Khamsin, originally the instrumental solo project of Jacob Curry, has since expanded to its current iteration as a four-piece dreamo band including Cole Harrison (bass), Darin Harger (drums), and Ben Beauchene (guitar) alongside Jacob (vocals, guitar). The Nashville-based group stays busy, most recently coming back from a tour across the midwest with Bouquet to kick off Furnace Fest’s final year in Birmingham, AL.
Released in May of 2022, Khamsin’s latest album What’s Left of Life? is equally crushing as it is cathartic, each track delivering a punch to the gut. Conceptually heavy and raw in its grief, the album ruminates on loss and coping with the empty space it leaves through intensely personal, metaphorically driven lyrics and a post-hardcore inspired sound bound to capture oldheads to the newest generation of listeners alike.
“Dye Front” offers a gentle opening to the album before taking listeners into the next track “Conjuring,” picking up in tempo until collapsing into an anguished cry, “No act of conjuring will make you appear again,” delivered by Curry with a gripping intensity.
The fourth, and possibly my personal favorite, song on the album, “Conniption,” battles carrying on in the wake of shattering loss with the biting lyrics, “Put your ear to the wall, you might think it’s some sort of conniption / It’s news to me that we keep ourselves so pristine and so orderly.”
“Follow” seems to close What’s Left of Life? with some acceptance that there is no linear means to grieving, or perhaps moreso a way to reframe it, before going back to the beginning with Curry singing, “One step at a time, but it all might be fine / The dye front flows.”
I was very excited and grateful to talk with Jacob Curry about What’s Left of Life? as well as the band’s latest tour, how their creative approach has evolved, and what’s up next for Khamsin. You can read the interview below, slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
K: How’s your day been? Hopefully not too busy since getting back from tour.
Jacob: Yeah, this week has been pretty busy. I manage a research lab at Vanderbilt during the week. As manager, I do all the ordering and normal manager kind of stuff, but I also have my hands in a few different projects that are ongoing. So I’m doing science multiple days a week and, since I was gone for three days last week, my desk and my bench in the lab are currently completely covered with stuff I need to get to. That’s partially because I’m disorganized, partially because there’s a lot to do, but it’s already been a hectic week so far. But I like staying busy, so it’s not too bad.
K: I didn’t know you worked at Vanderbilt until recently. That’s really cool.
J: Yeah, science is cool. I went [to Belmont] for undergrad. It’s, of course, known as a big music school. Like, if you wanna make it in the music industry in Nashville you go to Belmont, you study music or music business or whatever. I went there. I didn’t study music- probably why I’m still playing in DIY bands- but I was one of four people in my major by the time I graduated. I studied biochemistry. Belmont’s science department is actually pretty decent, especially for being a music school. They fund it relatively well. So, yeah, I’ve always kind of had the split personality thing of science by day and then loud guitar music at night.
K: What exactly do you study?
J: Our department is pediatric infectious disease. So, that’s primarily because my boss is a MD, so a doctor and PhD, so he’s a physician researcher. He’s a pediatrician. So that’s where he’s housed, and he’s specifically an infectious disease physician, so he sees patients, kids, that have some sort of infection. Specifically what we do in our lab, the lab was initially started to study Staphylococcus aureus. You’ve probably heard of staph infections. So that’s the primary bacteria that we study, specifically within bones. I could go into way more detail. But that’s the general thing. That’s, like, the thousand-foot view.
K: So you went to school here, but you moved around a good bit, right?
J: Yeah, so, yet another complexity to my life that makes any conversation or interview that I do a little bit all over the place. So, after I graduated college I stayed in Nashville and worked and played music and stuff for a little bit. In 2019, I decided to go back and get a master’s degree. I applied to a few different schools, and one school I got into was in Philadelphia, and I like Philly a lot. It’s a really cool city and the program was good, so I moved up there in 2019 and started the master’s program and kind of decided to put Khamsin on hold. And as fate would have it, I started writing a record I had kind of started. Then, near the end of 2019, I text the rest of the guys. At that point it was just me, Cole, and Darin. We’d had another guitarist, Zach Anderson- he plays in The Dreaded Laramie. Zach’s awesome. He had been playing in Khamsin since 2017, and when I decided to put the band on hold, I was like, you can focus 100% on The Dreaded Laramie. Don’t worry about this, I’m moving away, I don’t know what plans this band will have, if any, you know. So I talked with Cole and Darin, like, okay, we should record a record.
