Interview: KAYZO Discusses Writing 'New Breed', Blending Genres, and His Love of Writing Music
It’s a Friday night, and I’m sitting backstage at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Within seconds, a whir of people rush by me in the quiet, well-lit green room. There’s laughter and the loud stop of footsteps as three people follow someone holding a camera, making a mad dash for the backstage area. It causes me to look up from my phone when I hear the commotion. More people follow shortly after them. The running stops - everyone is suddenly brought to a halt, laughing and chatting as they review video footage that will be used in what I presume will be a behind-the-scenes tour video. One of the runners was a guy named Hayden Capuozzo, better known to the thousands of fans congregated outside in the venue’s main hall as Kayzo. His presence radiates positivity, and that happy energy translates into his live show. In a few hours, Kayzo will take the stage to a packed house in support of his newest effort, the genre-bending 2022 album known as New Breed.
Kayzo’s live show is a pyro-filled, headbanging, dance-hall-moving hour-long spectacle that only further proves he’s a force in one of the most exciting areas of dance music: bass music. Throughout the tracks that make up New Breed, the producer blends the gritty emotional sounds of post-hardcore, screamo, metal, and various other subgenres of rock with the thump and undeniable wall-shaking energy found on the heavier side of the dance floor. These are two genres that are worlds apart, yet have a handful of similarities; Kayzo is one of the few that can accentuate them so well in an industry where the lines between genre are becoming more and more blurry each day. Prior to the show at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Shameless SF sat down with Kayzo to discuss making music during the pandemic, the similarites between rock and bass music, and what made him fall in love with both of these genres in the first place.
Interview by Jared Stossel
Note: portions of this interview have been condensed and edited, solely for the purposes of conext and length.
You’ve been working with artists in the post-hardcore/emo/scene genre, for lack of a better term, for a long time. Devin Oliver of I See Stars was present on your 2018 album Overload, and you expanded upon those collaborations further on Unleashed and on New Breed. What is it about this genre of music that has always meant so much to you?
Way before I ever got into dance music, I grew up on all types of [music], whether it’s post-hardcore, emo, alternative, pop-punk, rock, any sort of subgenre that falls under the umbrella of rock music. That, and hip-hop. I grew up in Houston, TX, so it was southern trap hip-hop or rock music; it was one or the other. I loved hip-hop, but I also really loved rock and all the different kinds of subgenres. I didn’t find dance music until I was around 14.
Long story short - I played hockey, moved away from home at 14, played hockey with a bunch of kids from Europe. In the locker room, we all got to choose who had the aux cord. It was “the aux cord” back then, not Bluetooth! So we’d practice or play a game, and on the days that myself or any of the other guys from America got [the aux cord], you’d hear either hip-hop, rock, or whatever. The guys that were from Sweden, Finland, or Norway would put on dance music. Subconsciously, after hearing it over and over, I was like, “oh, I actually really like this stuff”. It wasn’t even bass music at first; it was kind of like Headhunterz, different kinds of techno or house, random stuff that they were into. Once I got a taste of it, I was like, “Ok, let me take a deep dive into this”. That’s where I found bass music, and where my love for that music started.
Did the love of those two genres start to converge and come together at that point?
Not really, at that point specifically, but then you fast forward to 2016. I was making a bunch of dance music, and I was finding myself very uninspired by just making dance music, stricly EDM or house. I had to step back, take a pause, and had to think, “how am I supposed to get inspired to make music right now that I’m really passionate about?”
One day, I was driving home, and I got on the aux cord in my car. I went back to my iTunes, and I scrolled back to the first songs uploaded in my library. I started going back to old Bring Me [The Horizon], Underoath, Sum 41. I was like, “hmm.” It brought a bunch of nostalgic joy back, but then I started to think, “there are some similiarities here that I find in dance music, whether it’s the writing, the melodies, the vocals”. I thought, “you know what? I’d love to bring my passion and my love for what I grew up on to what I’m really in love with now.” That’s where the spark first started.
Touching on something you said earlier, I notice when looking back at bands like Bring Me The Horizon and Underoath, and then looking at bass music artists like yourself, there is a similarity in that energy. There’s that feeling of intensity that’s very present in both of them, but they’re totally different kinds of music.
Absolutely. I think that without knowing it, people that love bass music for everything that it is, but maybe didin’t grow up on hardcore or metal, find themselves loving [rock]. But they’re at a show, they’re moshing, and they’re loving it. It’s heavy; it’s really heavy, energetic music. I started doing these crossover shows back in 2019 and started bringing bands like Memphis May Fire, Our Last Night, and I See Stars out on tour. My favorite part of that experiment was watching the crowd and seeing the fans of both bass music and fans of band music react. The coolest part was when the set opposite to the music that the fans came for came on stage, and you could kinda see the wheels turning in people’s heads. You’d see people going, “hey, wait a minute! I feel the same thing for both styles of music; I’m moshing, I’m headbanging, I’m raging.” And they didn’t even realize that there was this energy that was similar in the two worlds. That was really reaffirming, but I always knew that about the energy being that I was in love with both bass music and rock music. While they are different, there are so many similarities when it comes to the live aspect.
The creation of dance music can be a very solitary endeavor at times, where it’s just one person behind a computer keyboard creating their songs in Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton, etc. But you feature a lot of different collaborations on New Breed. I’m assuming that you were working on these songs during the pandemic, so how did you manage to create that collaborative space when creating the album?
