Talking Real Life (and Real Life) with Gollylagging

Gollylagging are a Boston four-piece: Jake Regulbuto and Jules Skiffington on vocals and guitar, Andrew Garas on drums and Joey Lorant on bass. They’ve spent the last several years playing bars and DIY spaces around New England. Along the way they put out singles, a 2023 split called fauna with going222jail and Dino Gala, and the 2024 EP Dry Rot.

Real Life, which came out this past Friday on the New England label Disposable America, is their first full-length. It’s also the first time Regulbuto has shared lead vocals, with Skiffington’s songs next to his own, and every member contributed to at least one track.

I got on Zoom with the band a week before release and opened with what I called a real life question: what did everyone do today before this call? One of them had been to Lowe’s for smoke detector batteries. The rest mumbled something about their day jobs. The night before, though, all four had gone to see the Rolling Loud movie together, and they agreed it was both amazing and horrible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the band name. Who came up with it?

Jake: I think I just said “lollygagging” wrong by accident, and I was like, I’m just gonna use that as a side project name. And then Andrew’s like, “Yeah, cool.”

Gollylagging: I put zero thought into it. I was like, yeah, that sounds good. We didn’t think anyone would ever listen to it.

Well, now people are listening. What pushed you to finally make an album?

Andrew: After the EP came out, we were playing a lot of shows, and we did a pretty long tour for us. The shows were getting bigger, and it was just kind of time to make a record. Jules had been in the band for a while, but not necessarily as a main vocalist. When we started putting an album together, we liked a lot of his songs, so we put those on the record too. And then it just came together.

Real Life opens with “Bronco,” which starts with a proper rock intro and has a chorus that goes hard. “Comet” picks up where it left off, and together they set the record’s fuzzy, loud baseline. “Red Fish” eases in slower but still grungy. It’s a sarcastic jab at people who care too much about being cool, and the hook, “I wanna be like you, I do, I do do,” sounds sincere and mocking at the same time.

How did you decide which songs to put out as singles?

Gollylagging: It was us. We weren’t even putting an album out at that time, so we just released the first ones as singles because we had them ready. From there we went back and forth and landed on the ones everyone was feeling good about.

The “Comet” video is basically a cookout with your friends. Did anything happen that didn’t make the cut?

Gollylagging: There was another community barbecue happening that day with a lot of kids. They kept coming over asking for food and water, so we gave them some, and then they wanted to play sports with us, so we played with them. We couldn’t put that in the video, but it was like being part of the community that day. At a certain point we just dropped the music video thing and were like, let’s make burgers and chill.

“Kill Devil Hills” is where the album’s preoccupation with growing up comes through most clearly. “It’s a good thing if we never grow up,” it insists, while also wondering whether any of this is just a phase they can pretend their way through. Then “Scarecrow” opens on something close to a beat and ends with my favorite moment on the record, a sudden rewind that flips the song into something else entirely.

That ending on “Scarecrow” is so sick. How did it happen?

Gollylagging: Jake said he wanted a big switch-up on that song, so while I was making the demo in Logic, I thought, where can it go from here? I reversed the piano sample, pitched it up a lot and added a bunch of 808 stuff. I was listening to a lot of underground trap and rage at the time. I normally listen to stuff like our music and then rage, and that’s pretty much it. So I just switched the genres.

The middle of the album slows down. “Heart of Ice” goes acoustic, with distorted vocals, and it’s real emo hours. The title track stands out most for its lyrics, and it’s the most communal song here, with Lorant’s mom on violin and the band’s families joining the final big harmony. The album shares its name with Albert Brooks’ 1976 comedy, which the band screened at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre for the release instead of playing a show.

Did the movie inspire the album at all?

Gollylagging: I’ve never even seen the movie. Andrew’s a big movie guy. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been like, “Have you seen The Godfather? Have you seen Citizen Kane, bro?” The name fit, and it looks cool. I don’t want to see it until the actual premiere.

Gollylagging: Honestly, the real reason I didn’t want to play is that I didn’t want to bring an entire drum set and amps to a movie theater. I just want to watch the movie.

When did it stop feeling like a pile of songs and start feeling like an album?

Gollylagging: Once all the demos were finished, I put them together on the Untitled app with a really dumb album art. I was like, yo, this all flows pretty good, even though everything was mixed super differently because they were all demos. That’s probably when I was like, “Yo, this kind of works.”

“Giant” leads into “Jackknife,” the album’s most painful song, about a friendship falling apart. It’s full of small, devastating details like “I was just practicing” and “we both cried on the way home.” “Terminator” closes the record in a slightly sunken mood, but there’s some hope at the end, and the band lets the guitars wail on the way out. I listened mostly on my commute, and that last stretch was the difference between getting off the train bummed out and getting off the train fine.

What’s the ideal way to listen to this album?

Gollylagging: Like the “Comet” video. Barbecuing with friends and beers. That’s how every album should sound.

Gollylagging: If people are going to say anything about it, I’d love to hear that they thought it was original. That’s hard to do with guitars, because people have been using those for a while.

Disposable America has put out music on a Nintendo cartridge. If you could release Real Life in any ridiculous format, what would it be?

Gollylagging: Maybe a blender. Like the joke in Popstar where they put his album on appliances. All home appliances.

Live is where the band has done most of its growing up, and they don’t take that part too seriously either.

What’s the vibe at a Gollylagging show?

Gollylagging: We’re pretty big on banter between songs. We’re just kind of silly. Last show, Jules unplugged something from his pedalboard, said “Look down,” plugged it back in, and we just kept going with the song.

Gollylagging: It was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

Best and worst gigs?

Andrew: We opened for Foxing at the Sinclair, and that was a super surreal moment. It was right after Dry Rot came out. Another highlight was a release show for a split we put out with two other bands. It was an all-local show, and there were a lot of people there.

Jake: The worst was the first time we played Burlington, Vermont. All the other bands were dropping acid and played for hours and hours. Everyone else had left, and we were the only ones there. At the end of the night, Andrew went up to the guy for payment, and he said he wasn’t doing it. So we didn’t even get paid.

If someone handed the band $10,000, what would you do with it?

Gollylagging: Recording, with someone we really like. Recording’s so expensive. Not necessarily someone really expensive, just as long as we like them.

Gollylagging: I feel like the goal would be to tour more. I don’t know if we’re striving for anything except to get around more.

What do you wish interviewers asked you about?

Gollylagging: The transparency of the behind-the-scenes. What it was like to make this record as people in their late 20s who are just working jobs. I’m at work right now. Online, you present a certain idea of the band, like we’re playing these big shows. But day to day it’s not really like that.

That might be the best summary of Real Life: a record made between day jobs by four friends who still mostly want to grill and play loud. Gollylagging celebrate the album at The Broadway in New York on November 14 with My Guitar Is Trying To Kill Me, fashn, ditch and Gavin Sultan, and at Deep Cuts in Medford, Massachusetts on November 19 with Jonny Tex, Bus Crush and Kings Evil.