Post-hardcore titans the Blood Brothers terraformed the contemporary punk landscape into new and exciting shapes. Co-vocalist Johnny Whitney’s new project, Evil Island, is in a similar vein, and he hopes that it will draw in their ever-expanding cult that started over two decades ago.
The Blood Brothers were planning reunion shows in late 2024 when they received a call from the Best Friends Forever Festival. Bright Eyes had to drop out of headlining the final day, and an offer was on the table. “We only had 48 hours to decide, and we hadn’t even started to prepare for the tour when they asked us. It was kind of touch-and-go whether or not we were going to make it,” says Johnny Whitney, who fronts his own project Evil Island, which also includes Cody Votolato and Mark Gajadhar from that band, along with Autry Fulbright II, formerly of OFF! and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, and Todd Weinstock from Glassjaw.
That triumphant performance at Best Friends Forever kicked off the reunion tour, and inadvertently, Evil Island. Decades after landmark records like …Burn Piano Island Burn and Crimes, the Blood Brothers are more popular than ever, something Whitney finds bittersweet.
“It felt great, seeing the larger crowds for the reunion shows,” Whitney notes. “I wish it had been that way when we were a band. We were always in this very weird space where we never really fit in anywhere, and we kind of had to forge our own path in a lot of ways because we didn’t really get a lot of helpful media attention. We were too weird for Warped Tour and too crazy and chaotic for indie rock. It is part of the charm of what we did.
“You know, it was very unexpected how Best Friends Forever turned out,” he continues. “I expected everybody would leave after the fucking Jesus Lizard played. I mean, following them seemed insane, and yeah, it was. From that moment until the end of the tour, every night I could not believe how many people were at the shows. People were even coming with their parents. We are now a multi-generational band.”
Seeing the legacy of the Blood Brothers, whose commercial success didn’t align with their critical acclaim, is validating for Whitney. “I’m not gonna lie, being in that band was a struggle for all of us. We sacrificed everything in terms of life plans to do it. We ended up very broke at the end of it. It felt shitty when we ended, and seeing that kind of impact 20 years later was incredible,” he says.
“We never really made that much money when we were around. It is always expensive to be in a band, and it means giving up everything–college, relationships, family time. If you do it for as long as we did, ten years, by the time you are done, you are like, ‘What the fuck did I do?’ It’s definitely amazing, but it comes at a cost.”
Evil Island was born from another disappointment for Whitney. He hoped it would mark the start of a new era for the Blood Brothers, but not everyone felt the same.
“We got done with the tour, and I expected that we would keep going, honestly. The reaction from everybody that came to the shows was so overwhelming. Every night I felt like we could write several more records of new material. It felt the way I always wanted it to. Then we found out shortly after the tour ended, when offers started coming in for festivals, that Jordan [Blilie] and Morgan [Henderson] just did not want to do anything more. And that was devastating for me. And I spent a couple months just feeling really depressed. How could I be the only one who wants to keep this going?” Whitney says.
Whitney contacted the other Blood Brothers, and Evil Island began to take form. “It just kind of organically came out of that. Started talking to Cody, who had a bunch of songs he’d been trying to do something with for a while. From March through May of last year, we just sent demos back and forth. I would record vocals over the songs he wrote. We came up with like 11 demos, and then got Mark on board. Coming out of the tour, I had so much creative energy that everything happened really, really fast and felt really, really great,” he says.
When it came time to record Evil Island’s debut, Ross Robinson, who recorded …Burn, Piano Island, Burn! was the obvious choice. “We’ve had a relationship with him for a really long time. I’ve always had so much gratitude for him because he basically found us in near obscurity and gave us a career by putting our band in front of people that could do things for us. He’s just such a kind, loving, and compassionate person, and so passionate, specifically so passionate about our bands,” Whitney says.
Whitney gives Robinson a lot of credit for helping them take the tracks he and Votolato wrote to the next level. “Ross really gets us. He knows what we’re trying to do, and what he adorns our music with is something we would not organically do ourselves. So I really wanted to see where that went with this group of songs. We brought him on board when we had all the demos, which were scrappier, shorter versions of the tracks on the finished record. The difference between the Evil Island record and …Burn, Piano Island, Burn! is that we let Ross be himself on this one. When we worked with him the first time, we were kind of elitist assholes, 19-year-old punk purist types. We didn’t let him loose like we did this time. He’s more like the fifth member of the band,” he says.
Robinson has a reputation for acting as much like a coach or counselor during recording, and Whitney credits this approach with getting the most out of the band. “What he really tried to do was just learn a little bit about what was going on in our lives at that very moment. And then every time we would track, he would try to get us in a headspace of pure emotional intention and struggle and passion by bringing up stuff that was going on,” he says.
Depending on how you look at it, Whitney was either the greatest beneficiary or the one who was put through the process the hardest. “Every single time I tracked vocals, it started with 35 to 40 minutes of talk therapy with us talking through the lyrics–what they were about, what I was thinking when I came up with them, how they have changed since I wrote them, and how I’m feeling about them now. All these songs are very meaningful to me. So there was a lot to talk about. And that got me into a very elevated headspace to do vocal tracking, just like getting really focused on everything. It was really helpful. I was going through a lot of personal problems when the record was coming out, and he was the person I talked to for the five months where we were making the record,” he says.