Kind of like Overload - my first album - I didn’t go into the writing process with the intention of writing an album. Going into 2020, right before COVID, I had no intentions of writing an album. Then, COVID happens, and I started writing in my free time. Then, I thought, “I have nothing but time to write music without shows in mind.” It was a nice change of pace for my writing perspective, because a lot of times prior to COVID, I’d be writing and writing, but I’d have to write with the next festival in mind, the next show in mind - I’d have so many shows because I’d been touring so much. Sometimes, I would go, “alright, I’m going to write with these specific events in mind”. But with nothing coming up, nothing in the future at that time, I thought “alright, I can write from a different perspective”. That’s when I started writing New Breed, writing and compiling music. I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna just keep doing this because I love writing music, and there’s nothing else to do but write music, hang out with my dog and my girlfriend.” So I wrote, wrote, wrote, and then things started to open back up very slowly in 2021.
I had all these different projects, IDs, and music compiled up into a playlist. I thought, “Huh…there’s a feeling to this body of work that I didn’t realize I was writing.” It was very subconscious at the time. I thought that maybe I had another album. I didn’t want to get too excited or too stressed out with the idea of putting an album out, but I wanted to see where it would go. At that time, it was mostly instrumentals; I hadn’t even gotten into the studio or over Zoom sessions with vocalists yet. Later, I got vocals on it, started writing outside of the production part of it, and I was like, “Okay! I can kinda feel a [beginning], a middle, and now I have to write an end to it. The process of writing the album lasted from the end of 2020 up until May 2022. It was very slow, it was on and off, and I wasn’t in “album mode”, because there was no touring, so I just had unlimited time to write.
It was a very interesting and very fun way to write music, for a time. There was no specific reason to me to write outside of the fact that I love writing music.
When you would bring in artists to record vocals, would you do that all over Zoom? Or did you have some moments where you could get into the studio?
At the beginning of it, everything was more digital because COVID was still affecting everything and studios weren’t open. I was working with artists that were overseas like GHØSTKID, so a lot of it was over WhatsApp and Zoom. But like I had told you, [the recording] lasted until around the end of May 2022, so around the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, I was able to get back into a real studio and write with people. So that’s when I was able to get back into studio sessions, which was a really nice breath of fresh air. It was great to see people and be in that collaborative process with people, face to face, and get real time feedback on what we were doing writing-wise, lyrically, or production.
Kayzo performing at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, CA. Photo Credit: Jared Stossel/Shameless SF
There are a few artists on here that I’ve heard of before, like Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men, Cray, De’Wayne, POORSTACY, but there are a lot that I’ve never heard of before like Siiickbrain, conner, Banshee, the list goes on. How do you go about finding new artists, and then how do you go about choosing who to collaborate with? Do you generally have an idea for a song right off the bat, or are you writing together?
Specifically, with some of those artists that you named, my management has actually introduced me to those artists when I wasn’t aware of them at the time. We’re always talking and going back and forth on new artists, whether it’s people that they’re into or that I’m into. I’ll get messages like, “Hey! This person is cool, have you ever heard of them?” So with a lot of those artists that you named, I became fans of them throughout COVID, and more towards the end of COVID. I had people come to me and say, “Hey! Have you ever heard of this person?” I’d say, “No.” They’d say, “You should check them out.” I’d listen, then I’d go, “Oh this is really cool.” A lot of that came from that spur of the moment, with my management or friends sharing music with me. It would come from the passion of another person sharing the music that they love with me, and me going, “oh I really love that too! I’d love to work with this person, if they’re down!” That would lead to us getting into a conversation with the artist and me going, “hey I love what you do, let’s work!” It was as simple as that. It sounds as innocent as “hey you like my music, I like your music, let’s work together.”
That’s what I loved about it. It wasn’t as strategic as, “hey let’s make a song together because we have a tour coming up.” When you have a situation where people are saying, “Oh I have to talk to my management, and to my label, and we have to talk to this person, that person,” it can feel a little less cohesive and not as organic. But when it comes together as a couple text messages and two people saying, “hey I like you, let’s make music!” - that’s when the best stuff happens.
Last question for this interview: your music has evolved so much from Overload to New Breed. How do you see your music evolving beyond the release of this album? Is that even a thought at this point since you’re touring on the album? Or do you already have ideas for the future? There is no right or wrong answer to this.
That’s a good question. For me, I’m a busybody - my mind is always working creatively. Even after the release of the album, I’m already thinking of new ideas. I don’t like being in idle creatively. I don’t feel the need to always work, but I truly love writing new music. Right now, I’ve actually started writing a bunch more bass and dance-driven kinds of records, because it feels so much more refreshing to write that right now, compared to what I wrote for [New Breed}. But, I do have some new crossover collabs that I’m working on right now. I’m actually going into the studio on Monday with a band that I’ve already written a record with that wasn’t on the album. I won’t give away too much now, but I’m going back into the studio full swing with different crossover sessions, writing with different bands and tracking guitars, drums, vocals, bass, and everything else.
Right now, I really don’t know what the next phase is for me. I’m more in the moment of just wanting to keep my mind active creatively, and then I’m about to go on tour. Right now, I’m writing from a place of passion, not from a place of “okay, what’s the next body of work?” I always feel like my best music comes when I don’t strategically plan to think much about why I’m writing versus writing for fun. That’s how the albums come about, so we’ll see!
Kayzo’s current tour picks up on September 30th in Washington DC with Knife Party. For more information on tickets and show information, click here.
Kayzo
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Twitter: @KayzoMusic
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