Recently, we were able to catch up with the up and coming Florida hardcore band, Years Off My Life after their show at the Soundbar on August 1st. During their interview we got all the details on their new EP,the start-up of the band, and what we could expect from them in the future. Their new EP Dystopia is now available on all streaming services. Keep reading to find out all you need to know about Years Off My Life, the band you all should be listening to!
You guys are from Winter Park, tell me how you guys came to be as band? What was the motivation and inspiration behind it?
Kaelan Saunders (Lead Guitar/Vocals): So, we started as a band, because Caleb and I has started the baby stages of a different project. So, we took what we were doing with that and we got Bailey on vocals and pretty much wrote half the EP with just us three. Then we later got Sam, who’s currently in the band Mansfield to be our bass player. Then we just kept writing and writing and practicing from about July and August of 2018 up until our first show in November, and we got Isaac to join the band probably a week or two before the show.
Isaac Hylton (Rhythm Guitar): Yeah, Mansfield had another show they were doing, and I need to fill in on bass for that show, and then after that we decided I would become the rhythm guitarist (for Years Off My Life).
Kaelan: It’s also interesting because Isaac, Bailey, and I are the only ones who actually live in Orlando/Winter Park. Like Scott is from Polk County and Caleb is from Lake Wales….?
Caleb Ward (Drums): Polk County…. well, it’s more like Lakeland.
Kaelan: Oh, there you go! But yeah, they’re about an hour away.
This is kind of a bland question, but any meaning behind the name Years Off My Life? Was there any inspiration behind it? Where did it come from?
Kaelan: Years Off My Life is a lyric from a song from a band, that we take a lot of on inspiration from, and if you can figure out who it is…. we’ll give you a high five!
Your single Concrete Statues recently hit over a thousand listens on Spotify, how did it feel when you guys finally reached that goal?
Kaelan: So, I was kind of like ecstatic, because Switch took over eight months *laughs*to break a thousand and to see Concrete Statues do that in just over a month is insane.
Isaac:It was a month from release, exactly pretty much. *collective agreement from others* Because I remember it was like two or three months ago that we were celebrating that Switch finally got over a thousand, and then we put this single out, and it got a thousand in just about a month. Yeah, we were all super excited. It was good to see that growth like, right up front.
Kaelan: What’s even more crazy is that we were in the studio, like the first day we were in the studio Switchbroke a thousand, and it’s even crazier now because Switch has almost two thousand now.
Isaac: Right.
Kaelan: And I mean like, we all kind of hate that demo. We don’t think it’s that good, as opposed to like our new stuff. It’s still on the EP but it’s still….
Isaac: We’re super excited for the new mixes.
Kaelan: Yeah, it’s a little different too. It’s not just the same song, we changed the breakdown a little bit. It has some electronic elements.
Isaac: Yeah, and our producer sprinkled on. Yeah no, we’re really happy.
I can imagine, your EP coming out on August 9th, what can your listeners expect from it? Is it similar sounding to your to stand-alone singlesConcrete Statues and Switch? Or can we expect something new from you guys?
Kaelan: Anyone who’s been seeing us live has already heard all of the new songs on the EP, but obviously for people who haven’t.Switchand Concrete Statues are kind of like the jist songs, they kind of have a little of everything we have to offer at certain points. In Motion is our softest song but it still has that same kind of intensity. A lot of people have compared Concrete Statues to like Beartooth, and similar things to that, which is awesome. But it’s probably the only song on the entire EP that kind of gives of that vibe. We take inspiration from all aspects of hardcore and post hardcore bands, and just throw it into the melting pot the we call our band. *laughs*So, I would say that Switchis probably up there when it comes to out heaviest, but our heaviest song on the EP is called Icarus, and In Motion is our softest song. So, both of those (Switchand Concrete Statues) are like the middle ground.
Isaac:Yeah, I was going say you can expect more of the same, but different.
Kaelan: Just different in-between areas, but different.
Scoot Hooker (Bass): Different dynamics, but same genre.
Thank you for leading me into my next question but on your EP, what kind of style influences can we expect to see? Who were some of the biggest influences while writing this record?
