In Conversation: Sami Kaiser of GEL
For a long time, Sami Kaiser wanted to keep their relationship with the public eye relegated to the stage. It's been a journey, but they're ready to start telling their story now.
Ever since 2019, GEL has moved through our community with a tagline of sorts: “Hardcore for the freaks.” It’s a sentiment that would appear to be self-evident—most of us come to hardcore out of alienation, after all—but in their hands, it’s more revealing than that. The kind of hardcore they play is closer to Discharge than Drain. They show up to gigs with a straightforward sense of workmanship that dismisses the pomp of a “performance.” Their ranks include two nonbinary members. And their singer, Sami Kaiser, has by and large refused the attention usually afforded to a frontperson, bucking the invisible hierarchies of being in a band for a more egalitarian approach. Which is to say, GEL have always been different. “Freaks,” even among the freaks.
But the thing is this: Hardcore is nothing if not a community that can give you the tools to grow—if you want them. For Sami, part of this has been admitting that their reluctance to put themselves out there has been less of a deliberate “freak move,” and perhaps more of a cop-out from dealing with a longstanding battle with anxiety. The other part, they realize now, is about learning to take their own advice. “Change is the only constant,” Sami tells me, referencing the title of GEL’s debut album. “That’s why I have those words [tattooed] on my chest, because it’s a reminder to me to embrace the changes.”
This conversation, more than any other I’ve ever had, is about embracing change in real time. It’s about taking the opportunity that hardcore gives us to grow, and giving yourself to what might as well be our lifelong community project of becoming better freaks.
I feel like we need to address the elephant in the room, first and foremost, which is that you do really seem to historically avoid doing interviews.
SAMI: Yes [laughs].
So I wanted to dig into that a little bit, because I think that most people who become the singer in a band are at least a little resigned to the idea that there is often a de facto spokesperson role attached to that position as well. For whatever reason, you’ve resisted that tradition.
SAMI: I mean, I think it works well for other people. But it’s not me. It’s never been me. Being in a band and being a frontperson has been a very opening experience for me, as far as branching outside of my mind and my social anxieties. I’ve never been comfortable with perception—let alone on such a large scale, you know what I mean? It’s always been something I’ve struggled with. Even with Sick Shit, I would sing with my back turned to the audience. I was so frightened I wouldn’t even look at the audience! I was doing it purely for the outlet of it, and also hoping that maybe it would resonate with other people.
I’m still on a journey towards embracing the outward perception, though. I’ll never be a person that hams it up or puts on a bit. It works for some people; some people’s personalities are just built that way. That’s not me. At the same time, I do think it’s empowering to combat my undue anxieties that should be worked on.
I actually found a Sick Shit video from Saint Vitus the other day, and not only was your back to the audience, but you didn’t even stand on stage! You sang from the floor [laughs]. So yeah, that’s real. There was this feeling that you were personally getting something out of that performance, but at that point in your life, you weren’t necessarily worried about what the audience was getting out of it.
SAMI: Exactly. That’s on the money, for sure. That’s just how it was for a while: It was all expression-driven. The value I felt in it was all about the authenticity of the expression and not worrying too much about outside perception—because a lot of the time, even to consider that would flub me up, you know what I mean? That’s where my aversion to interviews comes from, too. Because once I think of something that’s done in a perceptible way, I get really caught up in my head about that, and that clouds the authenticity because my own anxiety makes it so that my words stop working. My body tenses up. It’s literally an instinctual physical reaction a lot of the time. I’ve gotten better at it, and I’ll try to give more to the audience and lock in more with the audience nowadays, but even still, the value [of doing this] to me has always been and still is predominantly in the expression itself. I think I need to find the balance a little bit more, and I’m striving for that balance where I feel more connected and open with the audience, but I’m still working on it.
OK, here’s a weird cringey story. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I know I was younger than twelve. I was listening to Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4. I don’t know if you know that record so much, but there’s a song on it called “Changes,” which is this piano ballad that Ozzy sings. It was my favorite song at the time, and I remember being in my living room and just belting it out to the song like I was on American Idol or something. Later, I overheard my mother say to my father, “Oh, he can sing.” But obviously, I never really believed in myself enough to try to do that legitimately. So I’m curious how someone with your background and the predilections you’re describing gets to the place where you make a decision to cross that Rubicon and say, “I’m going to sing.”
