How Drain are inviting people to join the pit with Living Proof
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 show that night, but he also couldn’t bring himself to let it slide altogether. He wanted the touring bands to know he appreciated them stopping in his city and putting on for his scene. So, still covered in ink from printing merch at work all day, he ducked into the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz, California, during load-in. “These guys are in my town. I gotta say what’s up, you know?” he recalls. “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. A lot has changed in Ciaramitaro’s world since then, but this desire to always be a part of it has not, and likely never will. A couple of weeks ago, he walked his burly frame, accented by bags under his eyes from a stint touring Europe with his ultra-buzzy hardcore band Drain, over to a local show. His crew was a little surprised 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.”
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After breaking out with 2020’s California Cursed, a mosh-primed mix of hardcore bounce and crossover thrash chaos that had its initial tour plans swallowed by the pandemic, Drain’s second album, Living Proof (out this Friday, May 5), is set to be released by punk giants Epitaph Records. Tour posters for runs across North America and Europe, meanwhile, are groaning under the weight of sold-out notices.
Sometimes you get a feeling that a band are going to blow up, and that feeling has been following Drain — completed by guitarist Cody Chavez and drummer Tim Flegal — around for a while now. Living Proof’s title obliquely acknowledges that fact. It is a reminder that you — yes, you — can do this. “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 attitude will only be sharpened by hardcore’s continued moment in the sun. A lot of the dialogue surrounding the genre is couched in post-Turnstile terms, but the ongoing influence of the San Jose-Santa Cruz scene can’t be overstated, with bands such as Scowl, Sunami and No Right all windmilling their own path toward the spotlight alongside Drain.
History is dotted with similar creative outbreaks that were 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 protective of the bands and people who have carried the baton to this point. “Hell yeah” is his succinct response to that idea. “Hell yeah, dude.”
Read the comments below any hate5six video and you’ll get a front-row seat to a fierce debate about gatekeeping in hardcore, fueled in part by the explosion of online content that offered a vicarious thrill during the lean pandemic years (chief among it the Real Bay Shit parking lot show that Ciaramitaro helped put on with his friends). For Ciaramitaro, it’s not really a question of how you came to the music. He doesn’t want to push folks out; he wants them to 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 observation because Ciaramitaro already knows what it’s like when hype overtakes reality. For several years, he played drums for the short-lived, none-more-confrontational Gulch, whose rep was founded on feral music and, through no fault of their own, a circus that sprang up around their merch. Ciaramitaro works with Cole Kakimoto, Gulch’s guitarist and chief creative force, at his San Jose print shop, where they made each design that sparked snaking lines at the table and sent the internet 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 testament to their grinding, uncompromising blend of hardcore and death metal that burning out seemed like the logical option. The whole circus around Gulch was threatening to drag it away from its roots and strand its members on an island they wanted 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 different. This is Ciaramitaro’s baby, and, in the back of his head, he’s always hung on to the idea that it could last. “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 kid who had his eyes opened by punk radio and house shows that threw together hardcore and metal bands with little to no distinction between the two. Years later, Living Proof offers a similar crossing of the streams. Where Gulch’s recorded music was tracked live to ape their knotted, grotty noise, here Drain have teamed with producer Taylor Young to serve up a record that hits hard while also 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 other side of the fence are lyrics that cut deep. Ciaramitaro is proud of the fact that he sings like he speaks, with zero concern for decoration or misdirection. The tension, though, comes from seeing someone with such an outwardly bouncy demeanor (Stereogum’s Julian Towers recently reported a couple of kids at a show describing him as “a ‘golden retriever’ of a man”) relating lacerating self-doubt and anxiety. Living Proof’s lead single “Evil Finds Light,” for one, is a whirling dervish of breakdowns and flailing excitement that centers around 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, right there, is fuel for a killer hardcore show. Few arenas outside of contact sports offer the same chance for physical and emotional release, and Ciaramitaro is well aware that Drain straddle those two states better 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 person at the front, copping elbows and commingling sweat. Be the person nodding at the back whose $20 on the door will help get the band to the next town. Just find a way to be there when you can. That’s what Sammy Ciaramitaro is going to do, whether he’s just returned from a big tour sponsored by an energy drink or is spending a night off talking with his friends about that time they were in a band together. “Just go — then you’re a part of this,” he says. “Just go to the shows.”
