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By Michael Mambrino
3 min read
AdLo (FKA Adam London) is a musician based in Boston, with influences from hyperpop to emo post-hardcore and post-punk. Listening to AdLo can bring up potent memories of walking through Allston after your first house show that you stayed at until it ended. While that example may be too foggy for people to remember so clearly, AdLo brings a glistening and professional yet punkish twist to the sonic experience. I sat down with Adam to talk about his influences and experience as a local and traveling musician about his new release Halfway House and more.
MM: What is your favorite part about making music?
AL: My favorite aspect of making music has to be the self-releasing part of it. We all have a lot of bottled-up thoughts and emotions that you can put on paper and later record audio. Like I hope my music can both inspire or be inspired by people around me. I write the majority of my lyrics on trains or when I’m skating or fixated on an interaction I had especially if it’s something that stuck with me and I have to jot it down for self-release especially when my life moves chaotically. Really a lot of what motivates me is that I have a lot of people I know and teens who are going to my shows lately and to see how it can resonate with both younger and older audiences when I talk about shitty relationships or a fucked up family dynamics and it’s flattering and invokes a sense of underground community which I feel is really important about making music.
MM: What music did you listen to in your childhood / adolescence and does it influence how you make music today?
AL: Yeah for sure, I grew up on my dad’s music which was a lot of 80’s glam rock. I really turned to music when I started skateboarding when I was 6 or 7, I hung out with the older kids at the park which showed me a lot of old school rap like Wu-Tang and Nas and all of the 90’s New York rap. I also got into a lot of post-hardcore and metal too because I learned the drums later on. In my adolescence I got into a lot of punk and grunge, even some post-grunge. But really my biggest inspiration from that time was Deftones, as cliche as that sounds it is sentimental to me because that was my favorite band since seventh grade. I really like how they blend nu-metal aspects with really calming shoegaze and grunge influences. Slipknot, while they aren’t as big for me now, I remember meeting Corey Taylor and Clown Crahan when I was 13. I was telling him about my band and he really was genuine about the whole interaction like I didn’t feel like he was phoning it in for the whole conversation, which is pretty impressive for a majorly commercial band. A lot of post punk and hyperpop were influential and soundcloud as a whole community was a huge influence right now. Especially due to people that I feature in their songs and people featured in my songs is where I get a lot of my inspiration sonically.
MM: Do you have any non-musical inspirations?
AL: I grew up skateboarding and I find it to be a really healthy release for me, recently I’ve been rewatching a lot of skate videos in chronological order probably since around 2001 and it’s interesting to see how skate culture and punk rock culture evolved. In some ways people gave way less of a fuck back then probably due to a lack of social networking and not everything is documented on there. So yeah I get a lot of inspiration from skating and also like indie clothing and with that comes a lot of discovery of new artists and musicians. Tattoo artists are also another aspect I appreciate like when I die I don’t want my body to be this unoriginal flesh sack so yeah I got tatted up.
MM: Any closing thoughts or ideas you’d like to put out?
AL: Sure, My latest release Halfway House which I think is my favorite work so far, basically all of the songs surround this house I used to live in and the good and bad dynamics that it entails. I appreciate my friends who have stuck with me throughout my musical journey and just for supporting what I do.
*Originally published in-print in Boston Compass Newspaper #143 February 2022