Features

Today marks the release of Gentleman Nation, the genre-smashing debut album from Dollar Store. A vibrant mix of punk, post-punk, goth, pop, hardcore, melodic metal, post-hardcore and jazzy noise, the record is the result of a year and a half of relentless writing, road-testing, and refining—fueled in no small part by the return of punk icon Jeff Ott (Crimpshrine, Fifteen), making his first recorded appearance since 2007.

Joined by a cast of veteran players -Leda Gannon, Dave Slaverave and Phill Thee - and guided by esteemed punk engineer Bart Thurber, Dollar Store hit the studio in December 2024 to capture a raw, unpredictable blend of sounds. The final mix was mastered by Seattle's own Jack Endino, adding the gritty sheen that helped define an entire era of heavy underground music.

From spiky hardcore riffs to slinky post-punk grooves and goth-pop melodies, Gentleman Nation doesn’t settle—and neither does the band. Read on to see what Dollar Store had to tell us about the stories behind the songs.

"Creator"

Dave Slaverave: "We were knee deep in a slog of different sounds and inspirations back in 2023, sorta unsure what this project was gonna be. We started around Spring of that year, and I was going through a personal hell too long and not appropriate for this discussion. Personally, I was flying ideas in every which direction to express the wilderness I was in. I think it helped create the 'no genre' ethos where anything and everything was allowed. Jeff one day busted out this tune he and Leda wrote and I was like, 'Oh wow! That's a set opener." And a cohesion of everything we've been doing. All that feral energy gelled after this and tunes began falling into place. It was only appropriate that it opened our record."

"Equivocator (Chicken Fucker)"

Dave Slaverave"We were sitting around with acoustic instruments nailing down vocal harmonies when I just started strumming the bass line cuz it matched the style of punk I knew Leda liked. And my fuck she came alive and immediately began freestyling the vocal structure and even some lyrics right off the top. Her pent up rage at the Orange Plague was the fuel. She really speaks for all of us and I feel this tune is the first not just good, but ACCURATE Fuck Trump punk song I've heard. This was one of those gifts from the punk gods that just wrote itself. At the end of the jam, I just went, 'I don't think we're ever gonna write a shit song!' And to date, I am correct. We haven't."

"Tik Tok"

Jeff Ott: "Leda and I wrote this song first, on my birthday in 2023 on a piano. I can’t write metaphorical lyrics, but Leda does. The beauty of it is one short set of words can mean 8 billion different things to 8 billion different people. To me, it reflects on the sudden realization that I was 53 years old, not 24; and that I was in the process of walking away from nursing and back into music. My secret hope is that someone uses a snippet of the song as part of a TikTok filter that turns your face in the bird that comes out of a coo-coo clock."

Leda Gannon: "I had a few lines written that went with the feel of Jeff's music about time feeling like an island that's in the middle of everything else moving around us where we can only try to return to what makes us feel whole. I wrote more based on what I felt might be Jeff's perspective of what his life had been and was becoming, including past addiction and bridges we burn, losing people along the way, and always trying to return to where we ultimately belong."

"Spirits in the Rocks"

Leda Gannon: " It started as a tribute to my partner and band mate from Wire Graffiti of many years who passed in 2020 and was finished after Dave brought the music to the band after he just lost his father. It serves as an homage to the ancestors and horror from genocide we are currently witnessing in Palestine."

Dave Slaverave: "This one's heavy duty heart-wise. Thanks to the rest of the band for doing the lyrical lifting. I was in no place to do that myself. Should also add that it is a tribute to Native Americans who are generational victims of senseless slaughter and erasure. A tribute to senseless death en masse."

"Great!"

Jeff Ott: "Great started out as a small rectangle of paper I found on the ground in our practice space. One side had the word "GREAT." The other was blank and sticky, so I stuck it on the white board/set list. Someone decided it should be a song because it was on the set list, and viola. Besides there being many odd instruments on it, the engineer Bart Thurber told us later that the triangle previously belonged to Ginger Baker of Cream."

Dave Slaverave: "It's great."

