Indian Goat keeps busy with new single, video and work on next album

Local rock duo Indian Goat wasn’t about to sit back and graze while waiting for the world of live music to return.

Instead, guitarist/vocalist Garrett Zanol and drummer Travis Tveit have taken the past few months to release their latest single, “Rolling Winds,” in November, debut a new music video for their signature stomper, “Be Your Seer,” in December, and officially start work on their next album.

“With the albums ahead of this most recent video and single, we did a lot of promotion. We did release shows, and we did a bunch of hype a month or two in advance,” Zanol said. “But these two most recent things, we didn’t really do that at all.”

Instead, he owed the new single and video to all of the band’s followers and everyone else who has endured the perpetual tailspin that is 2020, with the new content hopefully tying over listeners until the next sign of a single or “Indian Goat III” emerges.

“Rolling Winds,” which debuted Nov. 13 on CorporRAT Records, picks up where the fuzzed-out riffing of last year’s release of “Be Your Seer” left off. Rhythms that roll with the efficiency and ferocity of the winds mentioned in the track’s name and Zanol’s overdriven vocals and dense guitar sounds indicate there’s plenty of riffs left for a new studio effort.

The single also marked a return to the band recording their own material in Zanol’s basement, where the first two works of the “Indian Goat” anthology were born.

“We were just like, ‘Let’s just do it in the basement,’ ” Zanol said. “It’s just a home recording that I mixed and mastered and recorded myself. … That’s how both of the albums were recorded, in my basement. Then we did ‘Be Your Seer’ in studio, and now we kind of went back to the basement.”

For the group, deciding to record “Rolling Winds” themselves was more than just a matter of convenience.

“I truly prefer the rawness of the first two albums just because I think it captures more of a gross side that we bring musically than a studio-produced single,” Zanol said. “It was nice to release a single again and have it kind of crusty.”

Keeping in line with that raw philosophy, the music video for “Be Your Seer,” released Dec. 4, pairs the band with an equally bare setting.

“We wanted to keep it super simplistic,” Zanol said. “I just got ahold of Dan Spalding, who owns Zephyr Lodge, and I was like, ‘Can we just break into one of your cabins, gut it, and just do a single-shot video type thing? Knock it out in an afternoon?’ ”

After enlisting the local help of HyperTuna Productions and visual whiz Justin Frick, the video channels as much aggression, energy and flannel you could possibly hope for from Indian Goat without seeing a live show.

Now, Zanol and Tveit, who also is known as a chef at Iron Goat Brewing Co., are pushing their chips forward on a new album that’s aiming to carry the same energy as their previous releases while still offering something musically fresh.

“We’ve got a handful of new songs that we’re looking forward to recording for ‘Indian Goat III,’ ” Zanol said. “The first two albums were recorded within a year of each other, and now it’s been almost a couple of years since we’ve released an album. We’re just kind of riding it a little bit to make sure we do it right and we don’t repeat ourselves in what we did on the first two albums.”

Johnathan Curley can be reached at johnathanc@spokesman.com