SAMI: I’d say that happened at the beginning of Sick Shit. And that was a cursed start. There was an old singer—he was awesome, he was a friend—but things did not work out with him, and the band needed a singer. I was always very close with everyone in the band. They were my best friends. I would go to band practices and started going to shows around that time, too. So it just organically fell into place. There was resistance on my end. But something clicked. I was like, “Wait. I want to do this. I can do this. This will be good for me to try to do this.” So one day I went down to the basement of the house we were living in at the time in South Jersey and I put my headphones on. I had a cup of tea, a glass of wine, and a Monster. I had a bunch of beverages [laughs]. And I just started screaming. I was listening to Punch really heavy at that time, too, so I was trying to do some similar throat things, but I was just feeling it out. I was just making weird noises home alone. I had to make sure no one was there. I didn’t want anyone to hear because I was cringing at myself and I didn’t want anyone else to cringe. I actually gave myself a nosebleed doing that, just from the stress and the buildup [laughs]. But I just ripped the Band-Aid off and started going for it. And then I started writing words. Only a few weeks after doing that for the first time, we recorded fifteen songs in that same basement.
In the few interviews that you have done, I feel like you opened a few doors that you didn’t really walk through. So I kind of want to walk through a couple of them. One of them is where you spoke about growing up with “a very reserved upbringing.” What exactly was so reserved? How would you describe your growing up?
SAMI: So, I’m first-generation American. My dad came from a German village in Romania when he was seventeen. My mom came to the states from Latvia when she was about sixteen, I think. So with that, I feel like a lot of the reservations and limitations that I felt early on were a result of their cultural standards a little bit—their insecurities about being foreign and having to acclimate and go through their own hardships with being immigrants in this country. I feel like [assimilation] was a big motivation, just working hard and getting an education and finding stability. Those were the pillars for them. And there was an importance placed on seeing me follow suit with that. It wasn’t a suggestion for me growing up; it was an expectation. My upbringing was very expectation-heavy from the jump.
I have a natural disposition to be an anxious person, but I feel like the upbringing I had definitely fostered that even more. Especially when I got into middle school and high school, I wasn’t really able to hang out or make friends. It was discouraged to have friends outside of the family. Family was everything. Those were my friends; that was my life. I wasn’t really allowed to grow socially. That was discouraged because it was a distraction from the goals they had for me to fulfill. So any time I would try—and I would try, I was the one that would make the most effort to push back a little bit on the rules of the household—that came with a lot of punishment and alienation on my end. It all reached an apex when I was eighteen and I was really pushing back and then I wasn’t allowed to live there anymore. I got the boot. I haven’t talked to my mom or my sister and brother [since then]. They haven’t talked to me. I’ve tried in modern day to reconnect, but it’s been over ten years since I talked to them.
I talk to my dad maybe a few times a month. I saw him recently. My dad’s very cool. My parents divorced when I was in fourth grade, and I think after that he just really embraced his eccentricities and hobbies and stuff. He metal-detects, he’s an artist, and he loves his artifacts. He’s just very cool on the creative end of things. He doesn’t really understand what I do, really. But yeah, I think my upbringing definitely [contributed] to my inhibitions, for sure, because my self-esteem was very low. I always felt like I was doing something wrong growing up, and that internalized itself into a dialogue that I still have with myself—especially in the absence of my mom, who was the main proponent in that sort of back and forth. Like, I hear it in my own words in my brain a lot of the time, and it’s grown with a little bit of distance.
I mean, this is all really relatable to me as a first-generation American. It may be a little bit different in that my parents actually encouraged me to be social because they saw it as part of the assimilation process of “becoming American”—and they were obsessed with becoming American—but at the same time, I think that made it so that there’s this perception of me that I am naturally outgoing. And I know that to be completely untrue. That only came to be because I also got the boot when I was sixteen, and I had to learn how to become outgoing as a survival mechanism. It was a necessity. If you’re not out there finding your people, making friends, you will not survive. So I had to learn how to be friendly. Because those relationships are almost like currency when you’re trying to survive. When people like you, they want to help you.
SAMI: That is so true. I definitely started becoming more social right after all of that because it’s like, what do you do? Where do you go? You’ve got to connect with people. And it’s good in two ways. It’s like, yeah, you’re surviving, but also it’s opening yourself up. It’s a crash course in socialization. I went from not being [allowed] to hang out with people outside of a scholastic activity with a three-hour cap on it to couch-surfing and hanging out with strangers and people outside of the family for extended periods of time and just learning how to be a friend. It’s so interesting that you have a similar experience, too, because you do seem very fluid and extroverted—but that makes so much sense that it’s sort of a response. You have to adapt. It’s an adaptability kind of thing.
