We’ve teamed with Koyo on an exclusive tri-color vinyl variant of their debut album ‘Would You Miss It?,’ which is out today. It’s limited to 250 copies.
Joey Chiaramonte and Harold Griffin met while attending middle school on Long Island in the late 2000s, when Joey overheard Harold playing guitar in one of the school’s practice rooms. It sparked a friendship and led to Harold turning Joey onto emo and pop punk bands he had inherited from his older sister–bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, The Movielife, Thursday, and New Found Glory–and the context that those first three and others like Glassjaw and Crime In Stereo came from the same areas that Joey and Harold and their peers lived. “That in itself is such a magnetic thing,” Joey says. “The idea that it’s local, this is tangible, even though those bands were already rock stars.”
A few years later, Joey would start going to hardcore shows on Long Island and discovered the bands that were shaping the local scene at that point–bands like Backtrack, Incendiary, and King Nine–and through those bands and shows he developed a love of heavier hardcore and continued to learn more about Long Island hardcore’s history. He found the ’90s LIHC bands like VOD, Neglect, Mind Over Matter, and Silent Majority; and also started exploring older NYHC bands like Madball and Crown of Thornz; and Connecticut bands like Hatebreed, Death Threat, and 100 Demons. The realization that you could do it yourself led to him playing bass in the metallic hardcore band Typecaste and tour-managing for the similarly brutal Vein, all while maintaining his love for the melodic stuff.
“We spent quite a few years playing music to get people to whoop each other’s asses. It creates a desire for contrast.”
In the fall of 2019, Joey had a lapse in his usual touring schedule, and with the downtime, he and some childhood friends who were also around started a group chat to get the ball rolling on starting some side projects. Among those friends was Harold, who had been playing guitar in Hangman (whose other guitarist Michael Smith now fronts Pain of Truth), as well as musicians who had played in Rain of Salvation and the San Diego-based SeeYouSpaceCowboy. Two of those side projects ended up getting off the ground, Koyo and Soul Provider, which were essentially the same band with Joey handling lead vocals in the former and Harold doing so in the latter. Soul Provider embraced their love of heavy hardcore, while Koyo leaned into Long Island’s history of melodic hardcore and emo, channelling the sounds of Silent Majority, The Movielife, and early Taking Back Sunday.
“Very early on the conversations were: we need to expand the local palette of Long Island,” Joey says. “Like hardcore’s obviously hard and heavy right now, let’s contrast that a little bit, let’s do something different that pays homage to Long Island Hardcore always being a place where a lot of different types of bands could exist.”
After writing some material, they hit up local engineer (and current Pain of Truth member) Chris Rini and recorded both bands’ debut releases at the same time–Soul Provider’s demo came out in December of 2019 and Koyo’s Painting Words Into Lines EP followed on March 14, 2020, three days before every venue, nightclub, bar, and restaurant in New York was shut down due to COVID.
“It was supposed to be a local thing, it was supposed to be a part-time thing, it was supposed to be a way for best friends to get back in the room and keep it fun and light together in between all our other various touring and life endeavors,” Joey says of Koyo. “Then we put the music out, COVID happened, and it kind of took while we were stuck at home. The conversation quickly began to change.”
By the time live music started to return in the summer of 2021, Koyo’s first EP had stirred up quite a fair amount of internet buzz, and the band then signed to the beloved hardcore label Triple B, released a second EP called Drives Out East (also recorded with Chris Rini), hit the road, and started to take the band a lot more seriously. “If people want to see this in Florida, or people want to see this in California, or wherever else, it’s like: we just lost a year and a half of our lives, we should make good on that, even if it’s just temporarily,” Joey says. “And we’ve been going ever since.”
As the band continued to rise, bigger record labels started to take notice, and in March of 2022, Koyo announced that they signed to Pure Noise, just weeks before a tour with their now-labelmates Knocked Loose. Joey says the band was a little apprehensive at first to make the jump to a bigger label, but ultimately decided that “with this comes a certain commitment, not only to the label but to ourselves. If we do this, that creates this broad timeline that the band presumably has to exist and be full-time for X amount of record cycles.” They signed a two-record deal, and Joey clarifies that of course the band could still stop sooner than that if they really wanted to, “but that’s not how we operate. If we’re doing it, we want to do it for real.”
