Returning to the dark ocean depths, Godzilla sinks beneath the water, out of sight but never forgotten. The world knows he's still down there, hibernating, getting stronger, waiting for the day he resurfaces to wreak havoc and level cities.
Johnny Whitney could be considered the Godzilla of the post-hardcore world. His work with The Blood Brothers in the early 2000s helped reshape what post-hardcore could be, carrying the torch for sasscore and pushing the scene into strange, chaotic, and exciting new territory. But when The Blood Brothers went on hiatus, and his next project, Jaguar Love, failed to bring skyscrapers to their knees, Whitney returned to the sea.
For the next fifteen years, he quietly disappeared from the spotlight, stockpiling creative energy while building a career as a software engineer at Netflix. Then, in 2026, he resurfaced.
Enter Evil Island.
The new band features three-fifths of The Blood Brothers, reuniting Whitney with guitarist Cody Votolato and drummer Mark Gajadhar, alongside bassist Autry Fulbright of Off! and ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. On their debut single, "Tiger Baby," Evil Island picks up where The Blood Brothers left off.
Johnny is back. Godzilla has returned.
Or, as Admiral Taizo Tachibana famously said: "Did you really think [fifteen] years of peace meant he was gone? Look out there! The nightmare has returned!"
And what a return it is!
Ricky Adams @ The Needle Drop: Howdy Johnny, what have you been up to lately?
Johnny Whitney: Well, working on the Evil Island record has really taken up a lot of what’s been going on with me for a while. We intended on recording for two weeks starting in October, and I don’t know if Ross Robins just knew in the back of his mind that it was going to take longer. I think that’s actually just what happened. But we had planned on only being there until the end of October.
The recording lasted until the very beginning of January, and then mixing and mastering took until the middle of March. So we spent the better part of five months, starting in October, working on this record in some form or another. I live in the Bay Area, and the rest of the band lives in LA. We recorded in LA, so I was living down there for a while and then kind of driving back and forth, which was fine and fun.
Since then, we’ve been working on how we’re going to present the band and the record. Rather than going out and doing a bunch of shows for people who don’t know the material yet, what we’re doing is basically this: we picked five songs from the record that we’re going to make videos for. Every month until the record comes out in August, we’ll be putting out videos. We actually have another video that we’re filming this weekend for the song “Animal.”
So that’s been fun. It’s been a nice creative challenge. The “Animal” video is going to be completely bonkers. I wrote a choreographed dance routine that me and four other people are going to be doing in this weird house out in a big field. It’s going to be nuts. More or less, that’s what we’ve been doing, along with work and getting the album layout situated and all that kind of stuff.
So you are fully back in it now, but there was quite a gap where you hadn’t been making music more or less since 2010, and you started working at Netflix?
Netflix wasn’t right away. Essentially, in 2010, I really just needed to not be broke anymore. After touring since 2000, after like ten years of doing that, I was ready to do something else. The last Jaguar Love record that me and Cody did didn’t seem like it was picking up momentum.
So I didn’t go straight into Netflix. That would’ve been a dream. But I taught myself software engineering and kind of worked my way up, then moved to the Bay Area in 2015 to work at Netflix.
You give up so much when you start a band as young as we did in Blood Brothers, and I was looking at turning 30 like, "Fuck, do I want to grind this out and eventually be a bartender or something, or do I want to actually not be broke for once in my life?" Yeah, it worked out. I still work at Netflix.
Was there a creative spell during the past 15 years, or did you have other creative outlets, or is your job creative in itself?
The job itself is somewhat creative. I mean, it’s creative in the sense that it’s problem solving, right? So there’s kind of an overlap in the brain cells you use to problem solve your way through writing vocals or lyrics to a song, and figuring out how to build a UX or something like that.
Other than that, the only thing I really did from 2010 until now was work with this really random band that very few people know about. There’s this band called Arsenal that’s a really, really, really big band in Belgium. Just as I was winding everything down and starting to step away from music, they randomly hit me up to sing on one of their records. I ended up singing on like four of their songs and going out to Antwerp like three times to sing with them. They don’t sound anything like what I do, but they’re amazing people. Their music is really cool, and the songs ended up being really good. They’re like a stadium act in Belgium.