Kaelan: Well, I’ve been writing this EP for a long, long time and I mean like I’ll kind of just do something, and be like what should we do to this? Then I’ll throw it in the group chat and get feedback and we all can just collaborate after the skeleton is pretty much made. Do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, which is awesome. Bailey and I wrote the vocals, we collaborate on pretty much all of the lyrics. But I don’t know, we call ourselves emotive hardcore just because we wanted to invent a new genre, so on and so forth in a sense. But we do a lot, we have metal-core influences, hardcore influences. A lot of people just call us post-hardcore because it’s such a broad genre, that we would fall into that.
Isaac: I feel like a good way to describe that we came up with emotive hardcore is that everyone in the band listens to hardcore, and we have a lot of hardcore influences. We’re all really hardcore kids at heart, like we love dancing like two-steps and pick-up changes, and things like that. So, we take a lot of hardcore influences, but we still heavily appeal, especially sound wise, to the metal-core and the more emotional crowds, which isn’t necessarily something you would tie in to hardcore. So, that’s kind of where we are.
Caleb: Choruses! Catchy choruses! Hardcore with choruses!
Isaac: Hard choruses, that’s our genre.
Tell me a bit about being in the studio for your EP, about the ups and down of recording more than a single? Did it put any pressure on you guys as a band?
*Laughing*
Caleb: I had a blast!
Scott: It was a lot of fucking fun! We recorded at a great studio!
Caleb: The learning experience is realtight!
Bailey Vaughn (Lead Vocals): Yeah, the studio we recorded at is called the Audio Compound, and we recorded with Andy Karpovik. The Audio Compound is owned by Andrew Wade and Jeremy Mckinnon of A Day to Remember. I actually was able to intern with Andrew Wade for like seven months, so I became really good friends with him. We got a really good deal and were able to get hooked up with Andy and he really set our sound to what we wanted. He like could really hear and see what we wanted.
Isaac: I love the product that we got, and it was really just such an enjoyable experience. . .
Bailey: It was really smooth.
Isaac: Other than the fact that Bailey, like the day before he had to track his vocals, had to get mouth surgery.
Bailey: Yeah, and then I did the vocals three days later.
Isaac: Yeah, three days later.
Caleb: So, when you hear that pain, he’s in pain.
*Laughing*
Isaac: Yeah, it was just so enjoyable, and Andy made it really easy for us. Pretty much we’ll just go in, and then we’ll get lunch, and then we’ll hang out and then-
Caleb: We’ll play Mortal Combat.
Isaac: Yeah, we’ll play Mortal Combat in the studio.
Kaelan: Andrew Wade has this dog named Dobie, and he’s like the light of our life.
Isaac: Studio dog.
Isaac & Kaelan: Studio dogs-
Kaelan: are amazing. Yeah, no. He made it like, it wasn’t cutthroat at all. Like we *laughs*
, it was very interesting because like you hear about stuff like that and you think it’s like dicking around, but in realization you’re still doing shit while you’re dicking around, is the bestfeeling in the world. Cause you to get to like to do what you want to do while also doing what you need to do. It was great, just a great time.
I saw that you guys got added to the Being as An Ocean show here in Orlando, how excited are you guys for that? What was it like finding out that you were being added to that show?
Isaac: You know, it’s kind of hard to say. I think that we’ve kind of, we’re one of the bands that do a lot in the Orlando scene and we’ve really been leading up to this EP with booking shows. Luckily, we’ve been able to gain a following in Orlando and we got in really good with Jared from Soundbar. We’ve been really just working and doing stuff, so when it came to getting that show, it was really more of just an email asking if we could do it and then that’s it.
Kaelan: It gets to that point, where half of you is like, in a none cocky way, “yeah, that make’s sense” and then the other half of you is like “holy shit, I’m doing this”. And it’s really weird, it’s a really weird world. We’re humble, and we’ll probably never not be. We’ve all dreamt of doing what we’re doing for a really long, in different ways than others. We all have musical aspects, like Scott has his own like music comedian thing, where he does Scott Hooker. That’s getting traction now.
Scott: Yeah, this is unfortunately one of my last few shows, the next one with be my last one with these guys. It’s really fucking hard, but I got to do what I got to do.
Kaelan: It’s okay. But yeah, when we get shows like that, we’re always like wow this is crazy. But we’re also like yeah, we see the progress.
