Permanent Embrace: In Conversation with Uniform’s Michael Berdan

Walking through the doors of Salford’s White Hotel and, like always, the first destination is the merch table. Arranging LPs and an array of T-shirts, Uniform singer Michael Berdan looks up, smiling. “Glad you made it!” A week earlier we spoke over Zoom about all things Uniform, including their landmark new album, American Standard.

Berdan is a conversationalist. Deep-thinking, warm, measured, at times it’s difficult to imagine that he is the driving force behind the hellish racket Uniform unleash. That’s how art works, though. It always has, and over the past decade alongside guitarist Ben Greenberg, Berdan has used Uniform as a vessel to pedal his pain.

Throughout the band’s bourgeoning discography, including the three-pronged attack of Wake in Fright (2017), The Long Walk (2018) and Shame (2020), as well as collaboration releases with The Body and Boris, Uniform have delivered a hybrid of maximalist punk that has seemingly been conceived through the flames at the belly of a dumpster fire.

American Standard is the band’s most poignant declaration yet. Centred on Berdan’s life struggle with bulimia nervosa, American Standard is delivered with an emotional force that bores through bone, obliterating all boundaries Uniform have previously set down. Likened to navigating through trip wire and landmines, the Uniform experience has always been a perilous one, and on American Standard, Berdan and Greenberg reach new dark frontiers.

Their live performance goes beyond those frontiers. Despite their gruelling nine-hour flight earlier in the day, there’s no jet lag here, as Uniform deliver one of the best live sets of the year, performing American Standard in its entirety.

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The first show of their U.K. / European tour sees the band unload their rage as a four-piece unit with Berdan and Greenberg joined by the ‘touring arm’ of the band. Drummers Mike Sharp, Mike Blume and bassist Brad Truax absent as Couch Slut’s Theo Nobel leads the assault from behind the kit with bassist Dan Olivencia providing further ammunition. (The latter, Greenberg’s bandmate in the gore grind concern, Miasmatic Necrosis.)

Taking the stage, Greenberg’s muted notes expose brief flashes of light that feels like you’re entering a nightmare. Suddenly, Berdan menacingly launches into This is Not A Prayer, as Nobel’s double-kick drums and Greenberg’s guitar roll like an avalanche of noise.

Clemency and Permanent Embrace are delivered with just as much ferocious gusto. Led by Berdan, the band merges the origins of punk and black metal with strip light noise that reaches supernova levels. It’s something completely majestic.

Like a raw scab torn from flesh, the band ends with American Standard’s epic eponymous track. Every bit as dishevelled and vexing as it is on tape, it’s one of those moments where you wish time was frozen, and as the set finishes, a sea of catharsis fills the room. These songs, delivered with a searing energy that reaches all the way to the nerve endings. Revealing new layers and depth, it’s raw. It’s primal. It’s Uniform at the peak of their powers, and while the band has always thrived on extremities, how they do this night-in-night-out almost defies belief.

No ego or retreating to the green room to take stock, Greenberg’s guitar has barely finished howling through the amps before Berdan is back behind the merch table, rifling through shirt sizes and making a running tally of items sold. The same smile afforded to those who greet him after the show.

The first night of their tour: a beautiful chaos.

Rewinding to our conversation from a week earlier, and Berdan shares the process and inspirations behind American Standard. And how those moments have eventually led to one of the year’s best albums and, of course, to nights like the one experienced at the White Hotel.

S13: How much has New York influenced what the band has achieved over the years?

Michael Berdan: “Honestly, I don’t know. We’re firmly a New York band, geographically. Me and Ben have lived in New York since the band started. Ben was born and raised here; I’ve been here for over 20 years, and my family is from here, so it’s impossible for it to not work its way through. That being said, the New York in which we started making music in other bands, in the aughts before Uniform, it doesn’t really exist anymore. I’d be lying to say that I don’t love it. It’s one of these places that at any given moment, you could do pretty much anything you want.

“At this point, New York is pretty unattainable for people who make music or create art as their primary source of income. The only reason I’m still here is because my wife has a real job. If you’re not from here, there’s varying graduation points where you moved to New York, and it’s like, ‘I’ve made it! I’m doing the prerequisite thing with my life. I live in New York!’ Then time passes, and you think, ‘Cool. All of my friends have either moved out or died or locked into intense jobs and families, and I’m ready to leave’. I’ve been at the ‘I’m ready to leave’ stage for a very long time.