Leading up to that we had talked to a few different producers, and we got in contact with Braxton Matlock in Kansas City. He had done a record by some friends in Mess, and I love that band and love those people. Loved their record that they put out, loved how it sounded. And he had actually reached out to us before the record came out and asked if we’d be interested in doing anything with him. At that time we didn’t have a record or anything. So when we finally had a record, he was affordable, because it’s not Nashville and in Nashville everything’s really expensive if you want to do a decent quality record or EP. I mean, you can do stuff DIY of course, but for our first record I really wanted to put our best foot forward and invest a lot into the record. So we went and recorded a record first week of March 2020 and, of course, second week of March 2020 is when the COVID lockdown happened. So I was in the middle of a master’s program that got moved completely online and I was sitting on a record that wasn’t entirely finished. So the rest of that year happened, we ended up being able to finish the record with some friends up in Philly who had a studio, and I moved back down to Nashville. But the master’s program was in biomedical sciences because at that point, and potentially still, my end goal is to go to medical school and be a physician. So then when I came back I joined the lab that I’m currently in, and the band is active-ish. Of course everyone would like their band to be more active, but for a DIY band I think we’re doing okay.
K: Yeah, I’d say so. How was your experience with the scene in Philly? Did you get to play while you were there?
J: I did. Philly is obviously very different from Nashville. The city as a whole is a lot bigger and a lot more sprawling. In my experience, it might be because I sought out places and people that were similar to me or similar to the people and places in Nashville. Everybody’s in music in Philly just like everybody’s in music in Nashville. It’s just very different. In Nashville you have much more of an industry, like professional class of musicians and music business people, but in Philly everybody’s in a band. I lived just outside of downtown, so it wasn’t as dense and I was relatively close to a neighborhood called Manayunk. Manayunk has the highest concentration of post-college people in the country per capita, so there’s tons of dive bars and venues and stuff there. There was a spot up there called the Grape Room. One of my friends, his name is Kevin, was a talent buyer there, and two of my good friends Tommy and Ramon played in bands that would play The Grape Room a lot. So, by extension, I played at The Grape Room a lot, either in their bands or open mic nights that they would drag me to or I would be hanging out at. All in all, while I was up there I played like two or three Khamsin sets. I went to a handful of basement shows, which is very Philly. I saw some bigger shows. I like all the venues. They’re cool. There are some bands up in Philly that I really like. While I was up there Sweet Pill was just getting started, and they’re from right across the river in New Jersey, so I saw an early Sweet Pill show which is cool. Bleary Eyed is a cool like shoegaze band up there. Yeah, I love the music scene there. Like most of the things I enjoy, I like music to be a little scrappy or a little rough around the edges, and most music from Philly is that way. I really appreciate that. One of my favorite quotes from George Lucas about Star Wars is that he wanted the universe to feel lived in it. He didn’t want everything to feel super pristine, he wanted it to feel natural and tangible and realistic, not just like a utopian veneer over a sci-fi futuristic thing. Philly has that, if that makes sense. It definitely has that lived-in, worn feeling. Nashville misses that, or is missing that, a lot of the time.
K: I get what you mean. Yeah, I was wondering how Philly had influenced your music, if at all because, like, Khamsin has evolved from being an instrumental band with just you, right, to what it is now. And then your first release, you had some spoken word parts in it.
J: Yes, unfortunately.
K: Hey, I still like it.
