how my own voice sounds - an interview with sub*t

I recently had the opportunity to e-chat with one of my favorite duos - Sub*T. With the release of their debut album How My Own Voice Sounds approaching (coming out this Friday by the way!), we talk in-depth about their creative process behind the album, how the world of 2019 stan Twitter brought them together, and much more that I can't bear to spoil for you.

Make sure to keep up with Sub*T on the interwebs, you don't wanna miss them taking over the scene in 2026!

• words by Eva

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me! I've been keeping up with your work since the release of So Green in 2021, so I'm super excited to be able to chat about the upcoming release of How My Own Voice Sounds! How do you feel you've grown as artists over the years since your formation in 2019, and how does this album differ from your previous releases?

Hell yeah we’re so glad you reached out and thanks for being here since the beginning! We have grown a lot since So Green. We started out very eager with a million ideas but also a little timid, with no understanding of what it would feel like to put ourselves out there. We’ve definitely become more confident musicians over the past five years. As an artist in any medium, not only do you have to practice your craft and learn your style but you also have to practice sharing it, which is arguably even harder. Showing our work feels really easy and exciting now and the music feels more true to us than ever. We’ve matured as songwriters and it shows in the sounds on the album. That’s really where the title How My Own Voice Sounds comes from. It feels like we have cleared our throats to make an announcement. Maybe to say that we are a band that’s ready to be heard!

Can you tell us a bit about the process behind putting this album together? With being able to sit on each track for a while, was it difficult deciding which songs should be added to the final release?

It’s a huge thing to put your first album out, and we wanted to be sure we were ready before making that jump. We were pretty intimidated by the idea of doing that for a while. We never intentionally set out to write an album, but a vision came together and we realized we had a story to tell within these songs. We initially wanted to release these songs as two EPs, each with five songs that connected in some sort of complicated like, concept project. But we realized oh, those ten songs could literally just be a standalone album. 

Some of these lyrics date back to 2019 and some are as recent as last year right before we went into the studio. So yeah, we’ve been writing most of these songs for years. And we honestly don’t write that many songs. I don't know if that’s weird or not, but sometimes you hear people being like, 'Yeah, we wrote 25 songs for the album and had to cut 15 of them.' I don’t understand how that happens. We have pretty much released every song we’ve ever written, aside from two or three we wrote just so we could have stuff to play live in the early days. We are really intentional about the songs we write and share with each other. So in that sense it wasn’t difficult to choose the tracklist, but finding the right musical pairings and energy to match the lyrics, or vice versa, felt like puzzle pieces falling into place and took a lot of time and consideration. 

How does it feel to officially release these songs into the world after years of writing, rewriting, and recording? What does How My Own Voice Sounds mean to you, and is there anything specific you hope your audience takes away from the project?

It feels unreal! It’s been a long time coming. Our favorite thing that this album represents is our range of influences and how that shows all the sides of who we are as people. That’s another meaning the album title has for us. All those sounds are all the ways we can express ourselves and all the emotions we have to figure out. We felt like we couldn’t fully achieve that with a smaller catalogue, so it’s honestly a huge relief for us that we can do that now with a whole album. We hope listeners can get that impression too!

With meeting and connecting in online communities, do you feel being previously immersed in Stan Twitter has affected your journey as musicians + how you interact with your own audience in any way? Are you still active within any fandom communities?

Meeting online definitely influenced our journey as a band. Our entire bond was built on being huge fans of music. Being in a mosh pit together and sweating and screaming and not caring who was watching, that is how we grew our friendship and it made everything so carefree and fun. That 100% influenced the style of music we made at the beginning, and we knew we could rely on each other’s desire to recreate that feeling when making our own music and wanted future audiences to feel that too. Now we’re not as immersed in that like, typical stan culture but of course we are never-ending fans of so much and get really invested in our love for things. And we really love knowing details about the people and things we’re fans of! We like when artists show their personality outside of their music too, and aren’t just muted all the time. That’s why we have our Substack series called The Hum, so we can talk about our other interests and paint a bigger picture of the band. Hopefully it brings an extra layer of connection between us and our friends and family and whoever else follows us.

I love the creative mixed-media visual aesthetic of Sub*T, from your album art to show posters to merch design. Are there any specific inspirations behind your visual identity as a band?

We really love that our visual identity is associated with Sub*T as a band. It has evolved with each release but we always always come back to our dusty stacks of old magazines to pull inspiration from. We usually start the visual part of the creative process by sharing a Pinterest board, and then start mind melding on the overall concept, colors, fonts, images, music videos and all that. The album cover is collaged from magazine cutouts. Grace made it. When she showed it to me I pretty much immediately thought it was perfect. It felt iconic and loud in ways that we were looking for. Kinda reminds me of Third Eye Blind Out of the Vein, or even Nirvana In Utero with a mixed media collage style and one iconic image. We have the same approach with photoshoots and videos - it’s always very deliberate. We even made our own font this time to mix in with some alphabets we collaged, so that was really fun and one of a kind. 

With playing live shows for close to a decade now, do you feel your stage presence and how you perform together has evolved at all? How does the energy between audiences compare between local NYC-based shows and other east-coast cities?

We’ve become more confident as performers but stage dynamics can still be intimidating, especially between you and an audience. That always affects stage presence. We have to feed off the crowd to feel confident, but they have to feed off us too. It’s a crazy dynamic to maintain. You really do have to exude the confidence to get people into it, which we’ve hopefully become a bit better at after all this time! 

Being in a city like New York that’s so saturated with music can make you a little jaded and even competitive, but playing in New York is really fun. You have friends showing up consistently and even strangers who come out to see you more than once. But it’s good to play to different crowds and obviously necessary if you wanna reach more people. Sometimes audiences outside of New York feel more excited to see live music that comes through their city, and you get to connect with new bands. That is extra motivating. 

Do you have any favorite local venues to play or independent musicians you feel more people should be listening to? 

There are so many to choose from! We loved playing our first shows in New York at Elsewhere, Union Pool, Mercury Lounge and Baby’s All Right, so those will always be special to us. But anywhere people will show up for a good show in New York feels cool. We are actually having our release show for the album at Elsewhere which is the first place we ever played as a band so that’s an awesome full circle moment!

Some independent musicians we love right now? Bounty, who we played with last summer in New York. Trinket and Panik Flower are two cool bands that are playing our album release show. Our guitar player Fritz has a band called Local Weatherman that we love. We just saw this band called many shining windows at a show in the city and they were great. Whisper Doll is super cool, fanclubwallet recently put out a really good album, Grumpy is sick, Perfect 100 is a perfect 100. There’s this band from Singapore that we love called Subsonic Eye.

What are you looking forward to most in 2026, both individually and within Sub*T?

In our everyday lives, we are huge fans of basketball so hopefully some glory for the Knicks and Liberty will be coming our way. We will definitely be pulling out a win in our local bar trivia league. Dune 3! Seeing who wins Survivor 50 and Big Brother 28. We really love music and traveling and movies and simply just living in New York so the list is kinda endless! Most of all though we are excited to put this album out, play shows, and see how it resonates with whoever listens. It’s going to be really fulfilling to finally let these songs go and get to work on whatever we do next!