Whitney also set out to push himself as a lyricist. “In The Blood Brothers, I had this distinct aesthetic,” he notes. “I’m a visual person. A lot of my Blood Brothers lyrics are less about a theme or message and more about creating images, more like a tone poem. I free associated a lot of it, and then did a lot of editing to make it make sense. And that worked really well with Blood Brothers, because I was writing for me and Jordan. There is a lot of real estate that needs to be accounted for in a song when you have two singers. Now with Evil Island, I wanted to be able to do these songs live without an additional singer, and I also wanted to not carpet bomb every square centimeter of the song with singing. I tried to be very minimal; as it turned out, that was difficult for me.”
That also meant getting more personal, which was tough for him to do in his former band. “I was really uncomfortable sharing who I was at that time. That discomfort showed itself by just not really being able to write about anything that was going on in my life, or how I felt about my life, or how I felt about any of the struggles I had. It wasn’t an intentional block. It’s more like I just never got anywhere when I tried,” he says. “For Evil Island, I wrote a lot about people that I had met that year. I wrote a song about a friend who completed suicide shortly before the record writing started. I would have never really done those kinds of very personal things in Blood Brothers. And I really tried to take care to make them meaningful and also visually interesting at the same time.”
Earlier this year, Whitney partnered with pal Justin Pearson on the harrowing track “War’s Coming Home”. For Whitney, despite his overall exhaustion with life in America in 2026, it was important to do something. “We are on our own; there is nobody,” he opines. “No one in the government gives a fuck about us. It’s easy to just throw your hands up. That makes it easy for some artists to disassociate and just decide to write love songs, because fighting back doesn’t always do anything. I was a lifelong Democrat until this last election, where I sat it out because of genocide that’s happening in our name.”
The chilling line that lingers is, “Fake-ass G.I. Joe/I.C.E. war’s coming home.” “With that song, JP and I were working on some stuff for his band Planet B, and the hook just popped into my head. I wanted it to be kind of like Run-DMC, or so, like the way the vocal treatment is. It just worked really well. The lyrics are very sneering and mean. I really like that because it’s like a Gestapo of 40-year-old alcoholics that just got fired from Safeway. I mean, it’s so egregious and pathetic that all that is being ‘done in our name.’”
Taking a unique approach, Evil Island’s record release build-up has been a series of short, provocative, hilarious videos. In this environment, even with a name-brand previous project, it can be tough to stand out. “The thing about starting a new band is that it’s not as fun to play live material until you have a record out because nobody knows the songs. When we were talking about how we want to introduce Evil Island to everybody out there, getting out on the road and touring right away seemed like not the best use of our time. We, along with the label, came up with an idea to do four videos, which turned into five. It was a way to introduce these songs to people and do some world-building around the aesthetic.”
“I wrote the treatments for ‘Tiger Baby’ and ‘Animal’, and we worked with Patrick Lascu on those,” Whitney continues. “It was really fun creating this visual introduction to the band. I wanted ‘Tiger Baby’ to be kind of like The Real Housewives of Evil Island. I am a big Real Housewives fan, and I will not feel any shame for that. For ‘Animal’, I wanted to make it like a take on TikTok video culture in a very sneering, horrific way. It’s just been a fun way to show a different side of us. We would have never made those videos in Blood Brothers. They’re a little too unserious. I’ve really enjoyed letting that side of me come out and have fun with something like making videos. The one [‘T-Hexx’] with Guy [Picciotto from Fugazi] is definitely the best one. I am really excited for everybody to see it. It’s fucking insane,” Whitney says. This is the first recording Picciotto has sung on in two decades. He previously produced the final Blood Brothers record, Young Machetes.
As for the band name, it’s not what might come to mind instantly, nor was that the reason behind it. “We came up with the name from a list, and that’s pretty much it. Naming bands is somehow one of the hardest things in the world. I think I’ve only done it successfully once, with the band I did with Mark [Gajadhar] called Neon Blonde. I don’t really like any of the other band names we have come up with. It was just the one on the list that made the most sense. No connection to Epstein Island. It felt concise, short, and evocative. It sounds like the songs,” Whitney explains.
Along with the aforementioned Neon Blonde, Whitney has been in Head Wound City with Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Nick Blilie, Zinner and Pearson, as well as Jaguar Love with Votolato. Each is a different iteration of his signature band’s sound, and all are worth tracking down. Sadly, Whitney’s projects aside from the Blood Brothers don’t have the notoriety they should, despite the “Featuring Members of the Blood Brothers” sticker that surely adorned the shrink wrap. Whitney hopes the passage of time, along with the ever-expanding reverence for the Blood Brothers, makes Evil Island find some commercial success.
“I desperately hope that we can break out,” Whitney admits. “I’ve been through this before. Just trying to start a new project after being in a band like the Blood Brothers, who have a hardcore following, you are going to get, hopefully, half of those people to notice you, and then maybe half of those people just want you to do the thing they fell in love with. I think we have a better chance of bringing on people that love the Blood Brothers with this project because it sounds a lot more like Blood Brothers. I hope those people will be on board, come to shows, and have fun. To keep this project sustainable in this truly cursed time of lives that we live in, you just have to get more people on board.
“If it were up to me, this would be all I do for the rest of my life. I truly feel that this is the best record I’ve ever made. It was the most creatively gratifying experience of my life.”