INTERVIEW WITH JOE COTELA BY ISABELLA AMBROSIO
“I’ve just always been around my scene in Arizona starting [with] the first band we were playing bowling alleys and backyard shows and stuff,” frontman Joe Cotela explains from the back of the DED tour bus, traveling from Washington to Idaho. And DED has been around for a minute – maybe not visually active, but around.
Maybe that’s where Cotela and DED’s extensive fusion of subgenres come from, each reflecting a scene and a time period Cotela found himself in, “I’ve been in like five bands probably in my life. And each one was a different time period, almost. I was in a punk band, and I was in a kind-of nü metal band when I was 16, 17,” sometime during the 90s, “Then I was in a metal core, hardcore band when I was 21, 22. And then I was in a hard rock band for a while,” each genre ripe with new techniques, ideas, and influences to offer DED and matured Joe Cotela.
Yet, genre seems like a lesser concern to DED, and more so an articulate celebration of the cacophony of metal sounds that drew them into the scene in the first place: “I was going to as many shows as I could go to. I just loved it. I just loved being around people. I loved the unity of all of it. I loved watching people be creative and passionate and I just wanted to be immersed in it.”
Whether able to be seen from outside the scene or not, DED has been around for the last four years, quietly stitching together the album RESENT which finally released this September. For reasons beyond their control, the band was forced to halt their momentum, yet the band remained confident in their course, “It made me feel like I was going to lose what we had done. And so it really puts all of us in a place of gratitude and appreciation. It made us hungry.”
DED took the sheer fury, frustration, and resentment building in the past four years and fused it all into one album that focuses on lessons learned throughout the process, with Cotela explaining that DED “had been writing the whole time. The guys built the studio during this time and stuff, which is self-empowering, we were writing the whole time. And then once we kind of got out of that scenario and we were free, we got in with UNFD [and] we were ready to go. We had all the songs.” So, RESENT, wasn’t just written after the fact. It was written during, showing a broader picture of resiliency through action and attitude, not just reflection.
Because at the end of the day, if you don’t fight for the thing you love, do you truly love it? “It’s just us really being selfish and making ourselves happy because like RuPaul says ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love someone else?’”
And DED is putting themselves – and their scene – first on RESENT.
