Gang Of Youths’ Joji Malani Opens Up About Leaving The Band
"I was pigeon-holed as just being a guitarist and I never saw myself like that."
Former Gang of Youths guitarist Joji Malani has spoken about his unexpected — but amicable — decision to leave the band last year.
The band announced last October that Malani, a close friend of frontman Dave Le’aupepe who’d been with the band for eight years, would be playing his last show on October 11 in Oklahoma City.
“He’s lovingly given eight years (practically the bulk of his 20s!) to this project, and a few months ago made the tough decision to leave GOY and move on into the next phase of his professional life,” the band announced on Facebook at the time. “Eight years is a long time for any job, and we are so grateful to have had him for as long as we did.”
In a new interview with Sosefina Fuamoli for triple j Malani opened up about his decision to leave the group, saying that he felt a little pigeon-holed as “just being a guitarist” and needed to explore his larger musical ambitions.
“If I wanted to make ambient noise-rock stuff, I could have stayed in Gangs and have done that too. It was another part of why I felt I had to leave, I was pigeon-holed as just being a guitarist and I never saw myself like that,” he told Fuamoli. “I love playing guitar, but I have the same feeling when I play stuff on piano and when I sing. It’s not something unique to my affinity with the guitar.”
“Just because something’s a really good set up, if there’s that yearning, you’ve gotta scratch that itch.” he continued. “I’m an adventurous person, sometimes it’s gotten me in trouble, but I have to see how far things lead.”
He added that he felt like he was “going through the motions” on stage with the band, and that his ambitions didn’t line up with values and thrust of the group.
“The whole notion of Gang of Youths is so big and ambitious, right?” he explained. “Dave is a huge personality and the songs explore some vast ideas, big topics. None of the other members are complacent at all but for me it was like, ‘If I’m gonna give off this air of living this lifestyle or projecting this idea where I have huge ambition, but I really don’t?’ It felt wrong. It felt like I was going up there and going through the motions. I’m like, ‘I do have big ambition, but it’s not within this’.”
Malani adds that Dave “summed it up perfectly” in the Facebook post announcing his departure. “Just like in any other workplace, someone might have worked in a job for a while and they might just want to go and work somewhere else,” he explains.
Since leaving the group, Malani has written and recorded two albums’ worth of material under his solo moniker Pei and started his own record label, Broth Records.
“The album is me indulging in my alternative 2000s/2010s favourite artists,” he says of his debut album as Pei.0 “Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Wilco…Phoenix is in there. There’s Deerhunter-y stuff, Walkmen and Marnie Stern. I love Marnie Stern. There’s electronic elements but the core of everything is very organic sounding.”