“Ben has also been ready to leave for a while. I think he has a more complicated relationship with it. The rest of the guys… Dan was born and bred here as well. He never really talks about leaving. Brad, his home base is here, but he plays in Interpol who are touring nine out of 12 months out of the year, so he’s never really here. Mike Sharp lives in Detroit and Mike Blume lives in Austin. Ian Jackson lives in New York. He grew up where I grew up, outside of Philadelphia. He doesn’t really talk about leaving, but he doesn’t leave his house… most of us don’t! If we’re here, we’re at home.

“It’s a younger person’s game, this city. I think that there’s probably a lot of amazing things going on and don’t want to be this cynical person and say there’s no subcultures left in New York. I’m sure there are, but we’re not really plugged into them. We’re middle-aged homebodies who would rather be with our partners watching TV than at a show that we don’t particularly understand what’s going on. In that regard, I think that there was a time where New York informed me and Ben specifically when we started the band, and I don’t think it does anymore. I think that we’re pulling from something different, which I can’t really say what that is, but geography doesn’t play into it very much. If anything, geography is incredibly inconvenient.”

S13: Generally, how do you feel after you’ve written a record, and was it any different with American Standard?

MB: “This one was intensely different, but not so much because of the reason that it’s intense for other records. Every time we put out a record, the lead up to it is fairly harrowing. You put so much of yourself into creating a piece of work that you hope is cohesive and that you hope expresses a succinct point… when so much time and energy has been put into something, it’s hard not to hinge your identity on it. And so at times it has been not so much this record is going into this public sphere, but I myself am going into the public sphere for judgment and dissection. What will people think of us? What will people think of me? It’s pure ego, and with that, over the years it’s stayed very present and very scary.

“But as time’s gone, we don’t think it’s the end of the world if people don’t like our record. We don’t view it as a value judgment or a referendum on ourselves as human beings. It’s extreme music, and extreme music, by definition, is not supposed to be for everyone. So in that, we’ve come to a tentative understanding to not take response so personally. When we don’t take response so personally, then we don’t choke on the anticipation of a record coming out.

“This one was different because obviously it’s a lot more personal in a lot of ways, and it’s compositionally different than anything we’ve ever done. There was this letting go of it as a commercial product and hoping that it would serve its purpose as a piece of art. Leading up to it was scary, but there was an element of peace to it.

“The day before the record came out, one of my best friends died very suddenly, so I’ve been in this purgatory of record stuff and the mechanics of death stuff. When the record came out, it was well received by critics, and we got a lot of support and positive attention… every minute I was fielding a positive tweet, and then the next minute, it would be something about my friend and somebody else who was in mourning.

“It was like addressing these two very different things at the same time, and it’s weird because it insulated me from dealing with both head on because I had to compartmentalise. In some ways, that made this release a lot easier, just because I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to take everything so personally.”

S13: Your battle with bulimia nervosa and coupled with the extreme approach Uniform has always taken, did you feel like this record was something that you were destined to make?

MB: “I wouldn’t say destined. I would say that it was the next logical thing for us to tackle. We’ve been a band for over a decade. We’ve made records about varying mental health and substance abuse struggles. The state of America as a political entity, capitalism and spiritual malaise. I don’t want to tread old ground. I don’t think any of us do. It doesn’t serve much of a point to write about what we’ve already written about, and so it’s like, ‘Well, this thing has been haunting me for my entire life. What’s the thing that I want to talk about the least?’

“I am at a point where there’s no money in this. There’s no glory in this. When you’re middle-aged, it takes you away from a home and your family. It takes a toll on your body, [so] what’s the point of doing anything half assed? I wanted to tackle something that I didn’t want to tackle so that hopefully through doing it, I could better understand a part of myself that I’ve always been afraid to explore. I wanted to get below my surface neuroses and start digging into deeper, harder things. I didn’t want to waste any energy and resources on something that was just born of pure ego and this responsibility that ‘if you’re in a band, you’ve just got to make a record’.

“Lord knows, there’s tons of terrible things to talk about, and I pretty much exclusively gravitate towards terrible things, but this was the one that was calling to me. I don’t know if it’s always been calling to me, it’s just the one that needed to happen right now.”

S13: Was the title track the first song you’d written for the record, and then did you work outwards from there with the others?

MB: “No. Ben wrote this large chunk of music that stood as seven or so disparate entities. At the same time, I had started working on lyrics alongside B.R. Yeager and Maggie Siebert, who collaborated on this side of things with me. When the music was pretty much done, it was a matter of taking a significant amount of time and seeing how we could edit the music in such a way that it would fit the narrative structure of the lyrics.

