We caught up with Gravel Pit over the lockdown for a chat.

Who are you? Tell us a bit about your music:
Four friends from Wellington. We play punk rock that is quite fast and has bits of hardcore and metal thrown in.
Dave Hampton – Guitar / Vocals
Matt Mason – Bass / Vocals
Bailey Palmer – Vocals
Jason Gascoigne – Drums

What have you been working on lately? Any new tracks or albums on the way?
We put an EP of 5 songs online at the usual places a few months back and since then have been working on new tracks. Nothing solid yet on when these might see the light of day other than being played live hopefully at some stage in the future when things might be back to normal.

Where is the best place people can follow you & find your music?
The usual places: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music. We don’t have any physical releases yet – something that will come later fingers crossed.

What were the 3 most influential albums to you growing up?
For the band:
Bad Religion – Suffer
Propagandhi – Supporting Caste
Fugazi – In On the Kill Taker

And one each:
Jason:
Metallica – Master of puppets (the reason I started playing drums)
Strung Out – Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
Matt:
Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction
The Misfits – Collection
The Jesus Lizard – Down

Bailey:
Hole – Live Through This
Agnostic Front – Victim in Pain
Joan Baez – Joan Baez
Dave:
Suicidal Tendencies – F.N.G
Black Sabbath – Master of Reality
Iggy and the Stooges – Raw Power

Which other Wellington musician (s) would you most like to work with?
Not sure about this one. Like work with as in making music together? That would be weird but playing live with one day? Rogernomix because they are amazing.

What’s your favourite Wellington venue to play in?
Has to be Valhalla.

In your songwriting or composing (or the band’s songwriting) how do the compositions and songs take shape?
Dave:
Usually I’m piecing together riffs, chord structures or some kind of lick or melody from a stack I have floating around in various forms. Could be something recorded as a voice memo or more fleshed out guitar recording or could be something from an earlier project that never saw release and is too good to waste. Most often these lend themselves to being put together due to the key they sound best in and whether something needs a verse or a chorus or whatever and the general vibe matches. Sometimes trying to shoe horn something in to something else means you need to mess with both things and that results in something else cooler than what they were before. After some experimenting and playing around I’ll have a rough arrangement and will tweak that until it sounds like something worth sharing with the others. Sometimes I’ll get lucky and sit down to play and an entire song or most of it will present itself but that doesn’t happen all that often – mostly it’s riffs and ideas that go in the stack. If I have a vocal idea that is worth sharing I’ll do that but lately have been leaving that to Bailey cause she’s so good at it. Then we get together and jam on it and turn it into a Gravel Pit song with ideas and tweaks from everyone. I like reading answers like this so apologies for going on a bit.

Bailey:
Dave will send through a demo of a new song, and I’ll sit and listen for a bit and sort of think about what kind of feeling I get from it. I have a tonne of shit poetry I’ve written over the past few years and I mostly go to that, pull a line or two I’m into, and go from there. Vocal influence for me is Probably Kat Bjelland (Babes in Toyland) Mark Scondotto (Shutdown) Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman (Bratmobile) and always and forever, Courtney Love.