What do you do after you've started, and this no mere exaggeration, a musical revival? It was the question that confronted Vinnie Fiorello after he founded the hugely successful label Fueled By Ramen. Cast your mind back to the mid 2000s and it was practically impossible to turn on the radio and not hear Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, Paramore or Gym Class Heroes. It was for thousands the first time since Blink 182 gave pop-punk a shot of adrenaline, that bands who paid great deference to punk had infiltrated the mainstream charts. They owed it in no small part to Fiorello.

Well, as it happens, if you’re Fiorello you leave at the height of this maddening and delirious success to start anew. Paper + Plastick was his brave new world, the ground treaded in the revolution’s aftermath. With a bit more bite but no less radical in vision, Paper + Plastick has been a torch bearer for defiant and dirty punk music since its inception in 2008.

A good place to start a story is always at the start. In 2008 Paper + Plastick was founded because Vinnie wanted to merge the creative elements of music and art as he tells me, “during that time there was a lull in the meeting of music and design. I wanted something that was visually pleasing and impact people who happen to be only paying attention to music digitally. Technology and music have been great together but I was missing something tactile.”

While the goal of putting out exciting bands hasn’t changed for Fiorello, this intersection between music and art is something that is crucial to him and something he thinks Paper + Plastick has been able to achieve over the past 6 years. “I wanted to make records that people remembered, toys and prints that pushed together music and design and I think that I have done that”.

However, work is never done and he continues to strive to keep improving. “I also think there’s always room to grow, new bands to find, new designers and artists to work with. The great thing about P+P has been that it was designed to be fluid in its mission statement and constantly evolve.”

Paper + Plastick has always led never followed – fuck trends and fashions. The only thing that Fiorello cares about is quality, noting that he looks for good songs and for the most part good people. “I try not to cater to what’s popular and just look for things I like and have passion for,” Vinnie says.

While Paper + Plastick has achieved critical success, the past 6 years haven’t always been easy, seeing its fair share of ups and downs. There has certainly been challenging aspects to running Paper + Plastick. For the most part it’s a contstant battle against time. “It’s my number one enemy, not having enough of it to make everyone and everything equal. There’s a lot of projects going on and timing right along with time becomes important.”

The process of releasing music has changed since Paper + Plastick started in a few noticeable ways. “We started to focus on a free weekly digital subscription to shine the spotlight on bands we love,” says Vinnie. “I never would’ve done that at the start of the label, but I learned to love the immediacy of digital over the last few years as a nice pairing of the vinyl we release.”

This love of vinyl is immediately clear to anyone who peruses Paper + Plastick’s online shop, and it is a format that is increasingly being accepted.  “CDs have been dead to me for awhile but they are an asset to touring bands and are a reliable way still to get music into the hands of people coming out to shows,” Vinnie explains. “Vinyl popularity means the backlog in production times for vinyl. What used to take two months now takes three as a minimum. I love that people are embracing the format, vinyl is healthier then it’s been in a long time.”

As previously mentioned art is integral to everything that Paper + Plastick does and Vinne is always on the lookout for great visual artists. There are some artists that have recently pipped his interest. “David Choe. Of course you have Horsebites and Terminal Distress. JP Flexner does a lot of work for me and he is great.”

Running Paper + Plastick is not the only thing Vinne is a part of. As a founding member of Less Than Jake, he’s a busy man. Having tasted success in different spheres I’m interested in finding out who he turns to when needing advice. “I talk it out with my lady and my 3 year old and both of them put things into perspective in there own way. Simple and direct. I like that,” he tells me, keeping it in house. And his best piece of advice?  “Best advice was from Rob Cavallo when producing ‘Anthem’ for LTJ. He said ” ..clever is crap.” When I try to get too ironic, it always rings true to me.”

That sort of sums up Paper + Plastick neatly, they’re good at what they do because they don’t take themselves too seriously. Vinnie and the label have a clear love of what they do and get on with it. In the coming years, he believes the label will become more visually diverse, a growth that will be incredibly exciting to watch.

So what do you do after helping to kickstart a music revolution? Change direction and then do it all again.

Check out the label’s official website.