What inspired the return to music?
We planned the Blood Brothers reunion tour back in November of 2022, and it came about because I would go down to LA for work, and Cody and Jordan live down there. We would go get beers or whatever, and it just kind of came up naturally that we would do it. We figured we would do a slightly bigger run than our reunion tour in 2014.
And it just blew away my idea of what the band was. You know, from my point of view, we spent so much time in Blood Brothers just struggling and scraping to get by. We would play really great shows in coastal areas and big cities, but then we’d go to New Mexico and play for like 80 people, right? It wasn’t glamorous at all. It was rewarding, and it was a really fun way to spend your young adult life, but it was tough.
So when we announced the Blood Brothers 2024 reunion, it sold out almost entirely within days. It was like, “Whoa, it kind of feels like something weird is happening.” Then Bright Eyes dropped off this festival called Best Friends Forever Fest in Las Vegas, and we got a call to fill the spot. It was one of those, “Can you tell us within 48 hours if you can take this spot?” offers.
We were playing after Get Up Kids and the Jesus Lizard. We were headlining over them, which felt weird to me, especially Jesus Lizard, because they’re fucking legends, right? I went into that show thinking, “Okay, everybody’s going to leave, this is going to be humiliating, and it’s going to be a crappy way to start the reunion tour.” But it ended up being unbelievable. I mean, it was so much fun.
I could feel from the first moment we started playing that there was this untapped energy that hadn’t really manifested itself when we were actually a band, but was there now. Every night on the tour, every show was better than the best show we ever had when we were actually a band. We met tons and tons of people who were like eight years old when we broke up and found out about us in the years after. I even met somebody whose mom went into labor with her at one of our shows in 2004.
That's crazy!
I had been really secluded from that world for so long because I’d been working and doing normal stuff that I forgot it was this wellspring of enthusiasm and energy, with people really feeding off of it. And yeah, because of the shows and how well they went, and the energy I got back from everybody, I got done with the tour and was like, "There’s no fucking way we’re not going to do another record, because this is it. This is what we worked for, right? This is what we fucking sweated for a decade, and it’s here. We finally got it."
Not everybody felt that way, though. We all came back together afterward to discuss the future, and the people who aren’t in Evil Island expressed that they weren’t really interested in continuing on. The people who are in Evil Island, Mark, Cody, did.
So from March until the middle of May last year, we were just passing demos back and forth, getting more and more excited and coming up with new ideas.
What made you decide to start Evil Island versus making another record from your other projects – Blood Brother, Jaguar Love, or Neon Blonde?
I'm really bad at coming up with band names. I think the only good band name I ever came up with was Neon Blonde, which was a project I did between Crimes and Young Machetes. So we briefly entertained the idea of just calling it that, but the music is so different that we decided not to.
With Jaguar Love, I personally have pretty extreme PTSD from how much I put into that last record and how poorly it was received. I just wouldn’t want to continue that. It felt like an opportunity for a new beginning. We wanted to start fresh and do something new.
What would you say what is different about Evil Island compared to your other projects?
It is very stylistically similar to Blood Brothers, but for me personally, there was less friction in the songwriting process. One of the things that was really awesome about the Evil Island recording was seeing Cody get to do Cody and really take over a lot of the composing and coming up with new ideas in the studio with Ross. Him and Ross together have this crazy symbiotic mind meld that happens when they're tracking guitars. They really feed off each other's energy and suggest things that independently they probably wouldn't have been able to pull off, but together become this really beautiful thing.
It is a lot simpler than Blood Brothers, but not simple in a song structure way. With Blood Brothers, there was always this tension because we didn't really know how to write songs. We just came up with parts, threw them all together in a Ziploc bag, shook it up, and that was the song. With these Evil Island songs, it's the same energy, spirit, and chaos of Blood Brothers, but with an editor.
