Culture Wars: Ten years in, just getting started
Ten years of “throwing shit at the wall”. One debut album. And a frontman who still can’t quite believe any of it is real.
Photo: Press
Alex Dugan has been to a lot of casinos. Baccarat in Macau. Blackjack across Japan. He’s familiar with the Wynn in Boston and already knows the distance from the venue in Singapore to the MBS. As frontman of Austin rock five-piece Culture Wars, planning a tour involves two spreadsheets — one for the shows, one for the tables. Playing The Garage in London next month, he has already clocked the one in Mayfair. “Hypothetical drinks on that,” he laughs.
It is, on the face of it, a strange habit for someone who checks ticket sales at midnight and describes life post-album as existing like “a horse with blinders on.” The same brain that colour-codes a tour itinerary will also happily put it all on black. What that says about him, he doesn’t volunteer.
“I’m always business-oriented,” he says. “Like, what do we have to do today to keep driving? It’s almost like a battle stations thing.” His songs, though, have other ideas.
(Tokyo), from the band’s debut album Don’t Speak, started in a hotel room on the Maroon 5 Asia run — the night after they’d played Tokyo Garden Theatre to ten thousand people. After dinner somewhere he remembers only as ‘Hero’s’, everything he’d spent a decade working toward was right there in front of him — and all he could think about was his wife back home.
He picked up his acoustic guitar not knowing what was coming. “I sang the chorus and I understood what I was saying when I did it,” he says. “And so that made me immediately very sad. I knew what I was doing once it came out of my mouth — but I wasn’t like, let me write a song about how I’m sad. I just didn’t know I was.”
Heaven— a hypnotic, churning track built around a bassline that barely lets up — came out of being stranded in Australia during COVID, chasing the woman he’d eventually marry. At the time, it didn’t feel like anything that clear. “I was like, what am I doing here?” he says. “Other than enjoying Australia.” Only afterwards did it land. “Oh yeah,” he shrugs. “That makes sense. That’s what that was.”
Typical Ways — two minutes thirty-nine of what he describes as an angry letter to his former self — was written with bassist Dillon Randolph in 2019, shelved for four years before they took it on the road, where it worked on every audience it met. Five million streams later, Dugan knows what it was doing. “It was a way of going back to that 2019 version of myself in Austin and letting them know my instincts were right,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing. That was the problem.”
Performing them live now asks something different of him entirely. “I almost disassociate a little,” he says. “It’s like going limp like a car crash and letting yourself sing it.”
For a long time, he thought you needed chaos to get there. Early sessions were built around it — an Airbnb, heavy drinking, no real plan. “Probably the most unproductive fucking thing I could have done,” he says now. “I think I was just avoiding sitting and doing the work.”
There’s not much room for that version of things anymore. “I can’t really drink for shows now — it fucks with my voice,” he laughs. “And I can’t really drink after the show because it gives me reflux and then that fucks with my voice.”
Then COVID arrived, the touring stopped, and there was nothing left but an acoustic guitar he hadn’t touched in years — sober. Sitting with it. “It Hurts came from that. Heaven too,” he says. A pause. “Miley only worked drunk.”
When people call Culture Wars an industry plant — and they do, given the band’s jump to arena support slots and 44 million Spotify streams — Dugan finds it genuinely funny. “I think that’s the greatest compliment you could possibly have. There’s no way. And I’m like, yeah. Ten years later, there is a way.”
“We kept throwing shit at the wall,” he says. “Eventually something stuck.”
The band’s been around, in some form, since 2015 — different lineups, different names, nothing quite sticking while the mileage builds quietly in the background. Their drummer, David Grayson, who Dugan has known since they were both bartending in Austin, still isn’t entirely sure any of it’s real.
Last year they did three months across four continents — opening for Banners, The Cult and LANY across Asia, before heading through Australia with Amy Shark. Somewhere around the halfway mark, Dugan realised he wasn’t present for any of it. “I felt myself taking this for granted,” he says. “I felt like my performance was suffering.” What he hadn’t quite realised was how much the songs meant to other people.
At the sold-out London show, he didn’t quite believe people were singing the lyrics back at him until he pulled one in-ear out. “It just hadn’t happened before,” he says. “I could see mouths moving, but I’m like, maybe they’re just singing along in their heads.”
“Even then I was like, if I’m wrong, I’m looking like an asshole,” he says, laughing. “And I put the mic out, and sure enough they knew every word.”
He’d been at the first night of Oasis’ reunion in Cardiff a few months earlier and assumed that’s just how UK crowds worked. His agent put him straight. “Not on a Thursday. Not like that.”
“You always have this idea that one day you’re going to get the big call where they go, ‘You made it,’ and the movie ends,” he says. “That never fucking happens.”
Culture Wars’ debut album Don’t Speak is out now on AWAL. Catch them on their UK and European tour this June and July – and if you’re over 18, maybe at a local casino too.
