SeeYouSpaceCowboy: Romance, Revival And Representation
California’s SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY have been on quite the climb since their formation in 2016. In just five years, they’ve become one of the most popular bands of the so-called ‘revivalcore’ scene, their throwback sound drawing in both nostalgic fans and new ones who missed the whole MySpace boat the first time around. Their latest album, The Romance Of Affliction, arrives at a time when many others are drawing on metalcore and post-hardcore of days gone by with impressive results, but it still finds SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY maintaining a firm stamp of their own identity even as they push into new territories.
For guitarist Ethan Sgarbossa, the band’s vision has changed a lot over the past five years. Starting out as a bunch of kids who wanted to make “crazy wacky music”, they soon realised that they might actually be onto something. “We all love music and that’s what we want to do,” he explains. “We’ve quit our jobs over it many a time, so I feel like at this point, being on the label and all that, our vision is just to try and make it work while staying true to ourselves and who we are as a band, because we don’t ever want to sacrifice those things and have change that’s too drastic or isn’t us. The album helps with that, I feel like it’s quintessential for us as a developing band and our identity.”
Central to that identity is SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY’s proud focus on queer representation, seen perhaps more obviously than ever before in the video for recent single The End To A Brief Moment Of Lasting Intimacy. “Everyone in the band is queer to some aspect,” elaborates Sgarbossa. “With our music videos especially we just feel like we want to be out there. We don’t want to be like another band playing a music video just in their clothes… We wanna do crazy stuff that’s gonna catch eyes and be flamboyant and fucking out there.”
It certainly seems to be working – we join Sgarbossa just hours before he and the band are off to practice for a support slot with Sheffield arena-fillers BRING ME THE HORIZON. Unsurprisingly, he’s pretty excited: “We had been talking to Oli [Sykes, frontman] a little bit before and he had posted our band a couple times so we were just kinda hoping that something like this would happen but it feels great. I’m hoping we get to introduce a bunch of new people to our band because the show is sold out and none of those people bought tickets for us, so hopefully we can gain some new fans from that.”
Sykes and co. aren’t the only ones paying attention either. As well as boasting solid performances from the band themselves, The Romance Of Affliction features guest appearances from scene royalty in Keith Buckley of EVERY TIME I DIE and Aaron Gillespie of UNDEROATH. Of course, Sgarbossa has nothing but positives for both these legends. “I’m just so happy that they agreed to be a part of the record,” he smiles. “It means so much coming from that realm and being like ‘I support what you’re doing and I wanna be a part of it’.”
These features, as well as the presence of producer Isaac Hale of KNOCKED LOOSE, may add to the excitement surrounding the album, but ultimately there’s no question that this record is SYSC through and through. Following on from 2019’s The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds, and with several members, including the band’s primary songwriter, having since left, Sgarbossa was keen to recapture the SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY sound as it was originally intended. “Coming out of Correlations with this one it was just like ‘what do we see this band sounding like?’ because I felt like we’d lost part of what made us SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY with that album, which was the zany, sassy flamboyant kinda stuff. But we also wanted to push the sound forward, because we feel like evolving, not staying stagnant was the right thing.”
The results speak for themselves, with The Romance Of Affliction making for surely the band’s most expansive offering to date. This time around they’ve turned the clean vocal choruses up to 11, and while the record has most of its feet firmly planted in the past, it still manages to capture a freshness that shows just how SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY have made the name for themselves that they have. “I think a lot of it is coming from the genre of sass and that side of MySpace type music,” muses Sgarbossa. “I don’t think that’s really a realm that people have tried to delve into when they’re just remaking it anymore… I think what we’re doing is blending like a couple of different worlds and I love it. I love the sound that we’re creating there so I’m gonna keep doing whatever I love doing. I think that’s how we’re doing it.”
As for what’s next for the band, the future seems as bright as their music is bleak. Sgarbossa touches on many of the usual promises of new music and upcoming tours, but it’s clear that he and the rest of SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY are still very much just getting started. “I just want to keep pushing forward,” he concludes. “I want to get on support tours with bands that I love, I just want to keep going.”
The Romance Of Affliction is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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