Alternative Press teamed up with Drain for limited-edition vinyl. Head to the AP Shop to snag your copy.
Sammy Ciaramitaro couldn’t make it to the present that evening, however he additionally couldn’t carry himself to let it slide altogether. He needed the touring bands to know he appreciated them stopping in his metropolis and placing on for his scene. So, nonetheless coated in ink from printing merch at work all day, he ducked into the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz, California, throughout load-in. “These guys are in my town. I gotta say what’s up, you know?” he remembers. “It was Knocked Loose. They don’t need my ‘What’s up?’ because they’re the big dogs. But I care about this.”
That was in the fall of 2021. Quite a bit has modified in Ciaramitaro’s world since then, however this need to all the time be part of it has not, and certain by no means will. A few weeks in the past, he walked his burly body, accented by luggage below his eyes from a stint touring Europe with his ultra-buzzy hardcore band Drain, over to an area present. His crew was a bit stunned to see him. But he cares about this. “I got home and, dude, yeah, I was a little smoked,” he says. “But it was a cool show, and I don’t have work, and my friends’ bands are playing. I’ve got no excuse, man. I wanted to go. I always want to go.”
Read extra: GEL’s “hardcore for the freaks” is as inclusive as it’s aggressive
There’s a notice of concern in that final thought. Ciaramitaro worries that he isn’t in a position to get out and help the scene as a lot as he used to. For some time there, he was at each present in San Jose or Santa Cruz and doubtless performed two out of three, both with Drain, Gulch, Hands of God, or another band. Now, he’s having to reduce himself extra slack as a result of he has a job and a girlfriend and a canine, and duties that stretch past opening this fuckin’ pit up. But, crucially, Drain are additionally perched on a precipice.
After breaking out with 2020’s California Cursed, a mosh-primed mixture of hardcore bounce and crossover thrash chaos that had its preliminary tour plans swallowed by the pandemic, Drain’s second album, Living Proof (out this Friday, May 5), is ready to be launched by punk giants Epitaph Records. Tour posters for runs throughout North America and Europe, in the meantime, are groaning below the weight of sold-out notices.
Sometimes you get a sense {that a} band are going to blow up, and that feeling has been following Drain — accomplished by guitarist Cody Chavez and drummer Tim Flegal — round for some time now. Living Proof’s title obliquely acknowledges that reality. It is a reminder that you simply — sure, you — can do that. “It’s like a mission statement,” Ciaramitaro says. “This is what we’re about, and we’re gonna talk it, but we’re also going to walk it, you know?”
This perspective will solely be sharpened by hardcore’s continued second in the solar. A number of the dialogue surrounding the style is couched in post-Turnstile phrases, however the ongoing affect of the San Jose-Santa Cruz scene can’t be overstated, with bands similar to Scowl, Sunami and No Right all windmilling their very own path towards the highlight alongside Drain.
History is dotted with comparable artistic outbreaks that had been bled dry — see the first wave of New York punk or the early ’90s major-label feeding frenzies surrounding grunge in the Pacific Northwest and indie rock in Chapel Hill, North Carolina — and Ciaramitaro is deeply protecting of the bands and people who’ve carried the baton to this level. “Hell yeah” is his succinct response to that concept. “Hell yeah, dude.”
Read the feedback beneath any hate5six video and also you’ll get a front-row seat to a fierce debate about gatekeeping in hardcore, fueled partly by the explosion of on-line content material that supplied a vicarious thrill throughout the lean pandemic years (chief amongst it the Real Bay Shit parking zone present that Ciaramitaro helped placed on with his associates). For Ciaramitaro, it’s probably not a query of the way you got here to the music. He doesn’t need to push of us out; he desires them to really feel it like he feels it. “Dude, you can’t be like, ‘I watched a lot of skateboarding videos online. So I’m a skateboarder.’ To be a skateboarder, all you gotta do is go skate. It’s really that simple,” he says. “You can listen to this music, but if you’re not out at the shows, then you’re cheating yourself of the full experience.”
It’s a pointed commentary as a result of Ciaramitaro already is aware of what it’s like when hype overtakes actuality. For a number of years, he performed drums for the short-lived, none-more-confrontational Gulch, whose rep was based on feral music and, via no fault of their very own, a circus that sprang up round their merch. Ciaramitaro works with Cole Kakimoto, Gulch’s guitarist and chief artistic pressure, at his San Jose print store, the place they made every design that sparked snaking traces at the desk and despatched the web right into a tailspin. “Some people think we calculated all this stuff,” he says. “Dude, the reason we only made 10 shirts is because we had leftovers from a customer’s order that bailed out. The 30 Sanrio hoodies, that was literally an order for a customer who canceled.”
