Death Lens appear in our Summer 2024 Issue with cover stars Wallows, Drain, Maya Hawke, the Linda Lindas, and Winnetka Bowling League. Head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.
“I look so fucked up right now. The pollen where we are is messing everyone up,” Death Lens vocalist Bryan Torres tells me just before flipping the camera around to show off the beachside view from the van. The band didn’t yet know my name — it was our first conversation — and already it felt as though we were old friends.
After having conducted many buttoned-up and overly rehearsed interviews myself, the band’s energy was refreshing — and reminiscent of the fanzine interviews I read as a kid, the ones that offered a peek into a conversation between two peers. I knew then, before even formally introducing myself, that I would finish the interview as a newly converted fan.
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The group had just wrapped up their month-long tour with Teen Mortgage, their longest stint out on the road yet, but already Death Lens were back in their van, headed toward Templeton, California, for a weekend run with fellow California-based indie-rock band Together Pangea, to kick off the release of their newest record, Cold World.
As the music industry demands of many emerging bands, Death Lens have a busy tour schedule. “The days are hard. Sometimes you don’t want to do it; you don’t have the energy; you want to go home. But you keep pushing,” Torres says. “Then I see people have a deep connection with the music, and I wouldn’t ask for anything else.”
Given the band’s precarious start, Death Lens’ newfound success is a pleasant development. The project — which first started as an instrumental surf-punk back in 2012 while Torres, the only remaining original member, was still in high school — went through a slew of member changes and iterations before finding their footing. “The biggest transition came when [Torres] called it quits due to debt loans,” guitarist Jhon Reyes says. “But one day, one of [our] old songs came on the radio, and I just started crying. My girlfriend was telling me to go back and try again; that I couldn’t leave it as it was. Then I met the rest of the guys.” Torres adds, “Even though Death Lens has existed for a long time, it feels like a lot of accomplishments in just a couple years.”
Since then, the band have released Fuck This (2016), Beer Up Only Club (2017), No Luck (2022), and now their most senior album, Cold World. For Death Lens, all of their past efforts have led to this new body of work. The songs on Cold World showcase a continuation of many of the themes they first began exploring on No Luck with the added complexity and maturity that time, experience, and a little help from their producer Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, Mom Jeans) provides.
“We love [Romnes]. We kept calling him the sixth member of Death Lens because he did so much for us in the studio,” Torres says. “As soon as we got off the plane in New Jersey, we all became best friends.”
Romnes’ influence is apparent throughout the album. With layered, fuzzy riffs and sugary backing vocals, Cold World filters their shoegaze influence through the occasional eruption of energy and anger. The injection of Romnes’ signature sound added a layer of heaviness that wasn’t quite present in the band’s previous work, something that Torres and Reyes are still impressed with.
“What stuck with us was that he wasn’t there to dictate — he was there to inspire,” Reyes says. “He believed in the music, and that’s all we want when working with a producer.”
Despite the added clout of working with someone of Romnes’ legacy, Death Lens are hesitant to call themselves a hardcore band, understanding of the realpolitik that comes with associating oneself in that community.
“The hardcore community has been around for a long, long time, and even though the scene is becoming more mainstream, which allows bands to branch out more, we aren’t trying to label ourselves as a hardcore band,” Reyes says.
“We were always stuck in this limbo, not quite fitting the sound of hardcore or punk, but with the popularity of bands like Turnstile and Militarie Gun, there are more opportunities for us,” Torres adds.
Whether or not they want to be lumped in with the current rise in popularity of hardcore as a genre, the punk influence in their music doesn’t go unnoticed — Death Lens make explicit effort to weave social and political activism into their lyrics and live shows. Their single “Disturb the Peace” can only be described as an anthem of revolution. Like early LA and New York hardcore bands of the ’80s and ’90s, Torres uses lyrics as an opportunity to comment on the hardship that he, as a person of color, experiences and sees (“One shot good enough/Nothing from nothing to the top/Immigrant raised, gave me everything/Through the chaos, through the flames”).
During their tour with Teen Mortgage, they waved a Palestinian flag onstage and spoke out against Israeli Imperialism. In conversation, guitar player Matt Silva outlines a more concrete political framework for me, stating that the band support socialist ideology. “We don’t feel an external pressure to be political, but I do see it as our duty to speak up for those who are in the same position as us, but don’t have the platform we have,” Silva says.
Today, as they begin to see the payoff of their years’ worth of efforts, their world often looks quite different from the one they criticize in “Disturb the Peace.” Having grown up inspired by the success of other LA-based, former-local bands, seeing outfits like FIDLAR and Butthole Surfers become their peers is surreal, according to Torres. But that isn’t to say Death Lens’ burgeoning success hasn’t come with the quintessential hardships.
In April, on the final stretch of their full U.S. tour, their rental van broke down, leaving them stranded in the Midwest for five days and forcing them to cancel multiple dates. When they couldn’t secure a new rental van, and worried they wouldn’t be able to afford to fly home, they found themselves at the dealership, signing off on a brand-new vehicle and spending more money than they previously could fathom. If you think a broken-down van and some missed tour dates soured Death Lens on touring, you’d be sorely mistaken. “In the end, we got home. It’s just like a rite of passage. Every band has to go through some van troubles,” Torres says.
Right on cue, Silva hops into the front seat and begins pulling their van out of the beachside parking space, heading toward their next show. The jam-packed schedule of an emerging talent never seems to allow for breaks. In a few months, Death Lens will be en route to Europe for a stunning three-month run, a tour three times the length of the one they’ve just finished. Until then, however, Torres says the crew will just be “celebrating the release of their long-awaited record, Cold World.”