Isaac: It’s very crazy, but at the same time we look at it like we’ve worked up to it at this point. We only have it, not because we’re lucky, but because of how hard we’ve worked for it.
How excited were you guys for the show tonight? What did you think of the turn out?
All of them: Yeah!
Caleb: I’m excited for every show!
Kaelan: Yeah, we’re always excited for shows!
Isaac: We’ve played shows in backyards with no bands that we’ve ever heard of and we were still super stoked. It really comes down to, we’re up here, we’re doing it, we’re guys that love playing music, we’re always going to be excited for shows.
Kaelan: Yeah, and Isaac and I are both in like four different bands, so we’re just always playing show non-stops. No, but even then, specifically for Red Handed, this show was kind of like a test to see if this niche kind of likes what we do, and we got a really good response.
Scott: What I liked seeing about the shows that we play, is that half the time we’ll see people that we know and people that fuck with us. But then there’ll be like half of the people that are fucking with us that we don’t know, and that’s really cool.
Isaac:I think one thing I can really lend to with our excitedness to play shows is that like our live, crowd interactions is always really, really good.
Caleb: And I like watching people get hit!
*Laughing*
Isaac: No seriously! We all love moshing and being in the hardcore scene. We all have friends who love moshing, and they always come out and see us. So, every show we’re playing we can depend on that kind of reaction, and other people who don’t know us seeing that kind of reaction and that’s a factor to drawing them in. We also really want our fans to know who are as like people, because we all listen to things other than hardcore. So, when we first started the band, we all made like twenty song playlists of who we draw inspiration from.
Check that out on the Years Off My Life Spotify!
Do you still get nerves, or have you gotten used to being on stage overtime?
Caleb: Fuck yeah! Every show.
Isaac: Always.
Caleb: But then it goes away right when I sit down, but that’s me though.
Isaac: A lot of it now is really just like, I get nervous about technical difficulties, and I feel like that’s PTSD from one of our first few shows. Like we were playing this Christmas fest at like Uncle Lou’s and halfway through our set Bailey’s mic crowd wrapped around my peddle board and pulled out my power. I had like no sound for like half the set, and people in the crowd were like rushing to fix things, and I was like “I don’t know what’s going on!”
Kaelan: Even like recently, we played a set at Will’s Pub and Isaac broke a string on like the first song.
Isaac: Yeah! I did not even- it was like the middle of the Intro and I broke my lowest string, the one string I cannot break, and it broke halfway into the Intro. I played like that the whole set! It wasn’t even a clean break, like it was the inside of the guitar and I kept trying to tune it and it just kept unraveling.
Kaelan: I had a back-up guitar and he never told me!
Isaac: I didn’t know!
Kaelan: So, he played like that the whole set and I was like ‘what the fuck’!
Last few questions, what can we expect from you guys from here on out? Do you guys have any exciting upcoming plans? More shows, or even a tour?
Kaelan: We’re playing I Am Convicted Fest at the end of August, our EP release show is August 10th, and then we’re playing Sheltered Fest in October.
Isaac:Kaelan and I are trying very, very hard to get this show booked at the end of October, so we’re stoked to hopefully announce that.
Caleb: And heavier!
Isaac: Yes.
Caleb: We’re making it heavier!
Isaac: We will be making it heavier.
Scott: Keeping it heavy while losing their heaviest member.
*Laughing*
Kaelan: I love you!
More writing planned?
Isaac: We are always writing.
Fair enough.
Kaelan: We might have something planned for the end of August.
Isaac: We have songs on deck right now that didn’t make the EP that we are dying to play.
Plans for an album?
Isaac: Yep. Maybe looking at a B-side.
Kaelan: We’re maybe looking at a little B-side thing for the fall, but after that, more writing.
Isaac: Yeah but do expect a full length.
Kaelan: You will get a full length before you get another EP
Isaac: Let’s be a band that only releases EP.
Anything else?
Isaac: Nope.
Kaelan: Not that I can think of.
Well that’s all, thanks for sitting down with me!
Don't forget to check out Years Off My Life EP Dystopia, available on Spotify! Follow them on their social media's as well!
Instagram: yearsoffmylife
Twitter: YOMLFL
You can catch them at I Am Convicted Fest on August 31st! Check out there socials for tickets!
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