There are no six-minute songs on the Evil Island record. There are no "Street Wars/Exotic Foxholes" type songs like on Young Machetes, where it's like, "Why is this on the record?" That's just my opinion. I'm a bit of a hater of that song. There's nothing that's a wild digression with a piccolo part or anything like that. It's more of a focused laser beam of Blood Brothers energy.
And then the obvious thing is Jordan's not in it, so that element isn't there, although he does sing on two of the songs. It's just more raw, I think, than Blood Brothers. It's more emotional, more real, more authentic. From a vocal standpoint, what I'm doing sounds more like what I actually sound like.
I kind of came up with how I was going to sing in this band during the Blood Brothers reunion tour, tweaking some of the ways I sang those songs in a live setting to make them sound better. It's more screamy in some ways, but also more melodic in other ways.
What was the writing process like for Terraform the Afterlife?
It was literally Cody coming up with songs, emailing them to me, and then I would either go into my car or my closet and record vocals, send them back, and send them to Mark. We would kind of go round and round until we felt like we were done. We were never in the same room at any point during the writing process, other than the pre-production stuff we did with Ross before recording the record.
From a lyrical standpoint, was it hard to jump back into it, or did it just kind of flow?
It was easy. The way I did the vocals on this record was actually different from how I did them on Blood Brothers records. What I would do when I was trying to come up with melodies, at least for these songs, was just listen to Cody's demos while I was doing random stuff like the dishes or housework or whatever. I'd listen over and over and over. Then I would get an inkling of an idea and just refine and refine and refine.
There was this moment with almost every song where I waited until I felt a certain really raw, powerful emotional energy in what I was doing. With every song, I just refined and refined and refined until I felt that in my body, which is not really how we did it in Blood Brothers. There, the challenge of getting two singers on one song took up a lot of the mental space in terms of figuring things out.
But yeah, I just had this internal feeling with every song that I waited for and pushed and pushed and pushed until I felt it. And when I felt it, it was this weird emotional outpouring. I felt like I was going to burst into tears, but I felt really good at the same time. I waited for that moment with every song.
Your lyrics to me have always felt like a Salvador Dalí painting in a way, where there’s abstract dripping clocks, and things of that nature. I've just always been so curious where that comes from, and it sounds like that’s just what’s coming out of your skull?
Early in the days of Blood Brothers, I was trying to figure out what my voice or creative vision as a lyricist was. Certainly, surrealism, beat poetry, and that kind of stuff were a lot of the early influences I had. There were also bands like the VSS. The way they wrote their lyrics really made me pick up on the imagery element of it.
But once I figured out what my vision for writing lyrics was, which I think is different from most people, it became kind of like a template, you know? There are influences, but it also comes from things that pop into my head, things that happen to me, events that happen in my life, or events that happen everywhere else.
It all kind of goes through the filter of this established aesthetic that I've built up over however many records I've done.
What was the recording process like?
I was staying with friends in LA and working at the Netflix office in North Hollywood during the day. We would start in the studio at like 3:00 and then just kind of go until 10:00. We started October 15th, and we did that all the way through January.
It was amazing. I was really happy with the demos we came up with. I felt really great going into it. Then, once Ross helped us refine the songs and we went through pre-production, it was like, "Whoa, this is actually..." Every step of the way, it got better than I thought it could.
Ross really spent a lot of time on the vocals. I mean, this is typical. I don't know how much you know about Ross Robinson, but there's a lot of lore around him about trying to do provocative things to get the best, purest, most authentic, artistically violent takes out of people. We go way back with him from Blood Brothers, so we've known him a long time.
The way that manifested with me was that every time we did vocals, it started with a 45-minute conversation between the two of us about what the lyrics were about, what was going on in my life, and what ideas I had behind them. I would go through every single line and explain why I made the choices I did, and even talk about ideas I had that I didn't end up using.
That was really... I think he was kind of afraid to do that with us in Blood Brothers. He's told us in subsequent years that when we made Burn, Piano Island, Burn, we kind of scared him a little bit because we were super elitist music assholes. We were lucky to be there, but we kind of acted like it was the other way around, like he was lucky to have us.