“The first song, American Standard, actually started out as three separate songs that didn’t really go where they needed to go alone. But when we put them together and cut them down, they fitted the musical tone and the narrative structure in such a way that we found that it would make for the necessary entry point. It wasn’t all an outgrowth of the first… if anything the first track was finished last, because it took a year-and-a-half dissecting and rearranging it in such a way that it could be a cohesive form.”

S13: Along with the lyrics, you said the process compositionally was different to what you’d done in the past. Do you think that’s something you would have explored in the band’s younger days? I mean, young punks generally don’t write 23-minute epics…

MB: “We are a punk band, for sure. We come from punk. That’s where our heart is. When we sat down to write this, we were at a particularly low point as a band. Ben had had some health issues, and outside of that, we were coming out of COVID. Before then, we toured a lot. That was how we forged our identity, and it made us feel alive and necessary… something right as a band.

“After COVID, we had a really hard time getting back out on the road. We did a couple of tours, but they didn’t go particularly well. We wanted to tour more, but our management at the time were dead set on us staying home until we had a new record out. That just demoralised us… being at home and inactive. We all had day jobs that we were devoting more time to, so it came down to [thinking], ‘Well, are we going to break up?’ We figured that if we were going to break up, we might as well just go as big and hard as we could on one last record so that we could have something that in time we could look back at with a degree of certainty.

“Where there are other records where I think we all wish that we had done things differently, we wanted something that, from the get-go, we could think, ‘This is our finished product. This is as big and as hard as we can do’. We’re a maximalist band, and this is a maximalist piece. It wasn’t something we ever envisioned doing… it was where we were emotionally and psychically, and it seemed pointless to do anything else. We wanted to see what it would be like if we didn’t hold back, and this was the result.”

S13: In your recent essay for The Quietus, you mentioned that you’d been immersed in underground literature. Has that been something you’ve been drawn to recently?

MB: “I’ve always been somewhat invested since I was a teenager, but it’s something that I’ve gotten a lot deeper in within the past five years or so. I find that I just don’t feel the same emotional response to extreme music, or music in general as I used to. The identification with the hideous and the sad that I used to find through music, I have found in contemporary underground horror. These people who are not holding back at all, completely bearing their souls talking about things that you’re not supposed to talk about. I’ve taken more inspiration from that in recent years than I have through contemporary bands. It’s nothing against contemporary bands and contemporary music. Like I said earlier, we’re older and what’s being made now is made by younger people for younger people. And that’s how it should be. There should be a cultural evolution. If every generation was continually stuck in my mindset, then we would really live in hell. I’m very comfortable having evolved into another form with other interests.”

S13: It’s interesting you say that because I was trying to think about a band over the last two decades whose primal rage seems to intensify as they get older. I would probably put Uniform close to the top. Is that something you’ve thought about?

MB: (Laughs) “Not really. I think that at this point, we finally know what we’re doing. I think that for years, Ben and I were trying to grow into Uniform, and we were charting different paths. Our interests in music are completely different. We’re very dear friends, but we don’t have much in common when it comes to music or art. Even our worldviews a lot of the time… and I think at this point, with this record, is where we came to a synthesis. We actually hit on what we both wanted. We weren’t trying to make what the other person wanted. We weren’t trying to make something that we thought other people wanted. We’re just beyond caring, and so I think with that, we have found liberty in letting go. We feel free, and I think that we now know how to harness our strong suits.

“We trust each other, the whole band, however many people are in this fucking band now as I’ve lost count! (laughs) But we all play to each other’s strengths, and what comes out is what you’ve been hearing. It’s all born out of each one of us trusting the ability of the person next to us and trusting the aesthetic vision of the person next to us and realising that if we all wanted things to just be our way, then we might as well be doing solo projects that would sound vastly different. But now we want to be in a band, and when you put it all together, no one’s trying to dominate. We’re a collective, and I think that we’re at a good place.”

S13: You and Ben have been the driving force of the band from the outset. Do you think that yin and yang you just mentioned has helped with the continuity of Uniform?

MB: “Definitely, without a doubt. I think if we agreed with each other across the board that we would have got tired of it by now. What we each bring to the table, and even how we each butt heads, forces us to create something that is not what we expected. Ben is a very studied musician. He’s a very studied producer. He likes very compositionally diverse, but very schooled music, where I tend to like more blunt, extreme sounds. My tastes are more kinetic, where his are more expansive. It presents an interesting dichotomy. Maybe outside of the Ramones, there’s probably nothing that the two of us both regularly listen to. Maybe Neil Young, but other than that… in the past it’s sometimes proven to be exhausting. But at this point, I think we find it endearing and we appreciate it.”

