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“I look so fucked up proper now. The pollen the place we’re is messing everybody up,” Dying Lens vocalist Bryan Torres tells me simply earlier than flipping the digital camera round to indicate off the beachside view from the van. The band didn’t but know my title — it was our first dialog — and already it felt as if we have been outdated associates.
After having performed many buttoned-up and overly rehearsed interviews myself, the band’s vitality was refreshing — and paying homage to the fanzine interviews I learn as a child, those that supplied a peek right into a dialog between two friends. I knew then, earlier than even formally introducing myself, that I’d end the interview as a newly transformed fan.
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The group had simply wrapped up their month-long tour with Teen Mortgage, their longest stint out on the highway but, however already Dying Lens have been again of their van, headed towards Templeton, California, for a weekend run with fellow California-based indie-rock band Collectively Pangea, to kick off the discharge of their latest report, Chilly World.
Because the music trade calls for of many rising bands, Dying Lens have a busy tour schedule. “The times are arduous. Typically you don’t wish to do it; you don’t have the vitality; you wish to go house. However you retain pushing,” Torres says. “Then I see individuals have a deep reference to the music, and I wouldn’t ask for the rest.”
Given the band’s precarious begin, Dying Lens’ newfound success is a nice improvement. The mission — which first began as an instrumental surf-punk again in 2012 whereas Torres, the one remaining authentic member, was nonetheless in highschool — went via a slew of member adjustments and iterations earlier than discovering their footing. “The most important transition got here when [Torres] referred to as it quits attributable to debt loans,” guitarist Jhon Reyes says. “However at some point, considered one of [our] outdated songs got here on the radio, and I simply began crying. My girlfriend was telling me to return and check out once more; that I couldn’t go away it because it was. Then I met the remainder of the fellows.” Torres provides, “Although Dying Lens has existed for a very long time, it looks like lots of accomplishments in only a couple years.”
Since then, the band have launched Fuck This (2016), Beer Up Solely Membership (2017), No Luck (2022), and now their most senior album, Chilly World. For Dying Lens, all of their previous efforts have led to this new physique of labor. The songs on Chilly World showcase a continuation of lots of the themes they first started exploring on No Luck with the added complexity and maturity that point, expertise, and a little bit assist from their producer Brett Romnes (Scorching Mulligan, Mother Denims) supplies.
“We love [Romnes]. We saved calling him the sixth member of Dying Lens as a result of he did a lot for us within the studio,” Torres says. “As quickly as we obtained off the aircraft in New Jersey, all of us grew to become finest associates.”
Romnes’ affect is obvious all through the album. With layered, fuzzy riffs and sugary backing vocals, Chilly World filters their shoegaze affect via the occasional eruption of vitality and anger. The injection of Romnes’ signature sound added a layer of heaviness that wasn’t fairly current within the band’s earlier work, one thing that Torres and Reyes are nonetheless impressed with.
“What caught with us was that he wasn’t there to dictate — he was there to encourage,” Reyes says. “He believed within the music, and that’s all we would like when working with a producer.”
Regardless of the added clout of working with somebody of Romnes’ legacy, Dying Lens are hesitant to name themselves a hardcore band, understanding of the realpolitik that comes with associating oneself in that neighborhood.
“The hardcore neighborhood has been round for an extended, very long time, and though the scene is turning into extra mainstream, which permits bands to department out extra, we aren’t making an attempt to label ourselves as a hardcore band,” Reyes says.
“We have been at all times caught on this limbo, not fairly becoming the sound of hardcore or punk, however with the recognition of bands like Turnstile and Militarie Gun, there are extra alternatives for us,” Torres provides.
Whether or not or not they wish to be lumped in with the present rise in reputation of hardcore as a style, the punk affect of their music doesn’t go unnoticed — Dying Lens make express effort to weave social and political activism into their lyrics and dwell reveals. Their single “Disturb the Peace” can solely be described as an anthem of revolution. Like early LA and New York hardcore bands of the ’80s and ’90s, Torres makes use of lyrics as a possibility to touch upon the hardship that he, as an individual of colour, experiences and sees (“One shot ok/Nothing from nothing to the highest/Immigrant raised, gave me the whole lot/By way of the chaos, via the flames”).
Throughout their tour with Teen Mortgage, they waved a Palestinian flag onstage and spoke out in opposition to Israeli Imperialism. In dialog, guitar participant Matt Silva outlines a extra concrete political framework for me, stating that the band help socialist ideology. “We don’t really feel an exterior stress to be political, however I do see it as our responsibility to talk up for individuals who are in the identical place as us, however don’t have the platform we now have,” Silva says.
Immediately, as they start to see the payoff of their years’ value of efforts, their world usually seems to be fairly completely different from the one they criticize in “Disturb the Peace.” Having grown up impressed by the success of different LA-based, former-local bands, seeing outfits like FIDLAR and Butthole Surfers turn into their friends is surreal, in line with Torres. However that isn’t to say Dying Lens’ burgeoning success hasn’t include the quintessential hardships.
In April, on the ultimate stretch of their full U.S. tour, their rental van broke down, leaving them stranded within the Midwest for 5 days and forcing them to cancel a number of dates. After they couldn’t safe a brand new rental van, and anxious they wouldn’t have the ability to afford to fly house, they discovered themselves on the dealership, signing off on a brand-new car and spending more cash than they beforehand might fathom. In the event you assume a broken-down van and a few missed tour dates soured Dying Lens on touring, you’d be sorely mistaken. “In the long run, we obtained house. It’s identical to a ceremony of passage. Each band has to undergo some van troubles,” Torres says.
Proper on cue, Silva hops into the entrance seat and begins pulling their van out of the beachside parking house, heading towards their subsequent present. The jam-packed schedule of an rising expertise by no means appears to permit for breaks. In a number of months, Dying Lens shall be en path to Europe for a shocking three-month run, a tour 3 times the size of the one they’ve simply completed. Till then, nonetheless, Torres says the crew will simply be “celebrating the discharge of their long-awaited report, Chilly World.”
