I find my way into Sleepwalk (the East Williamsburg venue of “sultry” decor—their words, not mine) around 8 PM, having just come from the ballot box. It’s Primary Tuesday, a muggy weekday night in June, and I feel lucky to have Imperial Motors as my nightcap.
I join Liam O’Toole(vocalist and bassist) and Josh Cukier(vocalist and drummer) in the basement green room twenty minutes ahead of their set for vocal warmups. The twangy tonk of Pterosaur–the soloist who comes across like a regular act at Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse bar–bleeds in from the stage area on the floor above. After a few photos, I leave the co-vocalists to their preparations and assume my position watching the rest of the current set upstairs.
As Imperial Motors assumes the stage and sets up their gear, CAKE’s “Never There” plays over the PA, followed by Sublime’s “What I Got”, a tune Liam can’t resist karaoke-ing while tuning up. The nineties rap-rock is quickly subsumed by guitarist Andrew Garces and keyboardist Ben Biber’s shared cacophony, and with a quick fill Josh drops the quartet into their first song of the night.
As the Motors blaze through the song–a newer track known, in the interim, as “the Eric Adams song”–the varied styles and personalities begin to come through: Liam, standing centerstage, dons an FBI standard-issue black-and-white suit, wielding the first of two basses(one fretted, one fretless) in rotation tonight; Andrew sports a Cold War-era gas mask, his shoulder-length dark hair spilling out of the back as he toggles between angular and angelic riffs; Josh, in a black cowboy hat that remains steadfastly in place, keeps the quartet in lock-step behind the drum kit; and Ben, in a white tank top and blue jeans, brings a James Chance-ian freneticism to his panel of keyboards and synthesizers.
The opening song’s chorus (“who’s in charge, who’s on TV, there’s nothing left, we tried our best, see?”) sets the first pin of a theme explored through most of Imperial Motors’ oeuvre: the plight of the modern individual–disillusioned, disgruntled, yet searching for answers.
The group moves swiftly into the next two tracks, “Infinite Money Glitch” and “PEP”. The former features disjointed verses interchanged with a glimmer of collectivism in the refrain (“help us make a difference!”), eventually giving way to a serpentine descent where the refrain mutates to meet a divison-sowing agenda ("help us make them different!"); the latter, a romp that could’ve found itself as a too-coked-out b-side off of Synchronicity (fitting, as “PEP” stands for ‘Police Exchange Program’), takes a turn inside the mind of a meathead-in-blue (“it’s my city, I am the law”) while Andrew manages to fit in a couple midwest emo licks (tastefully, I can assure you.)
The fourth track, “Bartender”–a cut from the band’s 2025 "Charlie Don't Surf" EP–continues on this plight-of-modern-man line, a lonely drunkard in the verse lamenting: “after hours, the only time left I have,” then, angrily spewing in the chorus: “200 years ago, you reached in the water / You could grab a trout, eat a trout / Now, you can’t even drink the water / Can’t breathe the air in my own apartment.” Later, on “Freeloader”, a similarly downcast character finds a moment of clarity, questioning their lifestyle of turning friendships into escapades: “Does it make you happy? / Does it make you cry?”
The penultimate song, a newer track called “SolidGoldMagikarp”, sees the band in by far their most tender moment of the night. The song’s first half would find itself comfortably on Pet Sounds, with O’Toole cooing about days past (“God knows I want to get back there”) before the second half nosedives–the quartet breaks into a marching dirge, O’Toole and Biber harmonizing shrieks and thrashing into their instruments as the crowd head-bangs along with them.
“Step by Step”, the band’s bona fide closer, completes the turn into the light, a four-on-the-floor dance-punk number that sees Liam leave both basses behind and take the microphone as his instrument of choice. The song kicks further and further into gear, the chorus of “let me help you out” ringing as a refrain and a final statement to send its audience back into the world.
After the band packed up, I held court at the bar with Ben, touching on the night’s performance and the outlook for the rest of the year as the band settles into a short break from shows. We marvel at the remarkably precise dissonance of post-hardcore acts like Drive Like Jehu and Slint, both of us maintaining aspirations of being a part of such a band. “That’ll happen when I’m like thirty-five,” Ben decides, “when I get a more stable job, and then will need to get unstable somehow.”
Andrew joins us and the three of us concur in our dour feeling towards careering in music, about how bands, in trying to meet the bottom line, seem to need to operate more as t-shirt stores than anything else. Andrew is preparing to begin a master’s program in audio engineering and looking toward a path in acoustic treatment; Ben muses on becoming a school teacher, feeling a desire to know, day-in and day-out, his impact on the world is positive.
Josh and Liam find us at the bar and I insist on a group photo of the four of them. Seldom does a band find a way to thread together their disparate influences as well as Imperial Motors does--talking to any of the four of them you’ll find wildly different listening habits, and yet between them lies a deep understanding of how to coalesce. It’s no secret seeing them play tonight that they’ve inundated themselves with shows over recent months (they played up the Hudson in Croton just a few days ago). This new batch of songs sees Imperial Motors at their tightest and most focused, pushing their songs’ wandering souls ever closer to salvation.
