Stolas is a quartet hailing from Las Vegas, Nev., founded in August 2011. They performed at Walters Downtown Sept. 15, with Hail The Sun and Icarus the Owl, in support of their new album “Allomaternal,” slated for an Oct. 15 release. The Cougar sat down with lead guitarist Sergio Medina to discuss the tour and the album during their time in Houston.
The Cougar: So how is this tour going for Stolas?
Sergio Medina: The tour is going great; tonight was incredible.
TC: Do you have towns you go to anticipating a good night?
SM: Yeah, Houston is one of them. Another one is Sacramento. Sacramento sold out, Chain Reaction in Anaheim in California, and tonight was definitely up there. In Sacramento a fight broke out in the first song (of Hail the Sun.) The kid was just looking for his glasses, and they were dragging him out (and he was) like “I just want my glasses!” Someone knocked his glasses over, and he just tried to fight back.
TC: So what does (the word allomaternal) mean?
SM: (It) means being motherly towards something that is not biologically yours. But it pertains more to the animal kingdom, not to humans. You don’t say an allomaternal mom, you would say ‘my adopted mom.’ Like if a pig finds a pup.
TC: So what’s behind the name?
SM: It’s a concept album about four orphan girls. When we release our CD, it’ll have a pamphlet that gives a plot of everything.
TC: This album obviously has some really different recording and mastering techniques put into it based on the final product. What did you do differently?
SM: We did no guest vocals, which left it all up to us to be spot-on as possible vocally, and that kind of pushes Carlo and Jason, and Carlo sings a lot more on this album. So yeah, no more guest vocals. I’m really stoked on that.
TC: Is there anything you set out deliberately to do with this album?
SM: We wrote the songs over the period of a year; we wrote ten tracks over one year. We spent a lot of time on each one of them. Some bands do a month of writing, or get together for a few days to write an entire album. We could do that, but we don’t like that. Before we were a little bit rushed, and that was why we had nine actual songs and an interlude track; this time we had ten songs and we did them in a specific order. And it’s a concept, (but) the concept is more in the music than in the lyrics. The lyrics stay vague so it’s open to interpretation. We know the story but we’re going to let (everyone else) figure it out. They might not even feel like it’s a concept album.
TC: Who wrote the concept?
SM: RJ, wrote the concept. He did all of the song titles — he named the album. He sent us this PDF of the entire story before we started. He wrote that, and I kind of present more of the structural riffs to the band, and everyone throws in their ideas.
