Stefan Doke puts his back into the making of new Forever Strange EP

The music of Forever Strange thrives on forward momentum, built on racing shreds of guitars, relentlessly propulsive drums, and singer/guitarist Stefan Doke’s vaguely sneering vocals. And yet, both of the band’s EPs have been preceded by prolonged stretches of forced stillness, the first surfacing a year after Covid introduced a near-global lockdown and the new EP 2 arriving roughly two years after a severe spinal cord injury led to Doke undergoing surgery and an extensive rehab process.

“I had a ruptured disc that smashed my spinal cord,” said Doke, who first thought he had pulled a muscle in his back until he visited a chiropractor who recognized the injury and told him to proceed directly to the ER. “And they did the surgery, and pulled the disc and all this stuff out, and then I had to do a ton of physical therapy. And I felt like we were building momentum with what we were doing, and then that happened, and I didn’t really do anything for basically a year.” (Or at least anything overly physical; Doke became a new parent some months into his recovery and is now father to an 18-month-old daughter.)

These life changes and the passage of time have combined to draw out new perspectives on the trio of songs Doke penned for the new Forever Strange EP, which he said collectively reflect the stress that he felt navigating that social and political moment – feelings that have only intensified under this current administration. “They’re still applicable to these times, and it still feels like things are falling apart,” said Doke, who will join bandmates Dennis Tanner (guitar), Marko Skugor (bass), and Jake Smith (drums) in celebrating the album release at Rambling House on Saturday, Feb. 28, supported by Wax Teeth and Brian Damage. “And I think that’s why we ended these three songs with ‘Everything’s Cool,’ trying to make it more of a ‘hey, everything’s gonna be fine’ type of ending where the rest of the songs are a little bit darker.”

This includes the album opening “Everybody’s Dyin’,” which Doke said he wrote during the emotional low that followed the death of a lifelong friend and the passing of two dogs, one to an unexpected stroke and another who had to be put down a couple of months later after reaching the age of 16. “And before we had kids, dogs were our total life,” Doke said. “So there was just this ominous feeling, and there were all of these things going on that I couldn’t control or do anything about.”

Prior to forming Forever Strange, Doke had never really written songs or fronted a band, previously content to hang to the side of the stage, contributing guitar to groups such as Comrade Question and local pummelers Garbage Greek, with whom he still plays. As a result, Doke said he tended to obscure his presence within his earliest Forever Strange songs, either fudging lyrical details to create a distance between himself and the song’s narrator or purposely burying his vocals in layers of noise. As time has progressed, however, the singer’s voice has moved closer to the fore, and he’s become increasingly content allowing aspects of his life to bleed in and shape the lyrics.

“At Relay [Recording], when you go into the live room, everything is complete silence and they want you to sing really loud to get the takes, and everyone can hear it isolated in the control room, which used to be really stressful to me,” Doke said. “And now I’m like, it’s fine. … It’s forced me to be more confident about things.”

In a way, Doke’s evolution into a frontman and a songwriter mirrors the expansive view he has taken of music since he first picked up a guitar as a teenager, describing the feeling that overtook him in that moment as an innate awareness that he had stumbled onto his path. 

“The first time I played guitar, it was really just like, ‘This is for me,’” he said. “And even now I feel like I’m still expanding, whether it’s learning more about mixing or recording, or getting better at writing, or just trying new things and spending time with my friends and trying to make something I think is cool, and that other people might think is cool, and that stretches my brain in creative ways. … I’m 36 now, and I played in my first band at 15, and I think the only thing that has changed is my ambition. … When I was younger, we toured a lot, and we were always applying to festivals and trying to do as much as we could with it. And I still try to do as much as I can with it in this capacity. But whether it is or isn’t popular in whatever kind of specific way, I don’t care as much now. … It’s almost like, why would a painter keep painting if nobody buys their paintings? And I’ve just gotten to the point where the answer can be because I like painting.”