It’s just before 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday night and red lights beat fast against the upstairs stage at Slipper Clutch. Acidtrain, aka Ryein Evan, has just launched into “Delulu,” a song, he says to the crowd, that’s about the billionaire class.
It’s the day after 36,000 people turned up for Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy event at Grand Park, just a few blocks away from this downtown club. Plus, “fuck billionaires, fuck Trump” has been the general theme of club conversations for months, so “Delulu” is a good fit for the moment. The frenetic beat and a squelchy synth sound that comes and goes throughout the song captures the vibe of downtown Los Angeles. Evan dances and bounces across the stage, growling lyrics like, “what’s this obsession with cultivating wealth?”
This is only the second time that Evan has played “Delulu” live. He debuted it less than a week earlier at Harvard & Stone in East Hollywood. “I’ve been very uncertain about that song,” he says on a video call two days later. “I was very hesitant to play it for a while.” Mainly, he acknowledges, it’s because the song is still so fresh that he’s had trouble remembering all the lyrics. “I don’t want to play a song where I’m forgetful of the words that I’m writing because I want to get the message out,” he says.
Evan, who grew up in Ventura County and is now based in L.A., has been actively playing around Southern California as Acidtrain for several years. In fact, the first time we sat down for an interview was close to two years ago, around the release of his EP Disco Lights, at a show at the now-defunct Oracle Tavern. But, Evan has been making music a lot longer than that.
Initially, he played in rock groups. During this interview, Evan repped one of his favorite bands with his t-shirt, the New York Dolls. “I wanted to be like Johnny Thunders, with the guitar playing and everything like that,” he says. “I wanted to emulate them as much as I could.”
When he first began experimenting with Acidtrain, Evan was making long, drone-y pieces influenced in part by some of his other favorite artists like Broadcast, Spaceman 3 and Suicide. “I have recordings somewhere, but I’ll probably never actually do anything with them,” he says of this early era. “They’re in the archive somewhere.”
Evan returned to Acidtrain during the pandemic, which is when the music evolved into the synthpunk sound that he plays today. “When COVID happened, I was actually able to focus on it and figure out how to make intros and choruses and verses and builds and add layers and stuff like,” he says.
Post-pandemic, Evan began performing as Acidtrain. Early on, he played live with his guitar as well, but, these days, he mainly sticks to his laptop and synth. “Main reason, I just like to dance around and get engaged and stuff like that. Playing the guitar, I’m kind of limited to that,” he says. “In some shows, I was just having trouble hearing everything, like maybe the guitar was too loud or I couldn’t hear in the monitor. It’s a lot all at once.”
Acidtrain’s most recent release was last year’s extended version of his full-length album, Lilith. The title track is one he plays at every show. “To me, it feels like I’m doing a summoning for Lilith,” Evan says. “I do it at every show just because I’m trying to reach an upper eshelon of something that’s greater than ourselves.”
Evan, who also runs the cassette label Love Shine Records, has three EPs tentatively planned for release this year, one of which will include “Delulu.” Although he only recently began playing it live, the song has had a long gestation period.
“I actually was stuck on this song for a few months. I had written the melody and everything and I was like this is fucking cool,” Evan says. “A lot of the tones you hear in the song are by accident. There are some weird, atmospheric things going on and, when I was creating it, they kind of just appeared and I was like what is this noise that’s coming from this? So, I just left it in, but it works.”
The lyrics, though, were another story. “Normally, when I write songs, lyrics come to me really quick. I’m able to just write things out in maybe a day or two, if that,” says Evan. “I was spending months on these lyrics just because I wanted it to be right. So there are multiple variations.”
The words started to click, though, around the time of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime performance. “I got really inspired by that,” Evan says. “It was really profound and on the world’s grand stage, he’s doing this to showcase all this fuckery that is going on in America right now.”
The title, “Delulu,” is slang for delusional, “which is this administration,” Evan adds. The menacing delivery of the phrase, “I’m God,” is in reference to the billionaire class acting as if they’re gods.
Evan has written political songs in the past, but hasn’t released them all that often. Now, he says, his songwriting is veering in that direction. He says, “The inspiration comes and I just go with the flow of it.”
Catch Acidtrain live on April 29 at The Escondite in Little Tokyo and on June 13 at Transplants Brewing Company in Palmdale. Listen to Acidtrain on Spotify or Bandcamp. Love Shine Records releases are available on Bandcamp.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram for more updates.
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