I didn't have that relationship with him back then. Now I feel like I've spent hundreds of cumulative hours with him talking about songs and my creative process. That part was really fun and engaging, and it helped me a lot. It was cool, too, because I'd have these conversations with him in front of the other band members, so they got a more acute sense of what goes into my thought process and what the songs are actually about.
Also, Ross's work editing the record is un-fucking-believable. Especially when it came to vocal editing and comps. He would push me to do every song in six different stylistic directions. Sometimes it would be, "Do a take that's more screamy. Do a take that's softer." We'd explore all the different permutations of how I could approach something. Then he'd take like 30 vocal takes and Frankenstein them into a comp that sounded like something I never would have come up with on my own. It's all stuff I did, but I never would have thought to arrange it that way.
He knows things other people don't know. He can feel it. He exists on a different temporal plane than other people. It's rare to meet somebody like that. I can't say enough good things about him. He's kind of the fifth member of the band in a way. He really shaped the sound of the record, and his contributions are as important as any one of ours.
I'm really grateful for that experience. I'll never forget it. It was a really, really seminal moment for me.
You have a couple of different guest vocalists on the album too. Do you want to talk about that or how that came about?
I'll just go down the list. Alexis from Sleigh Bells sings on "Melted Heart." I liked the idea of having a girl sing on that part. It just kind of popped into my head while we were listening back to the record. I've always been a big fan of Sleigh Bells. I basically just reached out to them on Instagram. I'd never met them before, but Alexis was into it, and it worked out really well. She sounds great on it.
Michael Gatto from XCOMM sings on "Terminatrixx." Michael was the production assistant on the Evil Island recording, so he was there helping set up stuff. One day I randomly texted Ross and was like, "Dude, you should have him try singing on that song because his voice sounds really fucking tough and punk." It just sounded great, so we kept it. There’s not really a crazy story behind that one.
Going into the record, cards on the table, we did want Jordan to do the record with us. There's a part of me that wanted it to be a Blood Brothers record. Some of the conversations we had with Jordan about whether or not he wanted to do this ended with, "Well, I'm happy to come do a song with you guys." That's kind of how that came about. We had a couple of ideas for what song would be a good fit for him. Then "I Bout A Spell" ended up being perfect. It's probably one of my favorite songs on the record because it goes so many different places. It's three minutes long, but it's like four different songs packed into one. It just seemed like a great and special song for him to do. I came up with the call-and-response part, and it felt like something we would have done in Blood Brothers.
The Fugazi thing was such a long shot. Obviously, we know Guy Picciotto from Young Machetes. He produced Young Machetes, and we were listening back to "T-Hexx" in the studio. As a joke, I started doing the chorus in a Guy and Ian MacKaye style, where Guy would do the call part and Ian would do the response part. We were just messing around with it in the studio, and then eventually it was like, "Wait a minute, we know him. Do you think he would actually do this? Because that would be fucking crazy."
So we asked him, and he was immediately down to do it. I mean, it's crazy to hear. I can't think of many people I'd rather have singing on a record with me. Other than digging up Kurt Cobain or something, in terms of people who were really important to me when I was younger, he's at the top of the list. It sounds like that part was made for him to sing. Fuck, he just blew it away. I can't even describe it. It was like an out-of-body experience. I couldn't believe I was hearing a song with me and him singing together. I just couldn't believe it. It's crazy.
Evil Island tour in the future?
Yeah, we are going to do shows once the record comes out. We wanted to avoid the awkwardness of playing to people who don't know any of the music yet, which is unfortunately the reality when you only have one song out. But yeah, once the record comes out, we're going to be playing shows.
Trying to avoid the dude in the crowd screaming, "Play Burn, Piano Island, Burn!"?
That is going to happen inevitably. I am fine with that.
Evil Island's Terraform the Afterlife is out August 14 via Blowed Out Records.
BONUS QUESTIONS
Before my interview with Johnny, I put a call out on social media and asked fans if they had any questions they'd like me to ask him. Here are a few of the questions that came back...