No doubt. And it sounds like hardcore was an early form of socialization for both of us.
SAMI: Absolutely. I think the first show I went to… I wouldn’t say it was a hardcore show, but it was a freaky, local punk/indie mixed bill at the Mill Hill in Trenton [New Jersey]. It’s in the basement of a bar-slash-restaurant. I was eighteen, and it was the most social that I’d ever been. I remember being scared—like, physically jittery. But from there, I started going to basement shows in New Brunswick, and that was so fun and so social and so sick. Those were more hardcore-punk shows. At the same time, in an attempt to cope with my social anxiety, that’s when I did start drinking more, too, because I felt like I needed to quell that feeling. I needed to feel “normal.” I needed to treat this feeling. Because I was feeling too hyper-aware, too insecure, and I needed to dull the senses a little bit. That’s kind of where the urge [to drink] really took hold. That’s when drinking became known to me as a socially acceptable means to cope.
Is that to say that alcohol also played a role in your early performances?
SAMI: For sure! I don’t remember a lot of the early Sick Shit times. I know that could be a product of time, too, but I really didn’t know how to drink back then. So a lot of the time, I would get too drunk and not retain the experience—and that probably led to the performance and my dissociation a little bit [laughs]. But it’s a learning process. I really hate being inebriated now. I don’t like being drunk on stage one bit. It feels way too chaotic and sloppy.
You called your relationship with alcohol “destructive” at one point.
SAMI: I’ve definitely dabbled with sobriety before. I’ve had inpatient experiences. I’ve taken a crash course in mental health because therapy was something that was looked down upon in my upbringing—like, they thought it was a privilege, or that if you wanted to “get good” you should just try harder or be better [laughs]. I didn’t even know where to start. But when I was 20, that was the first time I tried to seek help for it. It wasn’t an urgent situation, but I did some research, and I wanted a solution, so I was like, “I’m just going to go in and see what’s wrong with me and maybe get help with my alcoholism and all this shit.” I did that three times over the course of five years, from 20 to 25, and I learned a lot of skills through that. But at this point in my life, the temptations of being on the road are too great, and I can spend distracting amounts of anxiety and energy trying not to indulge at a show as opposed to just trying to moderate myself. So I’ve been very good with that. I just try to be as healthy as I can be and not be too hard on myself, but I also keep holding the reins on it.
When I first heard the lyric, “Slow down, abandon the notions / Open senses, go along with the motion,” I thought of the Serenity Prayer. Would you say that’s the vibe?
SAMI: Yes. I’m sure a lot of my lyrics are self-encouragements in a way. They’re like reminders to myself. I don’t want to expel negativity. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, and it can be productive, but most of the time, I try to give perspective. I want to remind myself that I want to be productive, even subconsciously, and whether people resonate with the lyrics or not, that’s a good goal to have, you know what I mean? I gotta just practice radical acceptance. I’ve gone to quite a few [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings. I know the lingo. And if I don’t know the words, I know the feelings, so maybe that was a subliminal slip in my writing book [laughs]. I just try to practice acceptance. That rings true.
“Radical acceptance” is something we talk about a lot in Buddhist circles. Is there an undercurrent of that in what you’re saying, too?
SAMI: It’s funny you say that because a lot of the experience I’ve had are with different therapy programs that do lean into Eastern philosophy. The one specific offshoot of therapy that I was most interested in and sought out multiple times was Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT, and while they don’t say it, a lot of it is influenced by those principles and teachings. There are all these different disciplines to it. There’s mindfulness, which is a meditative grounding, being aware of your surroundings and your relation to those surroundings. There’s interpersonal effectiveness, which is trying to communicate compassionately and effectively. There’s distress tolerance, which is about de-escalating emotions in a high octane situation. And then there’s emotional regulation, which is how you cope and how you breathe and how you live on a day-to-day basis, and the practices you can keep to maintain a regulated state. That all aligns with a lot of Eastern philosophy. I also really like the philosophers, like Alan Watts and Carl Jung—who was a big inspiration for me in writing the lyrics to Persona—and I know that they both acknowledge Eastern philosophies as a big motivation for their systems and beliefs.
I think I also reflexively looked at Only Constant through the Buddhist lens of impermanence, and that compulsion we have to want to hold on to something, anything, that won’t change, and then being frustrated because everything changes.
