Excerpt from transcription, audio
recorded on Saturday, August 9, 2025
Noah: I'm Noah. I play drums and do vocals.
Juan: I'm Juan. I play bass.
Chase: I'm Chase. I play guitar.
Ameer: Okay, so first question — how did the band get started?
Noah: We were in this other band before called Wayside Drive. It ended because of creative differences. Then Chase and I started writing more hardcore music on our own, and it eventually turned into us writing screamo music. After our first show, we got Juan.
Ameer: So, what influenced you to make that switch from hardcore to screamo?
Noah: The music started to surround us a lot more. Also, it was a very crazy part of our lives — we had all just graduated and shit.
Chase: I think we always liked emo music, so it was natural to start doing emo shit. We just like the freedom of doing whatever, so we still do hardcore stuff from time to time.
Ameer: What were your inspirations?
Chase: We’re really inspired by Gulch. When we first started, a band called Zulu — that’s not around anymore — was also a big influence. Those were the power violence, kind of hardcore influences. But screamo influences, I’m not sure. What would you say, Noah?
Noah: I don’t know. Just the run-of-the-mill, like Vs Self, Widowdusk, Knumears — definitely Knumears.
Chase: Also our friends too, like Salvinorin-a.
Ameer: How did each of you individually get into the scene?
Noah: I feel like it was all kind of the same story. I remember it was our homie Johnny—we all planned to start a band together, and he took us to our first show. It was a punk thrash show: The Halfpipes, Septik, all that good shit. Also, Chase played in an old band—it was an old indie band. That was my first experience going to shows too.
Chase: We all played in the same band, so we started going to shows around the same time. Gradually from there, we made friends in the scene and started going to more shows that we liked in general, yeah.
Juan: And we were hella young at that time.
Chase: Yeah, that was like 2022.
Noah: Yeah, we were like 16 or some shit.
Chase: We were in high school.
Ameer: What made you guys want to start making music in the first place?
Noah: Well, I started learning how to play guitar after Chase sold me a guitar when we were like 12 or 13. I would try to learn music. Then I started a band with that homie Johnny I mentioned earlier, and Juan, and a couple of other friends. That was the first time I realized, oh shit, I can actually make music instead of just covering it. Then we started writing music. It was super bad, but it was still writing music. I just started paying attention to how songs work, and I started trying to write songs based on how I listened to them and shit.
Juan: I just got a guitar and started getting into nu metal. Started playing some easy-ass power chord riffs. I was with Noah in wrestling; he played bass, and I was like, oh, you play bass, I play guitar. Johnny was also in wrestling, and I was like, I'm tired of just being in my room playing over songs I know. What if we wrote our own shit? And that's what we did. That’s what got me into music.
Chase: I’ve always played music. I've been playing guitar for a long time, so writing and stuff is just what I like doing.
Ameer: So in the Houston, Texas scene, do you guys feel like people influence each other a lot with creativity?
Noah: Oh yeah, definitely. Our friends in Salv impacted our own band a lot, especially with how many bands play together. I feel like they start picking up attributes from each other, you know?
Chase: I agree. A lot of people in the scene get influenced by other bands they’ve watched. That’s probably what’s happened to us, too.
Ameer: Do you guys feel like that influence is always good, or can it be kind of a negative thing?
Noah: I feel like it’s good, and it can be bad sometimes, but at the end of the day it’s just music. It’s just fun.
Ameer: So you guys have said that you toured outside of the city. What’s different about those other cities compared to Houston, Texas?
Chase: I think the crowds are different. San Antonio is always a whiplash because it’s almost scarier—they’re more angsty. Some scenes are more chill, some are more mature, some are younger, so they’re a little more bashful and stuff. It’s never a super bad thing, but they’re in different stages.
Noah: They really span with age and how they act, even the culture of the city. We played a show in San Diego with other screamo bands, but it was all college kids, and they were just chilling. They looked like they went to high school with me or something.
Juan: I thought they didn’t mosh as hard. There were a couple, but everyone mostly stood still.
Ameer: Do you guys think the Houston scene is younger or more of a mix?
Noah: Yeah, I think it’s super mixed, actually.
Ameer: I do feel like it depends on genre. When I come to stuff like this(TatsFest 2025), it’s younger people, but with hardcore it’s different.
Noah: It’s like all blue-collar people. They all look like my uncle or something. Here, they all look like my little cousins. It’s so crazy.
Ameer: Do you guys have any plans that you can share?
Chase: We're gonna play in Arizona with YoungLean. That's our big plan for October, and then we might tour after. We're writing more music right now. We've been doing a different kind of sound, being more emo, so we're trying to do that and record more.
Noah: We have a split that might never come out, but it could.