Signing to Pure Noise was also a tough decision because it meant not doing a full-length for Triple B, who the band loves and still works with on continuing to repress their back catalog, but they ultimately chose Pure Noise with the hopes of exposing their band to a wider audience outside of just the hardcore scene. “We were pretty well-known hardcore-wise, but there’s a whole world of people, perhaps in the more pop punk/emo/whatever world, that look to Pure Noise as a place to discover music, and we wanted to be in that conversation and beyond.”
Koyo wanted to have some new material out for that Knocked Loose tour, so the first thing they did for Pure Noise was release three new non-album singles: “Ten Digits Away,” “Straight North,” and an acoustic ballad called “Call It Off.” To record them, they enlisted a producer who they met at one of their very first shows, opening for Movements at NYC’s Bowery Ballroom: Jon Markson, the former Such Gold/Taking Meds member who’s also done studio work for Drug Church, Drain, One Step Closer, Regulate, and more.
“[Jon] was just like, ‘Hey man, fan of the band, true believer in the band. Would love to make music with you guys, and I’m still rooting if you say no. I’m just down with this shit, I believe in what you guys are doing,'” Joey said. “That really spoke to me, because of the other people we spoke to about recording, I don’t think we were ever met with that same genuine enthusiasm and energy that Jon brought, and it just kind of made us magnetic to him.”
They hit the studio with Jon for the singles, and “it was just magic,” Joey says. He also liked the idea of working with a producer who–like Koyo–is on the come-up. “I’d rather be shoulder-to-shoulder with the guy on his way up that does incredible work, rather than the one that’s established for the sake of playing it safe.”
When it came time to record their debut full-length album Would You Miss It?, having Jon produce was a no-brainer. “He is just such a virtuoso, has such an incredible mind for both the engineering and producing side of the record, and he brought so much nuance, tech/engineer/producer shit that I just could never have thought of, in the way of what pedals were combined to get certain sounds, what amps were combined to get certain tones, having Harold and PJ play certain parts standing up or sitting down. They’d play the part and Jon would literally mute a couple of the strings with his finger and have them keep playing as if that’s normal. He would grind out so many takes and do so many inventive things to get the sound he desired from us, and that spoke so greatly to me.”
“People always like to throw the ‘sixth band member’ cliché around,” Joey adds, “and Jon is a rare example where that is truly real. Jon is as close to being in this band as anyone could possibly be at this point. He was just such a meaningful part of finalizing that record.”
Putting out those three non-album tracks first also gave Koyo a chance to put out some new material that they were proud of, but that wasn’t going to make the cut for Would You Miss It?. For this album, Koyo were intent on making a grand statement, showing the world they’d leveled up, and contributing something new to the lineage of Long Island melodic hardcore and emo, not just paying homage to their ’90s / early 2000s favorites.
“The homage, the on-the-nose, more worship-y parts of the band in the very early catalog… we kind of blew through those ideas early on, and at the same time grew as songwriters and as a band chemistry-wise,” Joey says. “These songs were all developed with a broader, more defined vision of what our band is and could be. Even the older songs on the album that were written around the time we did the EPs all grew and developed and changed a little bit.”
Would You Miss It? doesn’t abandon Koyo’s roots–if anything, Joey says the band wanted to make sure that their first record for a bigger label wasn’t full of ballads or some other kind of drastic departure–but it definitely does put Koyo’s own unique voice front and center. It doesn’t come off like a love letter to ’90s / early 2000s Long Island melodic hardcore and emo; it stands tall next to the music of that era and rivals some of the era-defining classics. The delivery is urgent, the songwriting feels instantly timeless, and Jon Markson’s production gives it a crisp, modern shine that you’d never mistake for ’97 or 2001. It has an energy and a grit that keeps it fully in touch with Koyo’s hardcore upbringing, and catchy, cathartic hooks that transcend LIHC and welcome in a wide variety of listeners.
