’ll start with a riff, and we’re like, “Oh, this is really cool,” and then it’ll lead to something else, and then we just ditch the original riff that it started with.
LE: [laughs] For sure, yes. Every now and then, someone will play the original riff from eight months ago.
SM: We just have a graveyard of riffs.
LE: Riffyard.
JM: All of our songs start from another song and then become the song that they are, which is usually something completely different, at least these days.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
bloodsports’ Anything Can Be a Hammer is out October 17 via Good English Records.
