I had a chance to ask frontman David Gielan a few questions:
How did OC!N come together and what is the story behind the name?
It’s been a long and strange journey, let me tell you. After we left our first (record) label around 2006, we knew we needed a change. We had been playing under the band name Simple 6 and we were quite a different group back then.
There was a lot of bad blood with the label and after that whole thing fell apart, some of those band members were pretty fatigued with it all and wanted out. One in particular was dealing with heroine addiction and all in all it was just a bad scene.
The band quickly went from 6 members to 3 and we began looking for our new direction and identity. We couldn’t use the previous band name since it was tied to our previous contract and the guys who were left in the group wanted to push the style of music a little harder and much darker than what we had been doing before.
We used to tell people all these fantastic stories about where the band name came from. All total bullshit. It eventually became an inside joke to see how elaborate and strange we could make the origin story of the band name, but in reality, it’s much more boring and straightforward than we ever let on.
If you have ever been in a band then you know coming up with a great band name is hard. You want it to be part of your theme as a group but not limit you, so for most, you work hard to come up with the right image. Something that embodies your sound. Something that evokes the right emotion. However, I’m also firm believer in letting the music define the name and not the other way around. We tried for days and days to come up with a name.
We wrote lists of hundreds of names and they all felt off. Truth be told, it’s one that Frogs had originally thrown out there as a joke and we thought it was hilarious. We never took it seriously and just went on throwing out what we thought were serious contenders. This went on for days and days but every once in a while someone would say “I got it… Oh Crap! Ninjas”and we would all laugh hysterically. Eventually it just stuck. It was the one name that we never stopped laughing about. It always made us feel good when we said it and frankly, that was good enough for me. We’ve been told it doesn’t really fit our sound but that never really bothered me.
It is with immense pleasure that we here at the Indie Music Coalition Magazine bring you the world premier of the video for their latest single, Death Connected.
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