Aggressively happy grindcore & rainy day metal: the one-man band(s) Tanpopo Crisis / Sugar Wounds / FUCKED
Matt Miller talks about his one-man metal projects and explains how he adds a little Kyary Pamyu Pamyu into grindcore.
Back in 2021, I was turned on to Calico Dreams by Sugar Wounds via Rate Your Music. The album featured these saccharine synths that integrated surprisingly well with its grindcore elements, and it ended up becoming one of my favorite music releases of that year.
But I didn’t really know anything about Sugar Wounds. I had a feeling it was a solo project, but I couldn’t come up with much to confirm it. Calico Dreams had built an audience organically through word-of-mouth, and at the time, any database profiles of the band had little to no information, and the Bandcamp page for the album merely said, “Thank you so much for all the support!”
About a year or so later, I was working on an article about metal bands who were influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion. One of the bands I reached out to was Sachiel, an Ohio based metal band that named themselves after an angel from the series. Each member replied, including their former drummer, Matt Miller. It turns out, he was Sugar Wounds! And he’s also the atmospheric metal band Tanpopo Crisis, the grindcore band FUCKED, the noise metal band My Purest Heart For You, and more!
If it wasn’t obvious by now, Matt Miller is an extremely prolific musician. And even though he doesn't do much "official" promotion, his projects always seem to get around and find their audience. This year, he's put out Tanpopo Crisis’s Meridian, a lush and pensive metal album that envelops the listener in elusive feelings of loss, nostalgia, and yearning. Across the album, guitars build slowly, blooming and flourishing across tracks that are six minutes minimum. And just this past month, his more in-your-face project FUCKED dropped DEMO 2025, a short collection of snarling blastbeat-laced outbursts.
Not long after Meridian's release, Matt hopped on a Discord call with me to talk about how he approaches his various music projects, his unique brand of “aggressively happy” grindcore, his J-Pop influences, and the weirdness of seeing people describe your music online.
So Meridian is the first thing you've released as Tanpopo Crisis in a while, right?
Yeah, this was my first full album in at least six years. When I record I usually just pump through it - like, I don't re-record, I don't do demos. But with some of these songs, I really took my time…and then I got distracted and it ended up taking three or four years to finish.
One thing is, I don't like promoting myself. Like, for Meridian, I think I've posted about it, like, once or twice before I put it out. It just comes off as disingenuous to me if I started promoting myself really hard like that.
Oh, yeah. I totally get what you mean. I hate self-promo.
Yeah, I never want to be one of those musicians who like, plays snippets of their songs on camera and posts it. I'll post the album art and be like, “okay, it's here!” That being said, I'm very grateful for everybody that has supported so far because like I said, I've done little to no self promotion and it's still worked out pretty well.
When you record for your solo projects, are you doing it out of your room?
Oh, yeah, it's completely at home. Like, I'm at my desk right now, and I have a little Focusrite. And then I record on my laptop and I have a bunch of pedals that I record into. It's all me on my own time, with my own equipment. I don't think I could ever work in like, an actual studio environment.
In these interviews, I like to throw out the question of, “okay, if you had some big, giant crazy budget or access to some big, giant studio, what would you do?” And really, most people tell me, “oh, I'd just keep making it at my house.”
Yeah, I'd probably be like, “can I just have the money to buy my own gear?” And I don't even think I'd get that much! I was going pretty gear crazy for a while - now, I'll just use Neural DSP, a couple of my pedals, my guitars that I like...I won't say I'm not picky, but I've just found what I like and I’m not really inclined to mess with it right now.
Was there a solo artist that inspired you and made you say, “oh shit, I can just do this on my own?”
The first person that made me go, “oh, I could be a multi-instrumentalist” was this guy on YouTube - his name's Finowa. He’s a Finnish guy. I found him a long time ago when I was like, 13, and he was doing drum covers of Slipknot songs - drum covers, vocal covers, and guitar covers.