When the band broke up in 2022, it was a testomony to their grinding, uncompromising mix of hardcore and dying metallic that burning out appeared like the logical possibility. The entire circus round Gulch was threatening to drag it away from its roots and strand its members on an island they needed to get the hell off of. “Man, if COVID didn’t hit, Gulch would have broken up two years sooner,” Ciaramitaro says. “I think if Gulch never got popular, we would still be a band, in essence. You don’t want to be a pop-up store with inventory. If every Gulch show was in San Jose to the same 20-30 friends, they’d be stoked. That was what it was supposed to be.”
[Photo by Eli Rae]
Drain are completely different. This is Ciaramitaro’s child, and, in the again of his head, he’s all the time held on to the concept that it might final. “With Gulch, especially because Cole had such a clear vision, I was like, ‘Give me what shows we got, I’m there,’” he says. “I don’t feel like I had any ownership over it, nor did I want that — I’m here to help. I love playing with those guys, and I love those songs.
“With Drain, merchandise, flyers, and artwork come from me. We want to do this stuff. We didn’t necessarily have a clear vision — we want to be a band on this label, we want to do tours like this — but we want to play cool shows, so if the shows keep getting bigger and cooler, we’re in. That was the MO. If things are still going in the right direction, let’s keep chasing the rabbit.”
Ciaramitaro grew up in Los Angeles as a suburban child who had his eyes opened by punk radio and home reveals that threw collectively hardcore and metallic bands with little to no distinction between the two. Years later, Living Proof presents an analogous crossing of the streams. Where Gulch’s recorded music was tracked dwell to ape their knotted, grotty noise, right here Drain have teamed with producer Taylor Young to serve up a report that hits laborious whereas additionally making the most of the songs’ metallic anthemics and Ciaramitaro’s serrated, rabble-rousing shoutalongs. “The guitars are the ear candy on the record, you know?” he says. “Let’s isolate that. Let’s make sure we get this tone locked in. Let’s get all the pinches at the max clarity we can get and all the flair. That’s the good stuff, man.”
On the different facet of the fence are lyrics that reduce deep. Ciaramitaro is happy with the proven fact that he sings like he speaks, with zero concern for adornment or misdirection. The stress, although, comes from seeing somebody with such an outwardly bouncy demeanor (Stereogum’s Julian Towers lately reported a few youngsters at a present describing him as “a ‘golden retriever’ of a man”) relating lacerating self-doubt and anxiousness. Living Proof’s lead single “Evil Finds Light,” for one, is a whirling dervish of breakdowns and flailing pleasure that facilities round being an uncontrollable “stress case.” “I keep my thoughts to myself ’cause I don’t trust anyone,” Ciaramitaro spits.
“It’s tough to write real shit about real stuff, but then not necessarily bring that forward,” he observes. “No one wants to see a stressed-out dude live. I don’t want to be that person. Maybe day to day I get a little stressed out, but this is my zone, dude. I’m letting my nuts hang. This is my spot. I’m not fucking scared of shit right now.”
That, proper there, is gas for a killer hardcore present. Few arenas outdoors of contact sports activities provide the identical probability for bodily and emotional launch, and Ciaramitaro is effectively conscious that Drain straddle these two states higher than most. “If you can sit down and read lyrics like, ‘Damn, I feel this,’ that’s cool,” he says. “But when we go to the show, we’re not feeling that shit one bit. We’re gonna sing it. We’re gonna rock out, man. I’m a pretty weird dude, but I think I’ve got a lot in common with a lot of people. That makes a lot of us being fucking weirdos — let’s find common ground and have a good time for 20 minutes tonight.”
Be the particular person at the entrance, copping elbows and commingling sweat. Be the particular person nodding at the again whose $20 on the door will assist get the band to the subsequent city. Just discover a method to be there when you possibly can. That’s what Sammy Ciaramitaro goes to do, whether or not he’s simply returned from an enormous tour sponsored by an vitality drink or is spending an evening off speaking with his associates about that point they had been in a band collectively. “Just go — then you’re a part of this,” he says. “Just go to the shows.”
Discussion about this post