No one does indie rock in Pittsburgh better than Eli Kasan, as demonstrated over the years in The Gotobeds — the only local band signed to Sub Pop Records, the Seattle label that gave us Nirvana, Soundgarden and Sleater-Kinney.

Kasan had been in dual bands before, having released The Gotobeds first full length album in 2014 while still a member of the mighty Kim Phuc, and had no intentions of doubling up again — even with a sweet offer on the table from the mega-talented singer-violinist Shani Banerjee (daughter of prominent Pittsburgh musician Bob Banerjee).

That was toward the end of 2019 when The Gotobeds were just getting back from an eight-week tour, including a month in Europe.

“We came back on New Year's Eve and I ran into Shani, and she was like, ‘Hey, we should play together sometime,’” Kasan says. “At the time, I was just insanely busy and I was like, ‘No [expletive]  way.’ I was like, ‘I only do something if I can do it. I hate spreading myself too thin.’ So it was ‘no dice.’ Well, you know what happened in 2020. All of a sudden I found myself at home with a lot of free time.”

While he was wiling away the hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kasan’s mind drifted to a life-altering Nick Cave show at Carnegie Music Hall in 2017 when the Australian goth/punk icon had been accompanied by his Bad Seeds/Grinderman bandmate Warren Ellis who did eerie work on violin.

“I’d seen him before and I was always a fan,” Kasan says. “When I saw that concert, it just really struck me as stately and beautiful and more of a performance and, I would say, more sincere. I'm struggling for a better word. Just a different style of music and it stuck with me for a long time, struck a chord with me.”

In those early pandemic times, he found himself brooding in The Gun Club, X, Rowland Howard, Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, outlaw country — all this bad guy music,” he says, “like the villain in a movie.”

“I went into a little hole for a while,” he says. “It was just [expletive] miserable.”

The way out of that was to write some songs. And he was eyeing something different than The Gotobeds. He reached out to Banerjee, to drummer Evan Meindl from Rave Ami and to Gotobeds engineer “My War” Matt Schor to play bass.

“I kept thinking maybe someone will say no,” he says, laughing, “and then I won't have to do it, right? Like, maybe someone will be wiser than me. Luckily, everybody just agreed pretty quickly. Just an exciting time. Also kind of a scary time, too.”

That scariness is reflected in the darker, more gothic sound of The Sewerheads, where Banerjee’s haunting vocals and electric violin provide a tense, mournful and urgent counterpoint to Kasan’s always-dangerous energy. They had the luxury of time to workshop the band dynamic that emerges on the compelling debut album “Despair is a Heaven.”

“In regular times,” Kasan says, “we probably would have got an opportunity to play out sooner, and I think that probably would have been to the detriment of it. We wouldn't have quite figured out the mechanics on how we were playing together.”

For Kasan, the songwriting itself was, as usual, a more solitary process.

“I feel a little more lost in a band setting,” he says, “I've never been a big on ‘let's jam, and if it works, it works.’ That works for Can, but you know I don't sound like [expletive] Can or play like that, right? I wish I did, really wish I did.”

Lyrically, he was conscious of veering away from what he was hearing from other artists during the pandemic years.

“I found it extremely boring,” he says. “Everybody was just writing about, you know, a direct topic during those times and I was really just dreaming of escape. I was really trying to think about not referencing, you know, just, ‘Hey, I'm lonely, I'm depressed….and isolated.’

“So, I was really trying to take the mantle from someone like Leonard Cohen who writes these little stories about different characters. There's some of them, there's some of me in there and there's some people I know or different characters in there too. But I would say it was less personal.”

The Sewerheads debuted live in October 2021 and released their first single in May on Office Boy Records, founded by The Government Center owner Josh Cozby. In 2023, they went to Chicago to record “Despair is a Heaven” (Tall Texan) at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, where the Gotobeds made much of their last record, “Debt Begins at 30.”

While they did get to hang with Albini there before he passed away, they worked with producer/engineer Matthew Barnhart, who produced the last Gotobeds record, having also worked with the likes of Superchunk, Bob Mould and The New Pornographers. Somehow, Barnhart managed to capture both the melancholy and chaos of The Sewerheads. (Jump to “Trick of the Rain” to see how just how intense it gets.)

If Nick Cave hears it, he’ll be very pleased.

Because everything took a little longer than expected, Kasan doesn’t have much of a cycle with The Sewerheads before jumping back into the Gotobeds.

“I really thought I'd space it out a little better,” he says, “and I did a really poor job of doing that because the Gotobeds have a new record coming out in May and a bunch of touring and a European trip. It's kind of our first time back since the pandemic, so they're completely conflicted. So it's, you know, it's extremely foolish, the exact scenario I was trying to avoid in 2019 I've found myself in in 2025.”

Despite that, he says of The Sewerheads, “we're already more than halfway through writing the new record.”

First Published: February 11, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: February 12, 2025, 1:52 p.m.