J: At the time I thought it was cool, but you know I was a lot younger, and that was definitely a thing back in the day. I’ll give a super brief, like, the timeline of the band. I started writing music when I was a kid, like 13. As soon as I started playing guitar, I started writing songs. I didn’t really consider myself a singer or a songwriter until I was like 17-18. When I was 18 I started demoing things on my parent’s computer because they just got a Mac and it had Garage Band. I started demoing very rough ideas of what Khamsin could be and, over that summer before college started, I gathered my high school friends and I was like, alright, we’re gonna play a few shows and we’re gonna play these songs. And they’re like, okay cool, whatever. Then eventually throughout college we started writing, like, band songs, put out a few EPs, and didn’t start touring until 2017, but it really picked up as the band progressed after that. After I moved back from Philly is when Ben joined to record What’s Left of Life? because Khamsin was only a three-piece and I needed another guitarist in the band. So we put out What’s Left of Life in 2022, and here we are.
K: It’s cool to hear more about the evolution of the band. You also have a background growing up and playing in church, right?
J: Yeah, my dad was a chaplain in the army for the majority of my life. When I was really young, he was a pastor at church, but he eventually went back to duty in the army. So, like most kids who grew up in the church who start playing an instrument, as soon as you can hold on to it you’re put into the worship band. So as soon as I started playing guitar, I started playing at church on Sunday mornings. Then my friends and I started our youth group’s worship band, because we didn’t have one prior to that, and I wanted to play music as much as possible. That definitely was the foundation of my musical experience, at least playing “live.” That world that I grew up in in many ways shaped my worldview throughout a large chunk of my life. I’ve definitely recontextualized a lot of the beliefs I had and processed them. I feel really old saying this, for me, I “deconstructed” before that was even a term people used. I was 14 or 15 when I first was like, I don’t know if I vibe with all this. I don’t know if the way the conservative evangelical churches treat people of X or Y identity is okay, or even lines up with a reasonable interpretation of the scripture and, even if it does, do we need to hold on to that? That was like 2010 for me, so I guess that maybe even a decade or half a decade before I even heard the word deconstruction, I kind of went through that for myself.
My involvement and understanding of how the church is/should be feels weird at times because I haven’t been actively involved in a church in a very long time, but there are a lot of things about the belief system that I think are really valuable. I don’t want me saying that to come across as an endorsement of any conservative ideologies or political statements, because it’s the exact opposite of that. I am a very accepting, affirming, inclusive, person, so there’s a lot of mental dissonance that’s ongoing for myself and for a majority of people that have been involved/are still involved in the church, because I don’t think you ever truly leave the places that you were in at any point in your life. They might just be packaged differently, because who you are is a sum of your environments, and the people around you. You aren’t just an individual, unique thing, like, you are the sum of your parts. So the parts of myself that were developed or given to me through the church are always gonna be with me. Just my understanding of what that means is going to shift and be different the rest of my life. All that is, again, a very roundabout answer. Or at least just some crazy guys musing on a past life.
K: No, that was a beautiful answer. Yeah, I noticed listening back between your first release and then the latest release, I felt like there were still those religious connotations throughout all of them, but the way that you approached them did feel very different. I was wondering what changed, like if it was more your relationship with religion or just the way you would write about it?
J: I mean, it’s definitely both. I think so much of how I view the world, or at least can put words to the world, is still through the lens of that type of thinking, or that type of speaking, or influenced by that world view. The way I write is relatively loose. It’s metaphoric. I’m not super direct in my songwriting. Not necessarily 100% intentionally, it’s just what feels natural to me. There are a lot of allusions, not just the Biblical things or spiritual or religious things. Various things across the board, like on What’s Left of Life?, “Dye Front,” I could go off on a long tangent, but a dye front is related to a biochemical experiment or technique you would use. So I try to pull in all parts of myself in my songwriting, and I try to do my best to make that feel cohesive, but that’s also a reference of where I am at the time. So that’s why that first EP, or what I consider to be the first true EP, I’ve Only Been a Thief sounds or maybe feels different from What’s Left of Life? which is our most recent release.
K: Yeah, then just the different topics they tackle. Plus a decade of experience in the meantime. That makes sense. So how was your tour with Bouquet?