With a fresh take on a classic sound, Would You Miss It? is also a record that feels primed to bridge generational gaps, and it doesn’t hurt that it features guest vocals from two of Koyo’s most widely-loved forebears: Vinnie Caruana (of The Movielife and I Am the Avalanche) and Daryl Palumbo (of Glassjaw and Head Automatica). The band met Vinnie when Koyo opened for The Movielife at Brooklyn Monarch in 2021 and continued to keep in touch after that, and they wrote the song “What’s Left To Say” with his voice in mind. They sent it to him, Vinnie suggested some changes, and they ended up recording his part in a Milwaukee green room when Koyo toured with I Am The Avalanche, who Jon Markson was playing bass for, and he brought a little recording rig on tour with him for the occasion.
Daryl’s contribution came about a little differently. They still haven’t met, but Koyo reached out to him to see if he’d be interested in singing on their record, and about a year later, when the band were in the studio, he finally got back to them and said he was in. The album’s one other guest appearance comes not from a LIHC hero, but from Joey’s old pal Anthony DiDio of Vein, who lends his screams to “Flatline Afternoon.”
“We’ve managed to only include guest spots that have meaningful, tangible purpose on the record,” Joey says.
Would You Miss It? is an adrenaline rush from start to finish, and it feels like a triumphant victory from one of the most exciting new hardcore-leaning emo bands around, but Koyo’s road to success has been riddled with hurdles, and those tougher experiences informed many of Joey’s lyrics on the record. “We lived a lot of life, from hitting the road in fall of 2021 to when we finished recording Would You Miss It? in November of 2022,” he says. “In that year and change, we all just went through a lot individually and interpersonally, and rubbed elbows with a lot of adversity in life. We went through hard financial times; Harold had a really serious injury that forced him to relearn how to walk while we were recording the record; we’ve had vans shitting out on every damn tour, [leaving us] sleeping on the side of the highway hoping a truck doesn’t smash into us while we wait for AAA. We really lived it. We grinded it out, played for no money, slept on floors like we’ve done with all of our other bands, just in the band that optically was a little bigger. I definitely think my personal mental health went off the rails.”
“It all just kind of caught up to me, and a lot of the record is just about resenting people that let you down and resenting when the world lets you down,” he continues. “But also so much of the record is about love and community. It’s such an interesting contrast because the positive songs like ‘Anthem’ are very positive and hopeful, and then there are songs like ‘Flatline Afternoon’ that are about: I’m a type one diabetic and what that means for me is I’m sick for my entire life, even if I don’t always feel sick, I’m just at all hours of the day combating an illness. It’s a cathartic thing to talk about it and reflect on it, but there is no positivity in that beyond someone might relate to it and then feel some type of peace.”
Would You Miss It? doesn’t necessarily have answers, but it allows you find solace in knowing you’re not alone. It battles internal negativity by giving you something to scream along to at the top of your lungs.
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Would You Miss It? is out today (9/29) via Pure Noise. Stream it below and pick up our exclusive tri-color vinyl variant, limited to 250.
Catch Koyo on tour, including opening Thursday‘s War All The Time 20th anniversary show at NJ’s Starland Ballroom on Saturday (9/30) with Sparta and Tim Kasher.
Koyo — 2023 Tour Dates
09/30 Sayreville, NJ @ Starland Ballroom *
10/12 Detroit, MI @ Tangent +
10/13 Chicago, IL @ Bottom Lounge +
10/14 Lakewood, OH @ Mahall’s +
10/15 Toronto, ON @ Velvet +
12/01 Leipzig, DE @ Felsenkeller #
12/02 Berlin DE @ Columbia Theater #
12/03 Hamburg, DE @ Grosse Freiheit 36 #
12/04 Utrecht, NE @ Tivoli #
12/05 Paris, FR @ Glazart #
12/06 Ghent, BE @ Vooruit #
12/07 Nurnberg, DE@ Lowensaal #
12/08 Switzerland @ Aarau Kiff #
12/09 Wiesbaden, DE @ Schlachthof #
12/10 Koln, DE @ Carlswerm Victoria #
+ w/ Superheaven, Prize Horse
* w/ Thursday, Sparta, Tim Kasher
^ w/ Four Year Strong
# w/ Stick To Your Guns, Get The Shot, End It