SAMI: Change is the only constant. That’s kind of where it comes from. That’s why I have those words [tattooed] on my chest, because it’s a reminder to me to embrace the changes. I feel like a lot of my insecurities are a response to how I was sequestered so early on, and being scared, and then going from zero to a hundred by adjusting and acclimating and finding myself. Because a lot of the time I felt devoid of a personal identity growing up.
I think in the modern era, people think about identity as “the one fixed thing,” but in a lot of ways it’s the least fixed thing. It’s something that is just constantly evolving and adapting to circumstance and environment and the people around you. But what you just said is interesting to me—how you felt a lack of personal identity growing up. Based on what you’ve told me already, I am assuming you felt that your identity had become so tethered to your family at that point that you were unable to have your own.
SAMI: Exactly. My mom especially. Like, I was her “buddy.” I wouldn’t necessarily say I was her “favorite,” but I was her “buddy,” and she placed a lot of herself onto me—and some of it was maybe a little inappropriate. I don’t want to get too deep, but my mom was a little unstable at times, and I was her closest friend. A five-year-old was her confidante, you know what I mean? So there was so much I couldn’t process, and it reached a point where I didn’t know how to talk about myself. I didn’t know what I liked or even that I could like things outside of their lens. Like, I would come home from school and instead of taking time to myself to do something I enjoyed, I felt like that wasn’t a deserved thing, so I would just wait at the window for someone to come home like a dog. It felt like I didn’t start existing until they were around me. I still struggle with it.
That hesitance to claim your own space actually brings me back to that Sick Shit video. You seemed to be saying, “I’m not even going to stand on stage. That’s how little space I want to take up” [laughs]. But it seems to me like you are at least coming into a place now where you feel like you’re strong enough to take your space and strong enough to identify yourself however you see fit.
SAMI: Yes. I feel way more comfortable and aware and accepting and excited of the fact that there is a power in resonating with other people outside of a small unit, outside of the band. I feel more able to connect.
OK, this is somewhat related, but I wanted to go back to 2022 for a second. I want to talk about when the GEL Twitter account made that particularly publicized tweet about identity that said: “Hi everyone. Just an FYI. There are no women in GEL. Sami and Maddi [Nave] are both nonbinary and use they/them pronouns.” At the time, I think a lot of people saw it as a “coming out,” but it didn’t sound that way to me; it sounded more like a basic correction. What were you feeling at that specific moment to put that out there?
SAMI: I think me and Maddi, at that time, were acclimating to the newfound visibility and interaction at shows and on the internet, and there were just a lot of things that we didn’t feel vibed with us. We are both nonbinary, and we know that at our core. It’s not something that I feel the need to even correct if someone misgenders me now because I know it to be true. I don’t need it to be outwardly validated, but if you’re a real one, you will. But I don’t expect it and I don’t feel any anger. At that point, though, it was very frustrating because we were newly playing larger shows, and we were interacting with a lot more people, and it just felt like bam, bam, bam—every interaction would be like, “We love women in hardcore!” [laughs] Neither of us expected anyone to know [we were nonbinary] because we didn’t advertise it as such; we weren’t personally loud about gender. But it reached a point where it was so in our faces—that qualifier of “women in hardcore”—that it became so disconcerting and frustrating. That’s why we tried to make it be known. Because we were tired of being inundated with that. We’re not a “girl band.” I don’t talk about gender in any of my lyrics. We’re just existing. So it wasn’t really a coming out. It was more of a Shhh. Stop.
I think that, on a certain level, being nonbinary still unsettles a lot of people because we live in a culture that is addicted to clarity. It demands clarity. And binaries were created to enforce that clarity. So I’m curious about your own personal discovery. Was that self-discovery process something that actually made you feel uncomfortable?
SAMI: Well, I would say I knew I was queer very early on, from school. I couldn’t really explore that for obvious reasons. But once I started finding my way, after being kicked out, I started to understand that there are different facets of the self. I feel masculine at times; I feel feminine at times. I feel like I am just me at times, and gender isn’t something that’s on my mind at all. That’s where I kind of fell into feeling like “nonbinary” was the right way to describe how I am, because it fluctuates—my gender presentation, my feelings, even subconsciously, like how I talk or how I hold my posture. It’s a gray area. It’s not so concrete. It fluctuates on a day-to-day basis for me. But for the most part, I don’t think of myself as “a gendered person.” And I don’t like abiding by those standards, because a lot of them are antiquated and not right.