J: Tour with Bouquet was sick. I don’t remember the first time I heard of Bouquet, but it was relatively early on. Like they had a song, maybe two songs out. I’m constantly trying to find new music, so I’ve been following them for a bit, and then had conversations with them about playing shows or doing tours for a while. So I’m just really stoked that it even happened. Every show was really cool, especially Milwaukee. Milwaukee went off. We also got to play with Barely Civil in Milwaukee, and I’ve been trying to play with them for a long time. They actually played my house in 2019. Truly serendipitous moment all around. But [Bouquet] are super sweet guys. A great band live. Super tight, super cohesive. I could watch them play every night, and I’d be happy. It was great.
K: Any favorite memories from tour?
J: Let’s see. Yeah, in St. Louis. I guess the entire day in St. Louis was really cool. So the venue we played in St. Louis, it’s called Moshmallow, it’s the same space as a previous venue called Foam we had also played in 2019 that closed down that year. Someone bought it and opened it back up as a venue. So playing in that space under a different name was interesting, and there were people there that had been at the 2019 show, which is weird. It’s like, not quite deja vu, because it literally was the same exact thing, but that was crazy. Before the show we went down the street to this natural wine bar, called ‘Ssippi and I had some wine and we played a card game. Really cool spot. Connor from Foxing DJs there occasionally, which is cool. Then at the show this guy came up to me. He was really nice and he told me that he had been following Khamsin for a bit and, he didn’t live in St. Louis, he was just in town like traveling, and decided to come to the show with his friends. Like, he dragged them to the show because he liked us and wanted to see us. That was crazy. So all in all, the entire tour was great, but it’s like every little thing about that St. Louis show was just cool. It’s just really fun.
K: That is so cool. That’s another one of those moments, like, people talk about people getting tattoos of lyrics, or having people sing your songs back at you, I can’t imagine.
J: It was kind of surreal, like, whenever people tell me that they’ve been listening to us for a while, which does happen because we’ve been a band for how long, my first thought is always why? But my second thought is thank you, I appreciate it, but that’s crazy. It’s just interesting, I mean, we’re not a big band. But I guess I do that for smaller bands too, like, if you’re tapped into DIY music, or at least just smaller, independent music at all, that’s just what you do.
K: Talking about smaller or DIY bands, how do you keep up with/find new music? Especially being in Nashville, there’s so much going on. It’s usually Twitter for me.
J: Yeah, I love Twitter. Twitter is my favorite social media. Fuck Elon Musk, but I love Twitter. I don’t know, I went through a period where I was so frustrated because I couldn’t find any music that I liked relatively recently. In the past few years I mean. I do think a big part of that was because people weren’t playing shows throughout the majority of the early pandemic period. I don’t go to as many shows as I used to, or would like to. Both. But honestly show flyers. Like, when I see my friend’s band is out of town playing with a new local band, I’ll check it out, because if you’re going on tour you try to play with bands that kind of sound like you. That’s my number one way to find new music. Number two is there are record labels that I really like. And the purpose of a label is different than what it used to be. You don’t necessarily need a label to put out your own music anymore, but a label is a way to curate a world. I think the best example is Sunday Drive Records. Also New Morality Zine. They’re very similar. They both focus on bands that may not necessarily be hardcore, but are involved or adjacent to the hardcore world, but may contextualize their music through alternative rock or shoegaze or emo or whatever. But there’s a foundation in hardcore which I think is cool. Some of my new newer favorite smaller bands are on Sunday Drive- Feverchild, Sign Language, Squint, All Under Heaven, Glare. So there’s definitely a world that is being built based on that label’s interest and I think it’s a great way to find new music.
K: Have you worked with a label at all before?
J: For I’ve Only Been a Thief, my friend was toying around with the idea of starting a label around that time, we signed to his label. All that really meant was we were the first band on the label’s Bandcamp. Then he eventually got a few other bands. I think the first thing he actually printed was a run of CDs for Yvette Young’s instrumental EP before Covet started. But the only thing that came from that was like one review on a blog that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a good review, they said we sounded like locally driven Caspian, and I was very stoked on that. They gave us a 7 out of 10. I’m happy with that. But other than that, we haven’t worked with a label. I shopped around What’s Left of Life? as in conversations with people, but decided that we could do the record justice on our own. Especially coming out of the initial COVID period, labels were obviously not doing well, which is fine of course. We just decided to do it on our own, but I won’t rule out working with labels in the future. If anything, it would be really nice not to have to do everything on my own, but I’m a band dude for life at this point so I’m very okay being DIY. With where social media is right now, especially Tik Tok, you can do everything on your own. Post-COVID, with the state of social media, you can be an independent artist 100% and be completely okay. There are independent artists who are touring the country or world and making a pretty good living on their own.
I grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee, where the only music scene is DIY and locals. Bands don’t really tour through. If they do, it’s a rare occasion, and it’s honestly weird when that happens. So I had to learn very early on how to press my own CDs, how to upload my music to streaming. I demoed my own music before I went to a studio for the first time because I wanted to figure out things on my own. That’s just also I feel like in my nature. I’m a self-starter. I want to be able to do things well on my own before I ask for help to take things the next step further. But, like I said in relation to Sunny Drive Records and New Morality Zine and how I find music, a label gives you a community or a niche that you fit within and you can grow within and, potentially, sometimes out of that to other ones. Or just get so big that you don’t need that niche anymore. A lot of people think labels are completely negative. I see them as another tool or asset you could work with, and it really depends on what you want out of that situation of getting signed. But again, I’m not opposed to it. I’d honestly really like to be, just because I’m doing everything on my own and I feel like I’ve kind of hit the ceiling of what I can do on my own. To grow the band, I would love outside help.
K: Yeah, that makes sense, like, you work at Vanderbilt, you have the band, you book shows here, then you’re busy promoting. How do you manage all that?
J: I just have to, you know? If I didn’t do any aspect of what I do, whether that’s my jobs at Vanderbilt and also the restaurant I work at, or the band, or see my friends…
K: Wait, you also work at a restaurant?
J: Yeah, so as an aside, my wife and her mom own a cheese and charcuterie restaurant on Charlotte Avenue. It’s Culture + Co. It’s the cheese place with the conveyor belt if you’ve heard about that. We focus on artisan cheeses made in the U.S. with pairings that we make all in house, and it’s a seasonal menu. But in addition to the cheese and the pairings and the charcuterie, we focus on natural wine. So all organic, biodynamic, low intervention-style wine. I was there full time for the first year and a half or two years we were open. We opened up at the end of 2020, so throughout my second year of the master’s program into 2022 I was there about 60-70 hours week. Then I went and joined the lab, so now the lab is like my day job, and then I’m at the restaurant maybe 20 hours a week-ish. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Really depends on the week.
All that being said, if I didn’t do or invest in any of the things that I do, they wouldn’t happen. Like if I didn’t do well at my job in the lab, I wouldn’t have that job. If I didn’t work hard at the restaurant, that would be bad, because it’s my family’s business and I’ve got to support my family. If I didn’t work hard in the band, my band wouldn’t be doing well and I wouldn’t meet my own creative goals. If I didn’t hang out with my friends, well, I don’t really hang out with my friends, but if I didn’t see at least one or two of my friends one or two times a month, I wouldn’t have any friends. I just do what I do because I have to, and I would much rather spend my time being productive and putting things out into the world, whether that’s efforts at work or something musical. I don’t know, like, I’ll take a day to rest or something, but also for me being creative is resting because that nurtures the creative part of me. Like, it is an exercise to be creative, but that makes that part of me stronger, and it allows other aspects of me to not be in the forefront and to be rested. I’m not in work mode when I’m writing a riff, I’m in creative mode, and vice versa. I mean I do doom scroll. Like I said, Twitter is my favorite social media, so I am on Twitter constantly. I love a shit post. I love brain rot memes. I love looking at pictures of silly little guys. I do all that too, so I’m not trying to use myself as an example of good virtue in being busy or productive, it’s just my perspective on managing my activities.
K: Yeah, I respect that. And I definitely see why a label would be helpful to manage all that. Do you have any other creative projects going on, or is it just Khamsin?
