Few bands embody punk’s radical spirit of resilience like Street Eaters. On their latest album Opaque, the Bay Area trio — Megan March (drums/vocals), John No (bass/vocals), and Joan Toledo (guitar) — fuse raw political urgency with deeply personal narratives. The record brims with cathartic energy: rage against systems that fail us, grief transformed into sound, and a relentless insistence on finding joy and community through the noise.
In our conversation with the band, Megan speaks candidly about the trauma and transformation of childbirth and how it shaped the album’s themes, John reflects on the enduring necessity of chosen family and punk lineage, and Joan articulates how catharsis, solidarity, and experimentation keep Street Eaters’ music vital in 2025.
What emerges is a portrait of a band not just writing songs, but creating anthems for survival — confronting despair head-on and stitching wounds into resistance.
Street Eaters Interview
Answers by:
Megan March (drummer/vocalist)
John No (bass/vocals)
Joan Toledo (guitarist)
- Megan, you’ve described childbirth as both a traumatizing and transformational experience, one that shaped Opaque. How did that paradox — being dehumanized by a system while experiencing the joy of becoming a mother — find its way into the album’s sound and lyrics?
Megan: You’re right, the experience was a paradox, and I like that you chose that word because while it suggests a binary, it leaves a spectrum in between. The process of writing this record gave me a chance to examine various aspects of what happened from different perspectives that are endlessly complicated, and I’m comfortable with that reality. Emotions aren’t good or bad, they are complex and messy, and it took me a while to understand that what happened to me was symbolic of that. The lyrics in “Escalating Interventions” speak to needing help while under a system of power, and the build up of one thing after another going wrong until you feel like you’ve fallen for an unavoidable trap, or through the cracks as planned. There is a profound betrayal in realizing the health system is set up to fail in many instances, putting profit before care. In “Spectres” I reference the ghosts that haunt us, whether it be ourselves or fears of the past or future, and our need for community (or our stronger selves) to “hold the candle” as a symbol of resistance. After both me and the baby survived the birth, we had to choose to move through it in some capacity in order to survive. This was a conscious decision to fight, and not just survive but thrive. So while the experience was harrowing and echoed the abandonment I experienced from my own homophobic mother disowning me, we have a unique bond that is beautiful and understandably resilient. As a side note, even though these lyrics were inspired by my own lived experience, I’m also aware of many relevant parallels in various types of structural abandonment and inherent meanness we are all witnessing in our country presently with the steady rise of fascism.
- The video for “Tempers” captures you tearing apart a hospital waiting room. Was that scene born more from personal rage, political frustration, or both? And how do you translate that intensity into your live shows?
Megan: There is a justified frustration with a system failing those it should protect, and perhaps politeness never worked. It’s time to tear up the room. Both personal rage and political frustration is definitely the underlying vibe… and I think when we play live we harness that frustration to find catharsis and joy. The three of us have been through our own shit, and are also trauma-bonded together so there is a deep kinship and understanding.
John: The video originally had a bunch of other scenarios in it that supplemented the main action, but Krista and Theo realized that we were making a pretty full display of wild assness by just filming us smashing things up. It was cathartic for sure. An endless supply of fresh popcorn from our Orville Redenbacher air popper helped.
Joan: It’s really easy to succumb to despair. Practically every leftist or radical has done so in the last several years, as we continue to witness genocide in Palestine, Sudan, and other places around the world. People have tried and failed with many different tactics to disrupt or destroy the war machine, and the end result continues to be murder. This is a daunting task to face, and it is altogether too easy to feel powerless. People need catharsis to overcome despair, and we need it too for the various systemic pressures we’ve felt on ourselves on top of the ongoing genocide. And what greater catharsis is there than making a bunch of noise with your friends?
- Street Eaters has always carried a strong sense of kinship, but with Joan Toledo joining — and given both Joan’s and Megan’s experiences with rejection from family — how has the band itself become a form of chosen family?
John: I had far less painful experiences in my own family growing up, other than some unavoidable life tragedies, but both of my parents were themselves the products of abusive and difficult circumstances when they were younger and were both committed to not replicating that. They were also social/cultural radicals who had many close friends who were absolutely chosen family, often those who were excommunicated from their own blood families for just being who they are. I am still as close to several of these elders as I am with blood family; so the whole idea of chosen family is instinctive to me.
Joan: There are so many people who have to think about care outside of structures imposed on us by Western society. The biological family fails many people time and time again – not just queer people, but disabled people and others face rejection and abuse. It’s super common in lefty circles and in punk for people involved to provide alternative structures and support for any number of reasons: government repression, addiction, and, yes, bigotry. And I’m thankful every day for those around me, including my bandmates, who help me get by. In my head I often still feel like a shaky kid freaked out by the possibility of punishment from my family or society at large, and having support from others is the only thing that keeps this mental hellscape at bay.
