Meet Ethan Stafford

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ethan Stafford a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ethan, so happy you were able to devote some time to sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our community. So, we’ve always admired how you have seemingly never let nay-sayers or haters keep you down. Can you talk to us about how to persist despite the negative energy that so often is thrown at folks trying to do something special with their lives?

For me it’s a simple matter of being impervious to embarrassment but also being open to constructive critique. When I started Sinclair Noire, I was throwing paint on the wall with sounds of the records I really liked, which included Killing Joke’s “Night Time”, Skinny Puppy’s “Rabies”, and Bauhaus’ “Mask”. I never wanted to copy anyone else’s style, and I didn’t understand the idea of making anything derivative of strictly industrial, gothic rock, or post-punk. People are always going to find reasons they think you’re too audacious, or project an idea that you’re delusional in your grittier moments. But that’s where all of our most robust creations come from: limitations. Limitations make better music, better videos, better works of art.

What keeps me fighting every day is knowing that the work itself is the response. Every song, every video, every choice to lean into tension instead of smoothing it out is the real conversation. I don’t feel the need to defend the rough edges, because they’re deliberate. I treat dissent as part of the feedback loop, not a verdict. The truth is, being underestimated has a kind of alchemy to it; it frees you to take risks others wouldn’t dare. So I persist by staying in dialogue with the work, not with the noise around it. Let the haters underestimate. That’s when you’re most dangerous.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m the vocalist and frontman behind several bands that live in the more shadowed corners of post-punk, industrial, and avant-rock: Sinclair Noire, Th3 L3P3rs, and Most Modern. Each project explores a different facet of identity, decay, beauty, and confrontation. I love that all of them have architecture built from noise, poetry, and lived emotional residue.

Sinclair Noire is my most personal vessel. We released our debut EP Youthfully, Truthfully, Fiendish in 2023, a raw statement of intent. It’s unfiltered, romantic, and rhythmically fractured. Our first full-length LP, Bone Orchard, released in February 2025. It’s an excavation of everything that haunts and galvanizes us, recorded in a single weekend at Wall of Fog Records. This record feels like a culmination of the aesthetic I’ve been chasing: where brittle vulnerability, sensual tension and political dissent collide with abrasive textures.

We’ve been bringing our latest album Bone Orchard to life on stage this summer with a series of shows in Texas:

June 20 at Axelrad, Houston, TX

June 27 at Elysium, Austin, TX

July 12 at RIP Coffee, Austin, TX

August 23 at Black Magic Social Club, Houston, TX

With Th3 L3P3rs, the ethos is more chaotic and visceral. It’s less reflection and more explosion. We dropped our EP Tragic Blondes earlier this year, a wiry, convulsive blend of glam scuzz and post-apocalyptic sarcasm. It’s a band born out of a desire to reject the pristine, revel in the erotic, and embrace distortion, both sonically and thematically. Our EP was featured in the latest press, including Post-Punk.com and Electrozombies.

Most Modern is a stylized, conceptual project. It’s paranoid disco combined with coldwave melancholia, sleek yet frayed. Right now, we’re releasing ultra-limited edition vinyl singles: Acid Rain and Broken Glass, available exclusively at live shows. These serve as a prelude to our debut LP due later this year. You can catch us live on July 5 at Elysium (Austin, TX) playing alongside Blood Orchid and Dread Risks.

At the center of all this is a refusal to dilute or play into trends. Each band I front explores different tones, but the mission is always the same: to build something unignorable, emotionally risky, and sonically physical. I want to create work that people can’t look away from, even if they don’t yet know why.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Balance was the first hard lesson. Creative momentum often gets mistaken for always being “on,” but that leads straight to burnout. I had to learn how to sit with lethargy without mistaking it for failure. There’s an art to knowing when to push and when to pause. If you’re not pacing yourself, you’re not preserving the part of you that makes the work worth doing in the first place.

