A band whose members are split between Tijuana and Anza blends politics and humor into gritty garage-rock jams.
That band’s name? Apple Sex.
The band has become quite familiar within the desert’s music scene. Drummer Alex Cota remains in Tijuana, but brothers Arthur Gomez (guitarist/vocalist) and Edison Gomez-Krauss (bassist/vocalist) moved to Anza and became involved in Idyllwild’s music community. They’ve performed a few times at Audiowild Studios; Art Gomez contributed to Idyllwild Rocks Magazine; and the band also contributed a song to the Coachella Valley compilation album It Came From the Desert Vol. 3 (which, full disclosure, I produced).
Apple Sex released their latest studio album, Yuma Puma, on April 4. Tracked at Audiowild Studios, the 13-track epic explores numerous sonic experiences, as the band attaches their societal critiques to different genres such as relentless punk (“Stop Resisting”), danceable rock (“Some Boys”), surf pop (“Another Place to Party”) and others.
During a recent interview via Discord, the trio explained that the band’s name comes from family history.
“We were a cover band, and we had a completely different name, but we wanted to settle on something permanent,” Gomez said. “We were still playing covers, kind of mixing them with the original songs, but we needed a different band name, because we didn’t want to play with the cover band’s name. One day, while we were chatting about this, my father overheard us, and he told us the story about how one of his brothers, who had passed away in the ’70s, was a hippie kind of dude, and he wanted to play in a rock ’n’ roll band. He didn’t have a band himself, but he was a musician, and he had told my father … ‘I’m gonna make the greatest rock ’n’ roll band ever. It’s gonna be called Apple Sex.’ … When my father told us that story, we said, ‘We’ll take that name,’ and sometimes we’ll jokingly say we’re a ’70s band that never put out any music until the 2000s.”
As the years have gone by, the band has found deeper meanings in the ridiculous name.
“What (our uncle) kind of explained to our dad was that the name was a reference to knowledge,” Gomez-Krauss said. “Not just the sex; it was the apple of sex, of Adam and Eve, the one that takes you to a slightly higher plane. It’s a rebellion, of sorts, against the higher powers. That kind of resonates with the punk-rock element and the counterculture element that we want to always embrace, and I think there’s a lot of philosophy in our music. … To me, it’s that rebellion, that bite that shows you that you’re naked, that shows you you’re afraid, and makes you want to drive forward.”
Online, the Apple Sex members describe their sound as “psychedelic death rock,” but realistically, the band doesn’t know what their genre label should be.
“We’ve always struggled to find a place within communities,” Gomez-Krauss said. “We’ve always been too hardcore for alternative scenes, yet we’re still not punk enough for the mosh-pit crowd, so we’ve always kind of joked around, ‘What exactly are we?’ Vaguely, we are garage rock. Some people have said that we’re punks; we’ve been called educated hippies, and psychobilly. I don’t even know how we landed on (“psychedelic death rock”). … I don’t even know what death rock is.”
Yuma Puma is the band’s first album in six years; their last LP, New Cooler Weapons, came during the height of COVID in June 2020. Because of both distance and the pandemic, the trio used file-sharing to flesh out ideas for Yuma Puma.
“We had a Google Drive with the demos; we chose some songs, and we kind of polished them at a distance,” Gomez-Krauss said. “Everybody was getting familiar with the songs, and then Alex was able to come up here, and we just hashed them out.”
Apple Sex performed the songs physically together only a handful of times before tracking them.
“We tested them out once or twice in Idyllwild, and we just recorded them,” Gomez-Krauss said. “We really didn’t have the opportunity to play a lot of these songs (in person before that), which is the optimal way to really polish a tune. … One of the things that I think is beautiful about us is that we can still get together and do this.”
“I like to think all the songs are funny and political at the same time. There’s a sense of humor in how we comment about stuff politically or socially.”
Arthur Gomez
Themes of police brutality, trans acceptance and toxic nationalism are all over Yuma Puma, and the band said many of the lyrical ideas have been in the works for years.
“A lot of these songs were written in 2024, and even before,” Gomez-Krauss shared. “I wrote ‘Stop Resisting’ in 2015 when Eric Garner got choked out by a cop (in 2014), before George Floyd. It’s pre-Trump era, basically.”
Apple Sex’s songs dish hilarious insults to transphobes—“Some y’all need to get a life and shut the fuck up,” for example—and use humorous voices and frames to comment on serious societal issues.
“I like to think all the songs are funny and political at the same time,” Gomez said. “There’s a sense of humor in how we comment about stuff politically or socially. There’s a song in there that I wrote about depression, and I wrote it in what I think is a kind-of funny way as well.”
Gomez-Krauss said the track list of Yuma Puma was ordered to correlate to the struggles in today’s world.
“‘American Means’ is very arrogant American, and ‘Joke’s on You’ is like, ‘Get out of my way,’” he said. “Then it devolves into the society where your freedoms start eroding, and we have ‘Stop Resisting’ and ‘No One Gives a Shit About Your Band.’ After the erosion of your freedoms and your liberty, depression comes. ‘Yuma Prison,’ you’re locked in this cell, and then ‘All Out of Rock ’n’ Roll’ is more depression. Ultimately, there’s this realization that you can fight this with ‘Dark Side of the Room,’ and even though you’re in this corner, you can get out. ‘For the System’ is sort of the culmination of it. We can fight it, but ultimately, we’re just going in circles.”
Apple Sex’s lyrics are usually abstract, rather than mentioning specific situations.
“That way, you can stay timeless,” Gomez-Krauss said. “I recently played at a No Kings rally with Jonny Miller, and we played ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’ by Country Joe and the Fish. We swapped the word ‘Vietnam’ for ‘Iran,’ and the song just made sense. That one’s a 60-year-old song, and it still makes sense to this day, because they’re very American struggles. I think police brutality will always exist; American arrogance will always exist; homophobia and discrimination will always exist. If you stay away from direct timeline references, these things can resonate for generations to come.”
The band members wear their culture on their sleeve, including Spanish lyrics across their catalogue, and switching between English and Spanish on “All Out of Rock ’n’ Roll.”
“We need to embrace that, and especially now that we’re playing more in the U.S., we’re bringing our culture with us, so I would like to promote more multi-language, especially when you have some prudes complaining about, ‘Oh, they’re not singing in English,’” Gomez-Krauss said. “We’ll do a whole fucking album in Spanish just to piss those people off.”
Cota, who didn’t say much during the interview, provided an interesting perspective on the importance of culture in the band’s songwriting.
“When Edison and Arthur were living in Mexico, they were writing songs about what they were living through their current, political, social lives,” Cota said. “Much of the writing is about what’s going on right now. It doesn’t go deep into the past—we’re speaking of where we are at the moment. Sometimes it’s personal; sometimes it’s about family. We are kind of pushed into being in the U.S.A. for the circumstances right now, so we’re writing with this mentality, and we’re kind of doppelganging a bit. If we were somewhere else, I’m pretty sure we would be writing about what’s going on there at the moment.”
Learn more at instagram.com/applesexsux.