But, I think the first artist that I really thought, “wow, this guy does this all on his own and in his bedroom” was Disfiguring the Goddess - Cameron Argon. I was like, “oh, this guy's using drum programs and electric kits and doing his own vocals and everything. Oh, I actually really want to do that.”
Jamie [Thanthavongsa] of my first band Sachiel - he’s the reason I started playing guitar. It wasn't until around 2014 when Jamie had been recording for a while, and I always watched him record. Eventually I was like, “dude, I want to do this.” So he gave me a USB with a bunch of software on it and I went from there.
Doing harsher vocals in a tiny space must be kind of weird, right?
Well, it's funny because at my old place, I had two small closets, and one of them I kind of dedicated to being a vocal room. I faux soundproofed it by cutting up an old mattress and putting up a bunch of foam and blankets. It worked enough to where nobody could hear me, but, yeah - I was hunched over, sweaty in front of my laptop, in a small little closet doing vocals. Man, the closet sucked, because it would get so hot in there. I'd have to constantly take breaks.
Even doing vocals for Meridian in my new place, I basically just covered myself with a comforter and then did them under a blanket. Vocals are definitely the roughest part of recording any of my projects because there's no elegant way for me to do it unless I want to spend a bunch of money on it.
Do you ever do live performances of your solo projects?
I've never played live with any of these projects. I think if any of the projects could work live, Tanpopo Crisis would be pretty easy-ish to put a set together, but Sugar Wounds would be pretty much impossible. One, because I don't remember how to play most of my songs. And two, I would need like, four people doing guitars or synths at one time. But I like that aspect of Sugar Wounds.
With FUCKED and Tanpopo Crisis, I try and make the mixes seem a little bit live, a bit more natural. I mostly just record two guitars and bass and then have the drums, which I program. But Sugar Wounds, I try and make it sound a bit more robotic - which would be a little bit harder to do live.
So, you want the Sugar Wounds sound to be a little “cleaner,” then?
Yeah, essentially. I use a drum machine and everything for that. I want it to have more of that electronic element to it, very syncopated rhythms and everything, and then have the mixes a bit more full and a little wild. With Tanpopo Crisis and FUCKED, I try and make it as bare bones as possible.
Having three distinct solo projects is pretty impressive. I picture you making your first Sugar Wounds recording, and then right after going, “hmm, I'm actually feeling more of a grindcore vibe today, I think I’ll start a new band.”
And you're actually not far off! With Tanpopo Crisis, it started off as a stupid grindcore project because I wanted to do a not-serious thing. And then I started going through some stuff and, you know, we were moving away and it was making me all sad, so I moved towards that.
Actually, going back to specifically one-man blackgaze projects, there was this one very small project - it was this little gem on Bandcamp, an EP called Love Hunger by TEACHER. And I think it was just one person, and that blew me away. And, of course, Sunbather was making its rounds and being really popular, and my buddies loved that album. So I was starting to get really influenced by that.
I've always liked “lighter” metal in general. I like stuff that brings more melody and anxiety and more emotion into the music. So I was like, “yeah, maybe I'll switch gears with Tanpopo Crisis and I'll go this way.” But then I thought, “okay, but when am I gonna do a stupid grind project? Well then, I guess I'll make FUCKED, because that band name is somehow not taken.”
The first time I interviewed you, we talked about how Neon Genesis Evangelion influenced Sachiel. In general, do you find yourself pulling from anime often for your music projects?
Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's a little more incidental. When I'm watching something, I'll get a little seed of an idea and it'll grow. And sometimes if I'm writing lyrics, maybe some themes from Ergo Proxy or Evangelion will creep in. But there have definitely been a lot of FUCKED projects where it's straight up about one show or loosely inspired by a manga I read or something like that. Not quite as much anymore.
But Sugar Wounds especially was very anime influenced. And I mean, I got the name Tanpopo Crisis from the Witchcraft Works manga. It was one of the antagonist’s original names before they changed it.
