Koyo / One Step Closer / Anxious — live event
There’s a lot of musical history on Long Island, especially when it comes to hardcore and punk. It was that heritage that the six members of Koyo wanted to pay homage to with their band. Formed in 2019, the six-piece, now five piece – vocalist Joey Chairamonte, guitarists Harold Griffin, TJ Rotolico and Mike Marazzo, bassist Stephen Spanos and drummer Sal Argento – all played in different bands in the scene but had been friends for years. It was when they all happened to be home at the same time that idea of a new project was floated and Koyo started life. They managed one gig before the pandemic hit, but the subsequent downtime allowed them the time to really hone their craft and the direction of the band. “Our goal isn’t so much to exit where we came from,” explains Griffin, “but to stretch the boundaries of what we can be and what Koyo is. We’re heavily influenced by the early- to mid-2000s hardcore adjacent emo and pop-punk scene. It specifically catered to Long Island bands when it started, but now what Koyo is probably relates to other bands that aren’t so geographically concentrated. They can be from anywhere – it’s more the timeframe that’s more called back to with what we write.” As such, Koyo exists both in the past and the present. That’s something you can hear in the music they’ve released to date, but especially within the fabric of “Ten Digits Away”, the first song that they’ll be releasing on Pure Noise Records. A seamless blend of hardcore and emo, it infuses elements of the latter into the framework of the former to create a song that bristles with energy and emotion in equal measure while creating something new and unique in the process. “This is the project where we can be melodic and personal and emotional and vulnerable,” says Griffin, “and that’s not something we can always get out of the other things that we’ve done. This happens to be a more tender part of us that wants to come out.” “The beauty of doing something like Koyo,” says Chairamonte, “is that it can be truly whatever we want. The boundaries are infinite because there are none.” “And we can go beyond the box of hardcore,” adds Rotolico, “whilst still keeping the ethos of hardcore.” Koyo is now the project – above all the others they’ve been involved in – that its members are most focused on. That care and dedication can be heard easily in “Ten Digits Away”. Recorded in a studio on a farm in Flemington, NJ by Such Gold’s Jon Markson, it’s a song that also captures and reflects on – in trademark Koyo style – the tentative and temporary nature of existence. But within that fragility is also an urgent call to make the most of the time we have while we have it – because it could all end at any moment.
Starts: 2024-03-24T18:00:28Z
Ends: 2024-03-24T20:00:28Z
Where: 75 Martin Luther King Junior Drive Southwest, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, United States
Price: $25.0