Interview: Aidil Rusli

Meet The Talented Frontman For Malaysian Power Pop Band Couple

Couple (L to R): Ezzart (bass), Ariana (guitar/vocals), Aidil (vocals/guitar), Boy (drums)

The beautiful thing about great music is that it’s always there, waiting to be discovered. I was reminded of this recently when I got lured down a rabbit hole by Couple, Malaysia’s favorite—and perhaps only—self-described power pop band.

I’d definitely come across Couple over the years, but never spent any real time with their hooky bilingual rock and roll. Now it’s safe to say that I’m a fan. Lucky for me, there are several albums and an interesting backstory to explore.

Raised in a small town, founder/frontman Aidil Rusli first discovered artists like Matthew Sweet, Fountains of Wayne, Teenage Fanclub and The Posies in bargain bins—choosing albums based on band name, cover art and song titles. He continued this approach when he attended college in London, crate-digging even more music in the vein of his childhood heroes The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Badfinger.

That self-education led to the formation of Couple, pop rock chameleons who have released two-plus decades worth of classic power pop, Weezer-y alternative rock, and indie music in the vein of Guided by Voices and The Strokes—all with vocals in Malay or English. Their latest album, Poptimism, even delves into modern mainstream pop.

Couple is exactly the kind of “new to me” band that guitar pop fans seek out, so if they’re new to you too…I strongly suggest you dig in! (Or maybe’s it’s time to get reacquainted?) This is music that’s right at home on modern power pop playlists alongside Mo Troper, Tony Molina and 2nd Grade.

I caught up with Rusli via email as he awaits a shipment of Poptimism CDs.

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For readers new to Couple, tell us a little about the band's history.

Hello everyone! We’re a band from Malaysia, formed in 1995 when I was in college in a sleepy old town with nothing much to do, so we were just looking for ways to kill some free time during the weekend.

There were only two of us when we started, me doing guitar and vocal duties (and bass as well on recordings) and my good buddy Azhan banging the drums. We were 18 then with very little musical skill, so it’s really more like a bunch of young punks just wanting to make noise in the rehearsal studio, but with the added motivation of not wanting to just play cover songs, so we played songs I wrote instead.

The college town we were in was about a two-hour bus ride from the capital city Kuala Lumpur, so we were basically cut off from the scene happening there (and 1995-1996 was very much the height of grunge, alternative, hardcore, Oi!/skinheads and metal when it comes to kids in Malaysia), and any contact we had back then with the scene was simply through snail mail or phone calls.

The only gigs we played back then were strictly in college, but our first demo tape, In Love, got enough notice (thanks to a great review in a weekly underground/alternative column called Blasting Concept in local newspaper The Sun) that we managed to sell a few hundred copies of that tape and had kids in our college singing along to some of the songs when played the few shows we did play back during those early days.

Obviously we’ve now grown into a 4-piece band, but I don’t think that much has changed in the band’s DNA, as I still write the same kind of simple, easy-to-play and direct pop songs that I did since the beginning.

When did you first get bitten by the power pop bug? 

I was born and bred in a small town called Ipoh, and I only knew much later on that these bands/acts I liked were actually power pop bands. You see, Ipoh being such a small town, there were plenty of bargain bins for tapes back then (because nobody bothered to buy tapes by acts like this), and with them being so cheap (costing around 50 to 80 cents each, depending on where you were digging), I just bought tapes on instinct, basing my choices on the band names, cover art, and the song titles and names appearing on the back of the tapes.

That was how I got into Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, Fountains Of Wayne, This Perfect Day and The Posies. My drummer Azhan got a tape of Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque from his older brother, and we played that to death too, without knowing that all of this is power pop! All I knew was that I loved the songs, and having already been a big fan of The Beach Boys, Badfinger and The Beatles, it was just great to hear that kind of songwriting still in practice then.

It’s only when I got a scholarship to go to university in London in 1997 that I knew what power pop was, and London was full of even more bargain bins and I just fell down that rabbit hole, at first buying stuff like Velvet Crush’s Teenage Symphonies To God and the Jellyfish albums because they were dirt cheap and looked interesting. I stumbled onto the Poptopia! and Rhino DIY compilations, and then discovered pop zines like Popsided and Amplifier, which got me tuned into the late 90s/early 00s pop underground scene—and I’ve never looked back.

My absolute favorites and influences would, of course, be Big Star, Raspberries, Cheap Trick, The Nerves (and everything they spawned, especially The Beat), Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub and Guided By Voices (even though no one would call them power pop, but try telling that to the endless number of great songs that keep coming out of Pollard’s head). Oh, and I absolutely can’t live without some of the albums by The Wildhearts and Enuff Z ‘Nuff, whatever people might think of their image.

Current faves will definitely include the likes of Mo Troper, Uni Boys, Dazy, The Dates, The Whiffs, 2^nd Grade, Young Guv and White Reaper (and I’d include some 5^th wave emo bands like Joyce Manor and Mom Jeans as well, just for the amount of quality pop songs in their arsenal), though just by casually looking at these names, it’s quite clear that power pop nowadays casts a much wider net than it used to.

