Billed by sponsors Dromedary Records as “a celebration of indie rock by its great practitioners,” Dromfest, which will return for its third year in Catskill on Labor Day weekend, lives squarely up to that descriptor. Among others, the festival’s roster of 25 acts includes Wussy, Dumptruck, Come, Scrawl, Antietam, Nice Strong Arm, Barbara Manning, Doug Gillard of Guided By Voices, Hypnolovewheel, Sleepyhead, Beth Kaplan of Salem 66, Consonant, Karen Schoemer, Via, French/Cell, and Purple Ivy Shadows plus readings, art, and film. New York trio Antietam was formed in 1984 and their appearance at the fest coincides with the release of their new album on Dromedary, The Counting Game. I conversed with the band’s Tara Key (guitar, vocals) and Tim Harris (bass, vocals) by email ahead of the highly anticipated happening. Dromfest 2026 will take place September 4-6 at various venues in Catskill. Visit Dromedary-records.com for schedule and ticket information.
Peter Aaron: In light of the band’s history with Dromfest, your signing to Dromedary was clearly a natural move. This is Antietam’s 10th studio album and the first one you’ve made in nearly 10 years. Why so long between albums?
Tara Key: I would say we have settled into a reap-and-sow pattern of creating for the band, riffing and jamming without restraint. At some point it seems like it is time to corral a collection of sparks and make them into something coherent. Usually, sonics come first and those sounds suggest what the song is about and which words feel like a translation of that energy. We released a four-song EP in 2024, Pitch and Yaw. We had intended to release a series of EPs starting around 2019. But then the pandemic occurred and during that time, our beloved Louisvillian guitar wizard Wink O’Bannon passed away. His Majesty’s Request, released in 2021, was originally conceived by us as a secret project to help with his medical bills, and the charity-project record brings together a number of Wink’s friends covering some of his favorite songs, with Antietam mostly serving as house band. Lately I have been enjoying the idea of messing with time; musically, nothing is off the table just because it was started 30 years ago. At the same time, we were considering what jams might be the strongest contenders for The Counting Game, and I digitized 300 or so cassette tapes from nearly a half-century: all of our previous bands and Antietam at live gigs, rehearsals, and recording sessions.
Although Antietam formed in New York, you and Tim are originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and were both in the fantastic Babylon Dance Band (1978-1983), with Tara coming from an earlier pioneering local punk band, No Fun. What made you want to start punk rock in Louisville?
TK: I have a severe case of scoliosis, so my best friend was my guitar after the age of 15. I spent a lot of time in my room and very early on I developed a love of tracking tunes, using two tape recorders, reel to reels made for dictation, to bounce tracks and make overdubs. But it never occurred to me that I could be in a band considering the morass of “Dust in the Wind” and “Dreamweaver” that 1970s Louisville’s airwaves offered. Bands in Louisville were mostly blues-based or heavy rock and few women were involved. Then punk rock permission and art school created a fertile ground for me to actually play with other people, and me and my fellow painters at Louisville School of Art started No Fun. The act of interfacing, dialoguing with collaborators was intoxicating. We were all certainly aware of what was happening in New York and London, but there was something about the combination of where we were, Louisville being a unique place, the restlessness the ’70s had injected us with, the feeling that our slightly older brothers and sisters had gotten the exciting end of the stick during the late ’60s, and a growing unease with the politics we were stuck with that made it possible for shy girls like me to find a voice and disrupt.
Tim Harris: Peter, thank you for your kind words about the BDB. Stay tuned for both the Babylon Dance Band and No Fun as we sift through the archives and bring that era back to life! The Great Impulse swept across America, inspired certainly by New York and London, but taking its own lively form in Louisville, where all kinds of people piled into making the new music, from amateurs to women eschewing acoustic guitars for bass, drums, and electrics, to classical players lending violins and cellos to punk. Louisville as a city and as a musical hotbed is rich in straddling the borders between country (Pee Wee King, WINN), jazz and soul (Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Raney, Helen Humes, Kush Griffiths, WLOU), ’60s rock (WAKY, WKLO), and classical (the Louisville orchestra commissioning works from Ned Rorem, Eliot Carter, Martha Graham). So the punk rock scene prided itself on originality, from the BDB, the Blinders, and the Endtables to Your Food and Squirrel Bait to Slint and Rodan to Will Oldham and Tara Jane O’Neil. There’s just something in the water there!
You named the band after a Civil War battle. What was the inspiration behind that? I’ve always gotten the impression that you guys are a literate band; the Southern Gothic vibe of some of your songs. Are you history buffs as well? Is the name a conscious commentary on grappling with the North/South dynamic, or am I reading too much into it?
TH: A-ha! You are hinting at a couple of aspects of the name Antietam. D. Boon from the Minutemen (RIP) teased us that we weren’t very good Southerners, naming our band after the Northern name for the battle, rather than the South’s Battle of Sharpsburg. But the battle of Antietam itself is still the bloodiest day in American history, and, taking place about a year into the Civil War, it is significant as the day of moral reckoning when 4,000 or 5,000 casualties in a cornfield brought everyone to admit that the war was about slavery, not some other abstraction, such as states’ rights. So Lincoln put out the initial version of the Emancipation Proclamation the next day. And while many strands of our consciousness are Southern at heart, we would have been decidedly on Lincoln’s (another Kentuckian!) side.
TK: Yes, we are history buffs. However, when we needed a name with our first show at CBGB fast approaching, Wolf and Tim and I basically pointed at it in a book, dug it, and came in the back door about its significance, which seemed to dovetail nicely as time went on to describe the maelstrom we were creating.
Antietam has been a band for almost 45 years. What keeps you going, and what’s next for the group after this month’s Dromfest appearance?
TK: Man. I just don’t know what I would do without it. I am also a photographer and painter, and I am writing a book about my great-great aunt, a madam from the Gilded Age to the Depression. I love those pursuits, but having a collaborative way to express myself in conjunction with more solitary ventures is critical to what makes me tick. And particularly with [Harris and drummer Josh Madell]. I dig the combustion of the three of us together, the shorthand, and the camaraderie. And I actually think I am pretty good at what I do! There is still a magic to assembling a song, a communication, out of notes and squawks and keening wails and making a document of it, that is still my favorite thing to do. Plus I am a gear head, and I take great joy in honing that sound through new pedals and amps, continuing to evolve my sound and approach along with myself! I see it as a lifetime vector. Plus, one of my favorite times is immediately after we release a record when we just jam and thus the cycle begins again. I’m thinking…psychedelic rock?
TH: A friend who is a contemporary said he wrote an album about getting old, and then announced he was moving on to other things. The Counting Game is about both marking the passing of time and willfully ignoring the passage of time. Next up, please!