How do you think being a public person gets in the way of knowing yourself? I think about this in terms of my queerness as a public person all the time, where I become conscious of my presentation: Am I being too queer? Am I being queer enough? And sometimes I resent that those are things I even have to think about. When you’re putting yourself out there in public to be perceived, it can complicate your own sense of self sometimes.
SAMI: For sure. There have been times when I realize that I’m really leaning into femme presentation, but I’m not thinking about that before I go into a situation, I’m just trying to be me. So it can be hard to grapple with because I am aware of perception, too, and sometimes I’ll be like, “I’m being too femme. Maybe I should change it up.” I know that outward presentation is not at the core of what these feelings are or who we are as people, but in a public setting, it’s something I consider. I just know what’s comfortable for me, and sometimes that’s a more stereotypical feminine [outfit]. I like a big pant and little top, you know what I mean? That’s the most comfortable combo for me. So it’s hard to deviate from that because there’s nothing worse than being on stage and wearing something that’s not comfortable, because then you feel a little strange up there [laughs]. But I think about it. Lately I’ve been doing barely any makeup on stage, which is a new one for me. It took a long time because another thing with my upbringing was that my mom—although conservative—really set into my brain that you can’t leave the house without makeup on. You need to be “presentable.” So that standard was set and it became a big fear of mine to be around other people without makeup on. Sometimes it feels like a lot, but I just try to be authentic. I just want to be and I want to accept.
Even when we were on tour together, it felt like things were moving really quickly for the band. There was a sense that things were changing in a way you could have never imagined for yourselves. Now you’ve got a new label, and a new record where the sound is starting to change, and there’s all this public attention, and it probably feels like it’s all coming at you at once. How are you coping with that?
SAMI: I am excited for the change. I feel like we need the change to happen. And when I refer to change, I mean me and everyone else just embracing our fullest potential in what we have. Because each member of the band, it’s all of ours. This is all of our thing. Everyone is involved, everyone is invested, everyone should collaborate. I feel like the new record is an essential stepping stone for us to be fully planted in what we’re doing, to collaborate and give it our all and go through the weeds together. It’s essential to what’s going to happen. I don’t want to deviate so much to where there’s melodicism—like, I don’t want to sing, I want to keep it true to the hardcore and the screaming—but the involvedness, the structure of the writing, the processes, the flares. I feel like we can all really hunker down and give it our all. We’re at a point now where this is a way for us to feel like the best selves we can be. The future will be more hands-on—for me, too. Because I’m trying. Like, even doing this interview with you. I would never have in the past done an interview, ever, ever.
And I’m really trying to figure out why because you’re a total natural.
SAMI: [Laughs] Stop it! That’s funny.
I’m not kidding. I’ve done some weird ones. This was not that.
SAMI: Well, thank you. I’m just trying to be the best version of myself that I can be, and I think all of this is essential to my own personal growth. I want to give something back to the world, hopefully through this creative process, and I just want to let everything naturally take its course. But I’m also an action-oriented person. I want to make sure that I’m trying. I think the next release will be indicative of that. Doing this interview is indicative of that. I’m trying.
Well, if we wanted to get all Buddhist about it, the other end of “radical acceptance” is “radical presence.” And it really seems to me that you’re trying to do that right now. It seems to me like that’s what you want for your future.
SAMI: There does seem to be a lot of overlap with Buddhism and the ethos I have and the things I like—the therapies and philosophers—and I’ve just never delved down too deep. But there’s a collision there, and I’d love to look into it more because I really resonate with that stuff. I feel like that’s the key: The presence. The acceptance. The awareness. The effort. And the non-judgment, too. The cringe? You have to work through the cringe.
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This was so awesome to read, venerable but with such courage (from my lens at least).
This resonated with me, "you opened a few doors that you didn’t really walk through".
There's finding a door, there's finding a key, there's opening the door... and then there is walking through it. Takes guts and courage to write, then scream, then record, and then deliver in a live setting with eyes, ears and a spotlight on ya.
Thank you Sami and Norm.
Oh man, I was so excited to read this interview, and yet again you've exceeded my expectations. I admire your vulnerability and Sami's courage in opening up about their struggles with social anxiety and being outwardly perceived. You approach the interview with such care and tenderness, and that energy is definitely reflected.
Thank you Norm and Sami. I'm grateful for your voices.