S13: On This is Not a Prayer, it’s not the first time that religion is a reference point. On Shame’s closing track, I Am the Cancer, you finish the album by singing, “God will not love you forever”. Has religion been something of a fuel that Uniform has used to burn over the years?

MB: “Absolutely. I have a very complicated relationship with religion. I grew up Roman Catholic and, for all intents and purposes, I left the church in my teens. But then, after I got clean in my late 20s and going through a path of fairly desperate spiritual discovery, I found myself going back to the church. At this point, I identify as a cultural Catholic. I read a lot of Jesuits; there’s lots of stuff in Jesuit teachings that I really enjoy, and I take solace in the meditative qualities of ritual.

“That being said, I view organised religion, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, as a governing body made up of inherently flawed humans. And when you have a government that’s stood for several thousand years run by humans who can just say at a whim that they are guided by the divine, then all kinds of terrible shit happens. I can’t imagine a God who judges gay people. If God created individual human beings, then God must have created their direction for attraction and loss or in love. I can’t imagine a God who hates trans people. I can imagine a God who presents certain challenges that a human being has to figure out over a period of time, and that strengthens them, you know?

“I’ve heard Catholics be anti-trans, saying, ‘God doesn’t make mistakes’. Well, no, God created what ever human being with a task of self-discovery ahead of them, and once they realise this, they transition and take all the knowledge and pain and beauty that goes along with it and help other people with that. To me, that’s where God is, and if I’m to the letter about this, in actuality, I don’t know what God is… I think it takes a tremendous amount of horrible hubris to say that humanity is created in God’s singular image, and that the path to God is by living this [way]. How can anyone comprehend the mind of the divine? How can you comprehend the incomprehensible? Why would you even fucking try?

“I don’t believe in heaven and hell. I think the idea is fucking quaint. It sounds like some real basic bullshit to keep your children in line. I think that the idea of attempting to lead a good life because you might be rewarded in the afterlife is fucking selfish and garbage; or not acting a certain way because you’ll be damned to hell is fucking reductive. Pretty much every major world religion teaches this.

“I don’t even know if I believe in God, honestly. This is all just shit that I sit with. What I do know is that when I wake up and I treat other people with dignity and I conduct myself honestly, I have a better day, every day. When I don’t do that, then there are negative reactions, and I have to fucking deal with that. I don’t spend a lot of time sitting with something that I think of as God, but I don’t know if I’m sitting with God or if I’m sitting by myself, and I don’t fucking care! It doesn’t matter.

“What does matter to me is leading a good life. I don’t trust any fucking government. Governments are comprised with people, exclusively by people, and human beings are inherently corrupt. I am only concerned with living a good life, and I don’t give a fuck what happens afterwards. Of course, that works its way into my writing and my day-to-day, but I can live with some mild heresy. I really don’t give a fuck if they don’t want me to take communion at Church because of what I say and what I believe. I’m fine with that, too. It’s a piece of bread given out by a human being. Maybe it’s not to some other people, and that’s their prerogative, but I take these teachings as parables. I think when I do that, things go well. I think when you take it literally, things go fucking disastrous. (laughs)

S13: Do you see the Uniform live unit as a separate entity to the recording unit or do they coexist?

MB: “They have to be separate because of people’s availabilities. Everybody has full lives, tons of responsibility. We’re all busy, so we know what will work as a live unit, and then we just find people who are available to show up at certain times. If we thought, ‘Okay, the people who played on the record have to be on every live show’, then we’d be fucked. We would never play because Brad’s on tour, Sharp’s got kids, Blume’s on tour as well. There’s nothing we can do so we have to pull differently, and sometimes it’s economic in that we can afford to have two bass players and two drummers, which is our ideal setup. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we can have synths on stage and others it’s a logistical impossibility, and we go without or use samplers. The songs when we play them live, wind up sounding different than the record, and the delivery is different because different people are doing it.

“But we all pull from a well of individuals that we trust deeply and who are incredibly competent in what they do. We’re lucky in that we are part of a world where we get to play with some of the finest musicians out there, and that’s great. When they can and when time and money allow, any member of Uniform is a full member of Uniform.”

American Standard and Nightmare City are out now via Sacred Bones. Purchase from Bandcamp.