35 Quotes by Ben Hopkins

It's our responsibility to cater to the needs of people who come and enjoy our work who have the same values we do. We're not trying to change the world. We're just sort of trying to deal with our specific lens of performance.

For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'

I think that our work and our music stands on its own without this knowledge about our identity around it. But I also think that we very consciously decided not to hold back that part of ourselves, but to be very vocal about who we are, kind of what experiences we've had in life, and how we identify.

I'd say, at the end of the day, you know, from a songwriting practice standpoint, you write songs to make yourself feel something true and validating, and cathartic, maybe, and then whoever responds to it is, like, out of your control.

I think the earnestness of what we're saying and what other bands like us are totally saying - or other queer bands - is 'We exist.'

You can't deny who you are, so you might as well be yourself in the most authentic way.

When you're a queer person put in the spotlight, you're supposed to have all the answers.

We're not writing songs to solve a cultural problem. The goal for us is to express what we're going through, and it's great if people find commonality in that.

I'm in a car so much on tour that I often just ask my friends to DJ and ask them what they like. That's the best way I discover music.