J: Not currently. I’ve been in multiple bands in the past, but Khamsin is like my thing. There are other people in the band, and the current state of the band is more collaborative than the band ever has been, but for all intents and purposes, music made by Jacob Curry is Khamsin. I was the first bass player for The Dreaded Laramie. I left because they wanted to be as intense as they are, and I respectfully said I can’t give this band as much as you deserve, so I’m gonna step back. Zach still played in Khamsin for a year, and I’m good friends with everybody that has been in The Dreaded Laramie. I’m essentially a ghost member for Smallville. Nathan is one of my best friends. We were roommates in college for a year and then we lived together after college for a little bit. I’ve written songs with Smallville, I’ve played tons of shows with them, I’m just not an official member.
I guess the only thing that I do currently that isn’t Khamsin is, there’s a pop artist named Tristan that I occasionally track guitar for and play for. It’s my sister-in-law, my wife’s little sister. I do stuff for her, but she lives in LA currently, so it’s not a regular thing. It’s also not cool to have your brother-in-law who’s a little bit older than you tracking your guitar when you can go to a cool studio with a cool producer and work on this stuff. So, yeah, I’ve tracked a few songs, and her stuff is great. I think she’s incredible. Honestly, one of my favorite songwriters right now. Like, she’s gonna make it, it’s just a matter of time when.
K: That’s a really cool thing to just have added in there. What about other members in Khamsin? I know there’s Nicholas Wall’s solo stuff.
J: Yeah, Nicholas Wall is his given name. He goes by Cole, but his artist name is Nicholas Wall when he performs solo stuff. He plays bass and does backing vocals in Khamsin with the future intention to be involved in keys and piano stuff since that’s his primary instrument. Yeah, Nicholas Wall is cool. I play guitar on his record that he put out a long time ago. He’s planning on gearing it up to do some more stuff soon. Then Darin is our drummer. Darin does a ton. We met Darin through touring on our first tour in 2017. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, and it was one of his bands, A Modest Proposal’s, first show. We played with them, and we just kept in touch with honestly everybody that was at that show. There weren’t a ton of people, but we kept in touch with that band and all of their close friends that were there. When we needed a new drummer for two tours one summer he was the first person I called, and he’s been involved since. A Modest Proposal is still active. If anything, they’re bigger than Khamsin. They put out a record this year that they recorded here in Nashville with Tate Mercer and it’s really good. It’s an awesome record. Darin also plays in a hardcore band called Grow Blind. Kind of Youth Crew style hardcore. Some dancing hardcore, not crowd killing hardcore. He also runs a promotion group, I guess, for lack of a better term, called Fuchsia Collective. Fuchsia started as just an annual festival that he organized but has since expanded to be one-off shows that he books, smaller festivals throughout the year. He and I are going to do a small label through Fuchsia. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. I would like for that to happen. I think it’d be cool, but I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. Then Ben plays guitar in Khamsin. He has a solo drone project called Ponds. He was one of the two main members in a shoegaze band called Versor. He just joined Vining. I don’t know how to describe Vining. He plays in a post-hardcore band called Early Mourning. Then he’s also a producer, so he engineers and records stuff. And he also records and plays for Sawyer Norman.
K: That’s insanely impressive, like, all of you.
J: Well, thank you. Hey, if you’re going to do something, might as well do it all the way, right?
K: Do you have anything coming up you want to plug?
J: We’re going to primarily focus on writing the rest of the year. We put out What’s Left of Life? in 2022 and I would love not to go more than three years without putting out another record. We’ll probably put on a song this year. There’s enough time, and I’m writing enough that we’ll be able to get something out, but the goal is a record next year.
Khamsin will also be opening for Delta Sleep alongside Carpool Tunnel and Teen Suicide on November 15, 2024 at EXIT/IN in Nashville, TN. Khamsin, without fail, delivers an unforgettable, explosive performance- be sure to get your tickets HERE before they’re gone!
Huge thanks again to Jacob Curry for taking the time to talk, and be sure to follow Khamsin on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Instagram @khamsinband to keep up with all future shows and releases!
Written by Kaitlyn Boykin
