Greg Saunier is hoping to “vindicate himself” on an imminent visit to Hong Kong. The Deerhoof founder holds an unabashed fondness for the city. “Every time that we visit, I just want to move there,” enthuses the drummer. “It’s so ridiculously beautiful. I’ve lived in so many cities on this earth, and Hong Kong just looks incredible.”
Yet, on his last stop, in 2019, he embarrassed himself. The afternoon before a “really fun show” at Mom Livehouse, the American avant-pop-ish band went to drink Chinese tea. It was all fine until someone cracked a joke. “We were just relaxing and we went into a tea shop — sort of a hipster café — but at some point I laughed too loudly for the etiquette and protocols of that particular café,” he remembers. “In general, I have found Hong Kong to be a very loud city where people are very comfortable speaking in loud voices, but somehow in this cafe, I crossed some line.”
That made him deeply nervous about returning for a third concert. Thankfully for fans he got over his nerves: Deerhoof return to Mom Livehouse on 12 June. The tea-shop experience stung especially, because Saunier has such fond memories otherwise; he found the city “instantly familiar” and describes every Hongkonger the band encountered as “shockingly personable.” He remembers “chatting to people and feeling like I’d known them forever.”
There’s a moving document of the musician’s first visit to the city, in December 2011, when nomadic French independent filmmaker Vincent Moon happened to be passing through town. The result is a short film in cinéma vérité style of the percussionist wandering the city streets, drumsticks in hand, tapping out rhythms riffing on the city’s sonic ebbs and flows — drumming on poles and barriers, keeping time with sawing workmen and the iconic click-click-clack of pedestrian crossings. The most moving segments see him taking over trade at a street vendor, playing along to Cantopop on the radio, and massaging a passerby with his sticks.
Yet it’s a painful watch for Saunier, who only sees an “ugly American” behaving in an excessively extroverted, performative manner. “In both cases, I feel like I embarrassed myself by being somewhat obnoxious,” he says. “I’m going to try and vindicate myself on this visit.”
A Western traveller making a cultural faux pas in East Asia shouldn’t be much to write about, but the fact Saunier is still thinking about these instances years later speaks volumes about both his humility and Deerhoof’s globally minded outlook, shaped by curious decades spent on the road.
By the sea
Among the reasons Hong Kong resonates so deeply is because it reminds Saunier of San Francisco, the city he decamped to in his early 20s. Born in Chile to American parents serving in the Peace Corps, he was raised in Maryland and graduated from Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory of Music before moving to the West Coast. “Deerhoof started in San Francisco, which is not totally different from Hong Kong — rolling hills that are right next to a bay that looks almost unreal,” he says.
The band formed in 1994 as a lo-fi improvisational duet with co-founder Rob Fisk — riddled with percussive thwacks, feedback and primal screams, out-of-print 1996 debut Dirt Pirate Creed is unlistenable by most standards. “We were into noise and we were into really harsh aesthetics,” says Saunier, talking over Zoom from his home in Tuscon, Arizona. “Revolution, collapse, apocalypse, post-apocalypse, calamity, banding together against the rich, against the oligarchs, against the fascists. It’s always been our ethos and our vibe since day one.”
But amid all this nihilistic noise-making, sweet, hummable melodies soar above the storm thanks to Deerhoof’s secret weapon — vocalist/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, who joined the band a week after arriving in the US from Japan. Her songbird delivery lends even the band’s wiggiest moments a warm, welcoming way in, epitomised in 1999’s early leftfield-punk masterpiece Holdypaws.
A year later, Fisk departed and was soon replaced by jazzy virtuoso John Dieterich. Deerhoof remained an underground affair, releasing a string of messy, noisy DIY poppy punk (but definitely not pop-punk) LPs. Shortly after the addition of second guitarist Chris Cohen in 2002, the newly expanded quartet all simultaneously quit their day jobs to tour in support of seventh album Apple O, heralding an indie-sized breakthrough of sorts. “Deerhoof is making a living now,” says Saunier. But it was hard work: it took “about nine years” for the band to make money.
“A holy mess”
For the past quarter-century, Deerhoof have enjoyed a somewhat uber-cult status. Despite a relatively low commercial profile — in Hong Kong they perform at a 200-capacity venue — new releases invariably attract mainstream press coverage, earning a mix of breathless superlatives and dumbfounded confusion. In a three-star review from 2017, The Guardian described them as “fun and frustrating,” with “nothing discordant [that] lasts long enough to get tiresome. Melodies, for which they have a flair, scuttle past like mice making a break past outstretched claws. Playfulness is a conscious, insurrectionist act.”
Deerhoof’s music has gained more focus in recent years, evidenced in the gleefully knotty, psych-pop of remotely recorded Actually You Can (2021) and its antithesis, the studio production Miracle-Level (2023), the band’s first record sung entirely in Japanese. In response, last year’s Noble and Godlike in Ruin was a gritty DIY production inspired by listening to an audiobook of Shelley’s Frankenstein on tour.
What makes all this music so boggling is its utter imperviousness to tradition, and the middle-finger it serves common sense. Each snappy song flies by, densely packed with jarring ideas and knotty rhythms, moments of noise and abandon flitting into charming pop hooks. No musical section sticks around for long, and whatever comes next is rarely expected, and often unrelated.
“Whenever I’m first hearing a new song written by any of my bandmates, that’s the closest thing I have to the virgin experience of what it sounds and feels like to hear Deerhoof the first time,” says Saunier. “I’m often totally baffled. I can’t even tell where the beat is. I’m like, why do you think that part goes after that part? Man, we got to figure this out. This is just a holy mess. This song doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Saunier says that what makes Deerhoof work is a deep-seated respect for each other’s ideas developed over decades spent scrabbling together. Since Cohen was replaced by guitarist/bassist Ed Rodriguez in 2008, the core quartet has remained completely unchanged — but notably none of them has had children, the “sacrifice” of a life spent on the road. The band requires more than enough emotional commitment. “Devotion” and “love” are two words Saunier uses to describe their process. “It’s just us trying to respect each other’s ideas.”
He sees a parallel with Hong Kong, which he calls “a perfect case study of language complexity, because it’s a constant lost in translation. English is an official language, but so is Chinese — but it’s not Mandarin. Hong Kong has its own way of saying things. When two languages meet, when two societies meet, when two traditions meet — that’s similar to when two brains meet, or two musicians meet.” It’s similar to the “creative mistranslation” that defines Deerhoof.
Humble survivors
David Bowie, Thom Yorke, St. Vincent, Dave Grohl and Beck are just a few of Deerhoof’s A-list supporters. Saunier is unphased, hypothesizing that these genre-defining icons may see in Deerhoof some of the independence they lost in signing a contract with the devil of industry. “It doesn’t surprise me that they might look wistfully at some band that’s basically not gotten too big,” he says.
Could the band have been bigger if they’d tried harder, or made the same kind of compromises? “I don’t think so,” he says. “It’s like, whenever we’ve tried to write a hit, it didn’t end up sounding like a hit. We were always trying to be trendy. We were always trying to be top 40. We were always trying to do what we thought people could understand and enjoy.”
Which, in a sense, makes the band a complete failure. “We have failed — and I couldn’t feel happier about our failure,” he says. Deerhoof, he suggests, is like a tiny Hong Kong dim sum place whose dumplings are so good people ask why it doesn’t expand. “No, this is enough. We’re fine. We can pay our rent. We can eat. People like it. We have friends.”
But you never know, he adds. “We might finally write a hit, and then we’re screwed.”
The dangers of cultural convergence
Instead, Deerhoof have used their high acclaim but low-ish profile to see the world, shaping the geopolitical outlook that fuels the anti-capitalist messages of their music and actions. Touring, he says, has given him a view of other people’s lives he could never have had as a tourist.
“We never have time for sightseeing. It’s not like we go to Hong Kong and see where some John Woo movie was shot,” he says. “You travel the world and you realise that in many superficial ways, the food tastes totally different. The fashions are different. The musical styles are different, but deep down everybody experiences joy and pain the same way. They experience family and love and relationships so much the same. They want the same things. They want to be happy. They want to be free.”
Before Hong Kong, The Bio Fantasy Tour takes Deerhoof to Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Instead of being misunderstood, Saunier is concerned that local audiences are understanding his band’s music more profoundly than ever. In the past, there were places that Saunier felt didn’t need whatever emotional or intellectual outlet Deerhoof was providing. He feels that less and less: “There seems to be a kind of gelling, a kind of convergence.”
While it’s true that streaming and the internet have made the world smaller and everyone’s listening habits broader, this isn’t the kind of “convergence” Saunier is talking about. A deep socio-political awareness runs through Deerhoof’s music and messaging. In June 2025 they stripped their music from Spotify, after its founder Daniel Elk became chairman of German weapons manufacturer Helsing.
Saunier senses “a battle for our future” against “a small, multinational ruling class — oligarchs, war profiteers, AI tycoons — who appear to feel perfectly comfortable bringing our species to its knees in terms of poverty, but also possibly to its extinction, whether that be with the climate apocalypse or World War Three.
“There’s an urgency and a desperation that was always contained in Deerhoof’s music,” he adds, “and it seems to be landing more easily now.”
Asked how long Deerhoof might continue, he answers with bleak comic fatalism. “I think that depends on how long the powers that be decide the human race is allowed to exist before it needs to be terminated by nuclear weapons or some other problem,” he says. “I’m not sure how many years the earth has left.”
Saunier’s love for the people of Hong Kong, and staunch anticapitalist activism, collided in a bittersweet way the day he shut down Deerhoof’s Facebook page. “There are people that I met in Hong Kong that I actually stayed in touch with, because I liked them so much — and then I dropped my Facebook page because I was so sick of Mark Zuckerberg, and I’ve lost touch with them. Some of them I’ve literally tried to find on other platforms, and I’ve failed to do so.”
He doesn’t want to name anyone specific. “But people who were in touch with me 10 years ago, please come to the show,” he says. “I want to see you again.”
Deerhoof perform at Mom Livehouse on Friday 12 June 2026 at 20:00. Tickets.