"We're trying to have the band create something beautiful that hopefully one day, 20 years from now, can be picked up by a kid and hopefully have the same effect that Neil Young had on me, or Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath"
About this Quote
Valo isn’t talking about “making music for fans” so much as engineering a time capsule with teeth. The line is built on a quiet anxiety every working musician knows: the present is loud, crowded, and forgetful. So he shifts the ambition away from charts and toward durability. “Something beautiful” sounds soft, but in Valo’s universe beauty is gothic and bruised - an aesthetic that assumes darkness is part of the melody, not a flaw to polish out.
The key word is “picked up.” Not streamed, not algorithmically surfaced, not discovered via a playlist titled Sad Bangers. Picked up implies objecthood, deliberate choice, a kid reaching for a record the way earlier generations reached for vinyl, cassettes, battered CDs. It’s nostalgia, but it’s also a rebuke to frictionless consumption: art matters more when it asks you to commit.
Name-dropping Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath isn’t just classic-rock worship; it’s a map of origin stories. Those artists weren’t merely influences, they were identity-forming encounters - the kind that give a teenager a vocabulary for feeling out of proportion to their life. Valo’s subtext is inheritance: he wants to graduate from being the kid transformed by giants to becoming one of the giants someone else measures themselves against.
There’s humility in the “hopefully” repeated twice, a recognition that legacy can’t be willed into existence. You can only make the work sturdy enough to survive the era that made it.
The key word is “picked up.” Not streamed, not algorithmically surfaced, not discovered via a playlist titled Sad Bangers. Picked up implies objecthood, deliberate choice, a kid reaching for a record the way earlier generations reached for vinyl, cassettes, battered CDs. It’s nostalgia, but it’s also a rebuke to frictionless consumption: art matters more when it asks you to commit.
Name-dropping Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath isn’t just classic-rock worship; it’s a map of origin stories. Those artists weren’t merely influences, they were identity-forming encounters - the kind that give a teenager a vocabulary for feeling out of proportion to their life. Valo’s subtext is inheritance: he wants to graduate from being the kid transformed by giants to becoming one of the giants someone else measures themselves against.
There’s humility in the “hopefully” repeated twice, a recognition that legacy can’t be willed into existence. You can only make the work sturdy enough to survive the era that made it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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