Drive is what keeps things moving when inspiration isn’t enough. It’s a daily challenge to split your focus between creating, promoting, and making sure the work actually reaches people, especially when you’re asking them to support you directly through album sales or physical releases. No one’s going to care more than you do. The discipline to follow through, especially when things feel thankless, is what separates a fleeting project from a sustainable path. Too many artists burn out because they don’t blow up on social media. But the cult bands we revere from the 1980s and 1990s didn’t have that tool either, and they were relentless to build it anyways.

Authenticity is non-negotiable. If you’re not embodying something you truly believe, it shows. Listeners, especially in underground and alternative communities, can smell inauthenticity a mile away. That fear of being too weird, too raw, too much? That fear dilutes the work. The best art I’ve made came when I stopped asking for permission and just let the sound speak with its own voice. There’s a new video I have coming out for Sinclair Noire’s single “Nü Crime”, and it’s a video where I tap into my theatrical sensuality and shadow masculine.

For anyone early in their journey: don’t aim for perfection, aim for truth. Make space for rest without guilt. Build your stamina like anyone else would. And never betray your instincts just to seem more “palatable,” because you’ll lose the very people who would’ve resonated most with what you had to say.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

I’d probably design a crazy recording studio, not unlike what Rick Rubin did with his “Houdini Mansion” in Los Angeles, except mine would be even more eccentric, nonsensical, and wonderfully unhinged. Think: Dr. Emmett Brown meets Victorian naturalist, filtered through the dusty reel-to-reel heart of early ’80s England.

The main tracking room would be cluttered with Soviet-era analog synthesizers. Polyvoks, Formanta UDS drum synths, weird KGB-commissioned prototypes no one remembers how to power up. Patch cables would dangle like ivy from the ceilings, which are painted matte black and inlaid with constellations made of tiny Edison bulbs. The room would house at least ten different vintage analog preamps: Neve 1073s, Helios Type 69s, Amek 9098s, and a handful of crusty Soundcraft 200B strips for that authentic lo-fi bite.

Furniture-wise, I’m envisioning overstuffed plum velvet armchairs with claw feet, walnut desks with mythological marquetry, and Victorian fainting couches for existential mix-breaks. Walls would be lined with built-in bookcases holding leather-bound blank journals, taxidermy corvids, and rows of glass jars filled with preserved sea creatures: sharks, octopi, maybe even a smugly grinning coelacanth floating in formaldehyde.

The live room would feature a 1960s Ludwig Black Oyster drum kit, a Fibes acrylic snare, and a Premier Resonator kit for that brittle UK bite. For guitars: a Fender Jaguar with copper hardware, a Burns Bison, and an Ibanez 1990s RG, all ready to snarl through a battered Vox AC30 or a hissy Roland JC-120.

Off to one side, a private screening room; velvet curtains, crushed red seats, and a 16mm projector always humming would house a curated collection of film reels featuring Clive Barker, Andrzej Żuławski, and rare European horror gems and cult classics like “Possession”, “The Beyond”, “Hellraiser”, and other feverish fragments of gothic cinema. This is where bandmates go to “get in the right headspace” before tracking vocals.

Naturally, there would be a full bar, stocked with every imaginable vodka, rum, and whiskey, staffed by a bartender who speaks only in riddles and cocktail trivia. Beside it? A built-in hibachi grill and sushi bar, because seared tuna and synth patches are more compatible than people think.

But the crown jewel of the compound might just be the garage: a cavernous industrial bay with a collection of restored Honda and Yamaha motorcycles, ready to roar through the night should inspiration (or dread) strike. Helmet hair is encouraged.

Every hallway leads to somewhere slightly wrong: a sensory deprivation tank shaped like a chapel, a mirror maze made from Plexiglas guitar pickguards, an inspiration garden shrouded in dry ice and dotted with statues of forgotten glam icons.

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Image Credits

Caryn Rock
Kris Hex

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