Formula Indie Sessions _ Interview with The Lower Coast

The Lower Coast is a Netherlands-based Brazilian rock duo, Eric Caspari (Far Mah Sea) and drummer Bruno Martins, making melodic songs that start in pop-leaning calm and rise into guitar-driven release. Rooted between Brazil’s South Atlantic and the Netherlands’ lowlands, their recent singles “Reset:Default” and “Collective Exclusivity” trace a loose narrative arc about self-judgment, disillusionment, and the slow, human stumble toward accountability, carried by nocturnal tension, hooky choruses, and a wailing, cathartic edge

What is your earliest memory connected to music?

Eric: I think it was when I was about three, on a trip to Ilhabela, Brazil and my dad made a mixtape. He played “Ferry Cross the Mersey” by Gerry and the Pacemakers nonstop. I didn’t even know what “ferry” meant, but that nylon-guitar shimmer and those slightly old, kind of creaky strings just lodged in me.

Years later I realized we’d actually taken a ferry to the island and you could see boats from the house. Nice accidental symbolism. I’m pretty sure it was a coincidence, though.

Still, it was the first song that ever gave me nostalgia. By the time I was five, I was already missing being three, which is… aggressively ridiculous.

Bruno: Listening to Queen’s Greatest Hits compilation LP from my dad on his sound system.

How did your passion for creating music begin?

Eric: When I was 9, a friend taught me a couple riffs on guitar during a sleepover. The next day I picked up my dad’s guitar and, in my head at least, it immediately stopped being his.

Once I learned a few chords, I made a little songbook and started writing mostly comedy songs. I was super influenced by comedy and music felt like the perfect delivery system, like jokes with an engine and a chorus.

And then I realised the trap pretty early: if everything you write has to land as a joke, you end up only saying things sideways. I wanted the freedom to be direct too, to write what I actually felt without hiding behind snark. I still loved making people laugh, but I also wanted to make real shit.

Bruno: When I had my first tries on the drums at my uncle’s house, he is a drummer. After that day I wanted to play more and more and write my own songs.

What’s the story behind your current music project?

Eric: Bruno and I ended up in the Netherlands around the same time. I’d just moved over from London after ten years there, fresh out of university and already a bit disillusioned with my film-school diploma, so I started redirecting those “editing brain” instincts into music, treating songs like cuts, pacing, and arrangement choices. Bruno was starting his own chapter here too, and we met through our day jobs at a music distribution company, then not long after we started making music together outside of work.

Once we did, songs came together fast and we found a rhythm that just clicked. Early on it was very desert-rock leaning, lots of Queens of the Stone Age energy, with a big dose of Nação Zumbi in the DNA. We were recording wherever we could: a proper studio, Bruno’s old apartment in the middle of the Red Light District, and my place out in the suburbs. Very “Dutch realism,” but loud.

Our influences are all over the map, and we don’t try to sand that down. The whole point is that the sound can change track to track, so each release is basically a new corner of the same universe.

How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard your music before?

Eric: I’d call it alternative/indie rock at the core, but with Brazilian groove in the bloodstream. It’s guitar-forward and melodic, sometimes noisy, sometimes tight and rhythmic, and it can shift from track to track, but it always lives somewhere under that wide “alternative/indie” umbrella.

At least for now. We keep trying to make an ambient album, and then we inevitably relapse and add riffs and drums. It will happen one day.

What is one thing you’ve learned that completely changed the way you make music?

Bruno: Don’t play covers, just do you. don’t follow recipes.

Eric: Yeah, you gotta do your thing but I do have to say that playing other people’s music can give you access to different perspectives of writing and playing. I constantly steal chord progressions from new songs I check the chords for in the Internet, essential to have those in your pocket for jam sessions. It does help me stay sharp.

The thing that changed me the most as a composer was listening to Death Grips’ The Money Store for the first time. My whole perception of music changed, it was now truly limitless. 

What tools, instruments, or software are essential in your creative process?

Bruno: Drums, E. Guitars, Bass, Midi keyboard, Ableton Live and a few plugins.

Eric: Now, on this I agree 100%.

Which indie artist or song are you loving right now?

Eric: Nourished by Time, really into his sensibility and choices. 

Bruno: Sweet Pill

How have your personal experiences influenced your music and artistic vision?

Eric: In every way, honestly.

Even the name, The Lower Coast is our slightly shabby translation of “Baixada Santista”, the coastal region near São Paulo where we both kind of grew up. That geography, the sea, the humidity, the street-level chaos and beauty, plus the experience of moving away and building a life elsewhere, all of that leaks into the writing and the choices we make sonically.

Bruno: Yeah I think every artist’s output is a bit of their inner emotions and experiences.

What emotions or messages do you hope listeners take from your work?

Bruno: Awareness, perhaps.

Eric: That art is endless and abundant. So don’t settle for little, don’t let your taste shrink. Don’t stop growing, no one’s making you – no one can.

What’s the most important lesson music has taught you so far?

Bruno: There are no limits in art.

Eric: Trigonometry.

What is a dream venue or festival you would love to perform at?

Bruno: Rock Am Ring

Eric: It’s a cliché but probably Glasto or Primavera.

If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?

Eric: Present day: JPEGMAFIA. His production is surgical and chaotic in the best way, love his delivery. He also does amazing work with guitar riff samples, that would save me a lot of time…

Past: Louis Armstrong, of course. He’d make me sound good no matter what.

Bruno: more like a musician / producer: Ross Robinson

Where can our listeners follow and support your music?

https://music.apple.com/nl/artist/the-lower-coast/1748104321?l=en-GB

https://www.facebook.com/share/17h7LgEhmQ

Looking toward the future, what’s your dream for the next chapter of your musical journey?

Bruno: World Tour with many festivals

Eric: Yeah, but we gotta finish the album first.

What do you hope listeners will discover about you along the way?

Eric: That the sound will keep evolving and hopefully keep surprising you. We’re not going to pander or take you for granted. And if we throw punches, they’re aimed upward.