Hang on… I have to look Tanpopo up. Oh, she has a big giant cat hat…she's so good.
Oh yeah, they had a pretty good anime adaptation of it as well! Actually, some music from that anime very, very heavily inspired a lot of the Sugar Wounds stuff - a band called fhána did the opening song for that anime. I believe they also did the Dragon Maid theme song. Their one album, Outside of Melancholy, is really, really good and very, very quintessential for inspiring Sugar Wounds. It's sometimes like listening to a J-Pop fairy tale. There's like, horse clopping samples and it's kind of whimsical. I get very inspired by stuff like that for Sugar Wounds because it's happy and endearing.
I love hearing things like this, because I wouldn’t have expected anything like that to be a major influence.
Sugar Wounds is kind of funny. It's the first project that I've done where I'll read stuff online, and people will be like, “this is obviously inspired by so-and-so band and this band and this band.” And I've never heard of any of these bands that people say I'm “obviously inspired by.”
The one band that will come up every once in a while is Melt-Banana. And I'm like, “finally, someone gets it!” This band is like, totally inspired by Melt-Banana, and a band called Midori. They're this weird, jazz-noise-harsh-rock outfit from Japan.
I can definitely hear Melt-Banana now that you mention it. I like Midori a lot, too.
Yeah, I'm obsessed with them. Their vocalist, Mariko Gotō, her solo stuff is really, really great. But those two bands in particular were like, the biggest influences on Sugar Wounds starting up, and then a plethora of J-Pop - especially a lot of the early Capsule stuff, like Phony Phonic and SF Sound Furniture. A lot of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, too.
Those albums are what really made want to start up a project like that because they're just so, like, aggressively happy. And I was like, "I'd like to take this and have my own spin on it." So, grindy black metal-y stuff, but bring the vibes I like from other music I like.
That is a really interesting angle for you to bring up.When I picture someone saying, “I want to make an aggressively happy album,” I wouldn’t expect grindcore to be what they make.
Haha, yeahhhh. It’s just what I do! Straight up pop stuff just isn't in my wheelhouse. But I really like messing with synthesizers, especially guitar synths.
If you had to pick one genre descriptor, which one do you think it would be? When I see people talking about your projects, they’ll say blackgaze or emoviolence or skramz interchangeably. So I’m curious as to what you would label it as.
A lot of people throw the emoviolence thing in or sometimes people call it screamo. People mention skramz a lot, and I'm like…sure! But I don't know what the core skramz sound is like. I’ll just go with post-black metal. I think that's a good blanket term for my music. I feel bad because I'm not like, actively listening to a lot of music in those scenes right now. I listen to the same couple of trap artists and like, Steely Dan sometimes.
You're so real for that, though. Love Steely Dan.
It’s just what I get into. I've gotten quite into plug and artists like K Suave. Sabrina Carpenter is good. I had my brat season, and then in between that was a lot of Lantlôs. And not the old Lantlôs where they're black metal. The newer stuff where they're soft.
Actually, those two latest Lantlôs albums were probably some of the biggest inspirations for Meridian. I listened to those a lot, especially Melting Sun. I heard that for the first time in a tattoo shop, and I was like, “what is this, man?” [Markus Siegenhort] went completely clean singing, and his voice is so good. It’s like, buttery.
Is there anything you want to say to people who listen to Meridian?
I just hope the album resonates with some people. Lyrically, it's a little bit about loss. I wrote about losing a pet on “Morpheus,” and the rest of the songs are generally about that sort of painful nostalgia, regret, and that sort of stuff.
A lot of the lyrics tend to free flow. Whenever I sit down to write songs, especially for Tanpopo Crisis, I don't have a clear thing that I want to say. I want it to envelop a certain emotion so that whoever listens to it can interpret it the way that they want and have their own connection to the song.
Tanpopo Crisis has a music video out now for "Morpheus," which you can check out here. Support Meridian on Bandcamp, and keep an eye out for an upcoming EP. You can follow Sugar Wounds on Instagram for updates.