- You’ve said Opaque feels like “suturing up wounds.” Do you see this album more as a closing chapter of pain, or as the start of something new and possibly more hopeful for the band?
Megan: Honestly, I think Opaque is already hinting at something hopeful, but not naively. Pain doesn’t go away just because it’s passed, it can become numb, or just hibernate. Likewise, healing isn’t linear; it’s more like a spiral or a ball of rope.
John: I definitely want to back up the sentiment that healing isn’t linear, and nor is healing itself painless. While life obviously isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) just a constant trajectory of careening from injury to injury, the events and experiences in our lives that deeply affect us never really disappear from our emotional selves. We have an ever-changing dialogue with ourselves in our lives, and events that seemed long ago buried might suddenly become very relevant again when circumstances change. Life is long and complex and often beautiful, and the experience of wrangling with pain is an inextricable part of that.
Joan: Opaque feels like fresh buds in spring, in which nature pokes its head up after a long season with submerged growth. We spent years playing around with these songs, letting different musical ideas and emotions blossom as they may. It’s tempting to imagine that spring could last forever, especially as summer rolls around and life grows a bit wild. But time is cyclical, and seasons affect almost every plant. We’ll have to see how these ideas and themes develop from here.
- Critics often connect your music to bands like Wipers, Gang of Four, and Dead Kennedys, yet your approach feels uniquely modern. Do you see Street Eaters as carrying on a lineage of radical post-punk, or are you more focused on reinventing that spirit for today’s fractured world?
John: It’s 2025, there’s lots of vinyl but everything is also online, so chronology is flat, yeah? We obviously all have some pretty deep fondness for music that was mostly made before we were born haha. And yeah we love that stuff but also Bowie and the Pink Fairies and Nina Simone, and if you really scratch the surface most of our riffs are somewhere between early Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath because that is literally anyone who plays a psych/heavy/punk riff. And just like everybody else who will never admit it, we have done our homework and read old Nirvana interviews and looked at what t-shirts Kurt Cobain was wearing because he had impeccable taste. That said, we also love loads of very original contemporary/current music made by artists that are inspired by the oeuvre of post-punk and innovative punk-affiliated bands you mentioned, as well as the generation of artists before that (90s, early aughts, etc) who also built amazing new sounds on those specific foundations. So I guess post-post-punk and post-post-post-punk? Whatever, as long as it fucks and speaks to what we feel.
We are 100% music nerds, music is way more than background noise for us, and when we get into an artist or album we absolutely deconstruct it and listen over and over. Plus since we all have experience in the music analysis/journalism/curation side of things (Megan has a degree in music from Mills, Joan was a content editor at MaximumRockNRoll, John has helped run multiple independent record labels), we will often follow up on our music deep dives by devouring every piece of journalism, books and video etc that we can find on artists we obsess over. Then we try real hard to meet them. You know, classic rock fan shit.
Joan: Some of the best post-punk records were all about incorporating sounds from outside of punk into a distinctly DIY situation. Look at Odyshape by the Raincoats or Second Edition by PIL. These records reflect a sort of melting pot of cultures that existed around these bands, in particular from Black populations in England. We don’t totally work the same way as a lot of those bands, in that so far there’s little actual incorporation of key concepts from non-punk music, but there are a lot of musical ideas that we tweak and work with. The most obvious example on Opaque is definitely “I See You Now” which feels in part like it pulls from psychedelic music and even aspects of perhaps jazz. But most of the time our way of incorporating non-punk ideas is more discreet.
An unusual example in our context is that I am very into folk music, and have spent a chunk of time writing music that is fingerpicked. Now, there’s very little actual folk music, if any, represented in our sound. But there is a tangible effect in my guitar playing that I cannot totally separate from even my punkier ideas. The result of this is that I tend to be regularly hitting open strings and looking for ways to inflict slightly more complex chords on others, which is something you’ll see show up in a lot of classic bands like Big Boys, Mission of Burma, or Sonic Youth.
There are going to be more ideas pulled from outside of punk showing up in future music we make, and this has already shown up in our current live shows. John has cobbled together a weird tool out of a drill that he uses to create wild sounds on his bass, and Megan frequently will improvise with ideas taken from the experimental scene. There are a lot of potential paths we can pursue with music, and odds are good, given the wide range of music we love, you’ll probably unknowingly hear something pulled from Turkish psych or gamelan. We don’t feel compelled to pursue one distinct style besides ourselves, whatever the hell that may be.
Check out “Tempers” below: