© Eliot Lee
Culture Wars is a Texas-native alt-rock band blending powerful guitar-driven sounds with raw, introspective songwriting. Their debut album Don't Speak, out now via AWAL, explores identity, emotional fallout, regret, and self-awareness. Following their European headline dates earlier this year, Culture Wars are currently bringing the album to North America before heading to Australia and Asia. We spoke with Alex Dugan about letting the album's themes emerge naturally, bringing it to audiences around the world, and how ten years of evolution shaped Culture Wars' sound and identity.
The B-Side Hour: You released your debut album Don't Speak earlier this year. Exploring themes of identity, emotional fallout, regret, and self-awareness, it creates a cohesive narrative around the tension between who we are and who we're becoming. Did you have that larger picture in mind when you started writing, or did it emerge as the songs came together?
Alex Dugan: Oh, no, no, of course not. We didn't have any idea what we were doing. We were just trying to make music that we liked. I think just growing up around it, growing up while making the record is what happened. And then, you look back on it, you go, 'Oh, yeah, I guess that's what was going on.' We weren't really trying to think of anything and I certainly wasn't trying to create anything, that's for sure.
The B-Side Hour: You rewrote half of the album after touring with Maroon 5 and Wallows in 2025, saying that performing the songs live helped you better understand the kind of music you wanted to make. How did you decide what to keep, what to change, and how did that experience influence your approach to the writing and production of the record?
Alex Dugan: What to keep was just based on what we liked playing, where we felt like we were the best version of ourselves. I think, the crowd reacting to it also kind of gives you a little bit of confidence in certain things you may be unsure of. I think also just hearing the songs in a space, like in a stadium, in an arena, gives you this immediate feedback. You're like, "Oh, this is like, what?" Like where simplicity can take you in a good way, where you don't have to do a lot because of all the reverberations against the room and stuff like that. So I think, all that was kind of helpful, but it was really just us being like, "Yeah, when we played that, it didn't feel right", as a band.
The B-Side Hour: The album draws heavily from '90s alt-rock. What elements of that era and genre were you most interested in bringing into your own sonic identity?
Alex Dugan: I mean, we weren't trying to do that. We were just making songs that we liked. I think '90s music is very guitar-forward, but it's also song-forward. I think that's what we were after, just doing song-forward stuff and then letting the guitars fit around it. When you do that, you can get that sound, but I don't think we set out to do a '90s thing. I think that era just has good songs and good parts because just playing distorted guitar chords is not an original idea, nor was it an original idea in the '90s. So it's just more about the underlying songs and presenting them in a new way.
The B-Side Hour: Your vocal delivery is a defining part of the album, shifting between vulnerability and more powerful performances. How do you decide how far to push your voice on a song, and what are you looking for in those moments when the vocals become more intense?
Alex Dugan: I wasn't really thinking about any of it. In fact, if I thought about it, I probably would have made it easier to sing. It's more now that we're doing it live, I'm like "yeah, I gotta sing that now." I think there's a part of my brain that likes high notes because it feels like it stands out in a song, and it feels like a dynamically bigger part, but I gotta train myself out of that, you know? But I wasn't really making decisions. I was just making decisions on what I thought sounded good.
The B-Side Hour: Amid the self-introspection and personal growth, the album also tackles different stages and forms of connection, from desire and intimacy to distance and heartbreak. How did you balance those internal and external experiences? Did they naturally intertwine as you wrote, or did you have to consciously make room for both?
Alex Dugan: I mean, that's a great way to describe it, but I can't honestly tell you that I thought about any of that. I think that was just where my life was, and I was just speaking from my own personal experience. This reads like I'm a lot smarter than I am, which I appreciate, but, yeah, I wasn't consciously making room for anything. I was just writing what came naturally.
The B-Side Hour: You've described "Typical Ways" as an "angry letter to your former self." The song captures the tension between being aware of your own patterns and feeling unable to break them. How did that frustration shape the way you wrote the song?
Alex Dugan: Well, it didn't. I mean, I was stuck in that place when I was writing the song, and then I rewrote the lyrics, multiple times over the course of a couple years. And by the time I was out of it then I could actually look at it correctly. So I'm aware of the problem because I've already passed it by the time I'm writing it. At first when I was writing it, and I was unaware that it was a problem, it made for a very uncompelling song, so I'm glad that I forced myself to get it right later.
The B-Side Hour: "It Hurts" was inspired by the image of a drunk woman at a bar, but the songs turns that moment into something much more personal and yet universal, exploring the strange comfort and familiarity of pain. What was it about that image that gave you a way into something so deeply introspective?
Alex Dugan: I had empathy, you know? I think just having empathy for the situation, putting yourself in that situation. This was in LA, but there's plenty of it in Houston, where I grew up. It's hard to restart your life after a divorce, and you certainly see that with your friends' parents and your own parents and things like that, but you can kind of recognize it in public at a certain point. It's a tough part of life, unfortunately. But I think in seeing this woman, it was just also seeing the humor in the LA side of it, which you see a lot more of this in Dallas, too, but not as much in Houston. You're trying to hold it together in a time of intense, deep personal pain. Especially in LA, everyone's putting on airs all the time, you know, keeping up appearances all the time. I just find it funny, but there's a real human side to it.
The B-Side Hour: On the title track, you sing, "Don't speak a word of it/Don't let it live in silence," capturing the contradictions and complexity of growth. What brought you to explore that tension between letting go of things and moving on, and recognizing that some things need to be addressed in order to truly grow?
Alex Dugan: I think that's been the lesson for me of the last three, four years, picking your moments. I find myself kind of coaching myself, coaching people around me, even family. Saying to somebody, "I get it, I get why you're pissed, but that's not always how you handle things," and "It's not always the best way to be heard, or the best way to be successful." You've got to pick your moments. You can't just yell at people. You can't just power your way into every situation and you can't force things down other people's throats. Even when you know you're right, you have to coax people into things, for lack of a better phrase, or convince them, as someone would say nicely. I think that's a big part of it."
The B-Side Hour: Although Don't Speak is your debut album, Culture Wars dates back to 2015, evolving through different names and lineups before becoming the band it is today. After a decade of defining your identity and sound, what does Don't Speak say about who Culture Wars is today?
Alex Dugan: I think we ended up in a place where Dave and I wanted to be. When we first started this thing, we wanted to be a band and we wanted to play our instruments and not hide behind anything. I think we went through our evolutions of trying to figure out who we were, who the right people for the band were, trying to figure out everything, get better at music, go through life. I think where it stands now is this is the record we always wanted to make. If I heard this when I was in college and it was like, "Hey, this is where you're gonna end up," I'd be like, "Great." And then if you told me, "Oh, but it's gonna take 10 years." I'd go, "f*** you," but I'm glad, I'd rather get there that not at all, you know? So, we're very happy about all that.
The B-Side Hour: You're now sharing Don't Speak with audiences on the North American leg of your world tour, after taking it to Europe and before heading to Australia and Asia. How has performing the album in different places and in front of different audiences shaped the way you experience these songs live?
Alex Dugan: I mean, it just makes you excited to play the shows. I get excited to do this stuff. I try to make sure we don't take things for granted or go through the motions with anything. This is a great, great opportunity and we should feel very lucky to be in this moment that we're in, and we're going to keep working hard to push ourselves further beyond this. It's a great opportunity. We just feel very lucky to be where we're at, and hopefully we will feel even more lucky to keep going. Even when playing stuff in America and in the US and seeing the responses from the fans... I've gone to shows in LA before. They don't act like that. You know what I mean? It feels special. It feels like we're doing something different than even what I grew up going to, which is surprising. We've got two sold-out shows at The Troubadour in LA, and the last time we played LA, it was a lot smaller, but people were supercharged, and that's unusual for LA. It's unusual for most places in the US and we've been really lucky to find those people and those fans who connect with it in that way. So we're just really happy and appreciative. Thank you!
Stream or purchase Don't Speak