"Oscar Grant Will Have His Revenge on Oakland"

Jeff Ott: "Originally this song had no words, except in the title, which was sufficient to convey the point. On the way to the studio, part way through recording the LP, it dawned on me that I could populate the songs with names of people whose murders by police I had done work on from Jerrold Hall, murdered by BART police in 1991, to a long list of killings in Sonoma County in the late 1990s, to my friend murdered by UC Police at UC Berkeley, to a few of the more recent national cases."

"At Such A Cost"

Leda Gannon: "It's about feeling completely defeated after that person who rushes in can’t really get past the dopamine high after the pedestal they put you on crashes down. 'Consume and discard' in relationships is a symptom of our times."

Dave Slaverave: "I wrote this music forever ago. My Armenian roommate is of course obsessed with System Of A Down. Not liking that band, I told her I could write an SOAD song immediately. She challenged me to prove it. And I did. The tune I wrote sounds metal as fuck on guitar, but goth on bass. So of course our singer ate it up and made it ours."

"Candy"

Dave Slaverave: "This is some lyrics Leda had laying around that Jeff suped up into a cute pop tune filleting the hubris of cute pop tunes dying to be on the radio and get famous. I generally hate most cute pop tunes, but that Wet Willy in the ear of them makes this a ton of fun. Our new drummer Phill Thee even says it's his favorite. It's one of mine too. Made even more rad that Jeff inserted some lyrics from his departed Fifteen compadre Lucky Dog for the outro. My secret hero worship was beaming when I learned that. I feel honored to shout the fuck out of them."

"Madness"

Leda Gannon: "This continues the theme from 'At Such A Cost.' Dave calls this The Cure song. I wrote a bookend to Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill.’ This is about running down the other side. The heart starting and stopping when it gets too intense."

Dave Slaverave: "I crapped this bass line out feeling like I need to contribute more in the height of my depression in 2023. I don't remember writing a lot of what I wrote actually, but it made up a lot of our songs. It sounds goth because I was quite sad. This is not a cry for help, I'm doing much better now thanks."

"Fast Lane"

Jeff Ott: "Leda wrote the lyrics about the accelerated pace of everything: traffic, production, consumption, cyber traffic, leading us to the current day in which we don’t have time to be humans."

Dave Slaverave: "When we were writing the music, I had the idea for an irregular song structure where it begins, middles, and ends with 3 completely different songs. It goes from a Black Flag ripoff, to a Descendents ripoff, to a structure I wasted on a previous band's excellent tune it eats me alive I didn't take with when I quit, so I repurposed it for this one. Mission accomplished."

"Gentleman Nation"

Leda Gannon: "This song uses ‘gentleman’ to represent the nation, the East and West coasts are his two ears where the concentration of educated liberals reside. This is about how he (our nation, the patriarchal, capitalist colonizer) has really fucked it all up."

Dave Slaverave: "Musically, this was pulled from our first proper jam in 2023. After my first 2 rehearsals, I was fully believing i'm gonna be fired any second cuz I couldn't play the bass and had nothing creative to give. I dropped this heavy groove thinking it sounded like a 'bassist' playing, hoping it'd work. Then Jeff added the Suicidal Tendencies sounding chorus and bam, we had our first song as a band. Knew I'd stick around after that."

"Twilight's Last Gleaming"

Dave Slaverave: "I bought a nifty new Fender P Bass to commit to this band (I'm a guitarist if you can't tell by my chord-strumming style, but when I arrived at rehersals and saw Jeff Fucking Ott was the guitarist I was like, 'Mmm, okay guitar is covered!' and committed to bass), and this was the first tune I busted out dicking around with it at home. Sent a recording of two basic parts to the band and Jeff and Leda immediately began fleshing it out gorgeously. It's about the end of the world from humanity's willful hands. My counting bit is from needing to remember parts for different changes when writing, but it matched the loss of time we have left so we kept it in. And I'm super happy I got to include some lyrics from my old band Boxcutters to close the tune. And extra super happy with the Pink Floyd tribute that bleeds it out."