As long as the songwriting fits what we usually think of power pop—tight, hooky, three-minute pop jams—then we’re all set.

You write hooky pop songs in both Malay and English. Does your approach to songwriting change depending on the language?

I don’t think so, the melody-making and assembling of the tunes are the same, but it’s the lyric writing that needs a bit of adjustment, as Malay words tend to have longer syllables and sentence forming tend to be a bit longer than English, so I’ll have to account for that difference when trying to come up with the lyrics.

I guess because so much of my favorite music is in English, I do find it easier to write in English, so that might be a factor to why we have more songs in English instead of Malay.

There was a 13 year gap between your 2009 album Pop Tak Masuk Radio and your latest album, Poptimism (with a few singles and a split E.P. in between). Why is now the right time to release new music?

We weren’t actually on a break all that time. In fact, from 2008 onwards we were gigging non-stop with at least 2-3 shows a month all the way up till the pandemic hit in 2020. But I guess that non-stop gigging, coupled with our personal lives and day jobs as we advance in age (some of us even had kids), just meant that we had way less time to enter the studio.

We actually started work on the album even as far back as 2012, which we did in piecemeal fashion on weekends and whatever free time we had, but there were unexpected problems that cropped up as well, like the studio moving location three times, missing/stolen gear and hard disks. etc. Then suddenly it was 2020 when we were finally ready to unleash it to the world, and even that got pushed back another two years because of the pandemic!

In that time we got ourselves a new bassist, and more recently a new drummer as well, so that played a part as well as we took time to adjust to each other’s playing style, but even in 2012 I had already envisioned this album to be a bit more boundary pushing in terms of the pop styles we’ll be exploring. After three albums of intensive rehearsing for months and then recording in a few days (to be more cost-effective), I just wanted to do something that’s the exact opposite with this fourth studio album, hence the sounds you get to hear in Poptimism.

That big gap between releases also meant that, since we’re doing everything DIY-style, I got to learn about what it takes to release new music nowadays, which I find quite refreshing and exciting, that whole process of learning and practicing something new.

What’s the rock music scene like in Malaysia these days? Are there other Malaysian power pop/adjacent bands we should know about?

Ever since a TV series called KAMI The Series graced Malaysian TV screens in 2007, a barrier was broken between the mainstream and underground/indie rock scene here, leading to increased awareness among local kids about the existence of the underground/independent scene in Malaysia.

That led to a short-lived local indie rock explosion (that was mainly influenced by Britpop and then current bands like The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys), which lasted about 3-4 years starting from 2008, and our hooky melodic songs were lucky enough to get us lumped in with the bands from that era (and us having 8 songs used in that KAMI series surely helped as well), where it got so big that even a small band like us had bootleg shirts made and sold in night markets and even malls back then.

Things have calmed down considerably nowadays, but social media and the Spotify algorithm have ensured that there’s still a pretty decent audience among the kids for local indie/alt acts, and things have thankfully moved beyond the Britpop/indie rock sound of the class of 2008, taking in a broader spectrum of influences.

Unfortunately, we’re still the only self-proclaimed power pop band out here! But there’s no shortage of bands/acts that are armed with great tunes, even if they’re in other genres like alternative, indie rock, pop-punk, shoegaze, etc., and I count these currently active bands/acts as favorites—Dependent, The Fridays, Panasejook, OAG, Hujan, Claudia, Lovethee, Muck, Lust, Ramayan and a great many others I’m sure I can’t recall off the top of my head right now.

What's next for you?

Couple will be gearing up to release Poptimism on CD in the next few months, though most probably that’ll happen in May or June, after the fasting month and Eid festivities have ended (we’re a Muslim majority country, so these are big events in our calendar).

Once that CD is out, of course, we’ll be doing a nationwide (and hopefully regional) tour to support it. We’re lined up to play a few festivals already in the coming months, so that’s exciting, of course. And talking about releasing the CD, we’ll also do a few music videos to help increase awareness.

As for new songs, I’m currently writing and accumulating material for our next album, which I think will see us return to our more guitar-oriented sound, thanks partly to me having scratched that itch to do something different with Poptimism, and also thanks in part to the excitement of listening to all these young bands like Uni Boys, Dazy, White Reaper, The Whiffs and Mo Troper currently having their moment in the US power pop scene, which has rekindled my excitement to explore that more old school power pop sound again.

As for me personally, in addition to Couple, I’ve also got a relatively new project/band called Playburst trying to meld math rock with Midwest emo, glued together by the sort of hooky/powerpopp-y vocal melodies that I can’t avoid coming up with. We’ve got an album called Positive Jams that we haven’t managed to tour behind thanks to COVID and lockdowns happening about a month after the CD release party, so we’ll need to get that sorted out too, not to mention hopefully a Japanese tour since the album was released in Japan as well.

So, I guess it’ll probably be a quite busy year for me!