PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Capstan is on a mission to keep its listeners guessing.
This Orlando, Florida-based band, comprised of Joseph Mabry, Anthony DeMario, Scott Fisher, Andrew Bozymowski, and Harrison Bormann, has always penned tracks that run the gamut, from deathcore and metalcore to soft, heart-gripping melodies reminiscent of Mayday Parade. And its new music is no exception.
In recent weeks, Capstan has been rather busy. Not only did it release four fresh singles (“Heart to Heart,” “Arrows,” “Bloom” and “Bête Noire”), it’s also gearing up for a US and Canadian tour with Welsh rock band Holding Absence, which is headlining across North America for the very first time.
Ahead of the tour, and on the heels of the fourth single drop, PopHorror chatted with Capstan‘s guitarist Mabry about hitting the road, wide-ranging influences, fatherhood, and his enjoyment of hate comments on social media.
PopHorror: I’d love to start with the tour that you guys are going on with Holding Absence. Can you talk about how that came to be and how you’re feeling about it as it gets closer?
Joseph Mabry: We’re really excited for it. Me personally, too, it’s actually kind of cool, when we first toured the UK, it was in 2019, and someone over there showed them to me, and that’s when I first started listening to Holding Absence. That song “Like A Shadow,” I really like that song. So I was listening to them for a really long time, and then when they kind of blew up, I was like, “This is sick.”
And then as far as how the tour came to fruition, from what I’ve heard, it was somebody in their camp more or less reached out to us, I think maybe they dig our music, too. So it’ll be really exciting. I think the vibes will be sweet and I’m stoked to hear them play every night. It’s always really cool when you get to go on tour with a band that you actually listen to their music outside of being on tour.
PopHorror: Definitely. And you have a similar sound, so I’m sure the fans will overlap a little bit, right?
Joseph Mabry: Yeah, that’s what we’re hoping for, as well. We feel pretty confident and the same.
PopHorror: So you guys are going to be on the road for two months…is there anything you do ahead of time to prepare?
Joseph Mabry: Yeah, it sucks also too when you’re prepping for a tour during the holidays essentially because there is a lot to do, especially for us. There’s a lot of gear stuff too and building the show, but I won’t bore you with all the nerdy, technical stuff. But yeah, it definitely gets time-consuming, and we’re in the middle of rebuilding our setup, too. But we’ve been practicing and working on slowly getting our stuff ready for tour. We’ve also been a last-minute type of band. We’ll be scrambling a day before we’re supposed to drive to frigging Los Angeles or something trying to get everything together. We’re deep in the middle of the prep right now, obviously around Christmas as much as we can coordinate schedules over the holidays.
And we’re doing some, in addition to the tour with Holding Absence, we do some headline Capstan shows because this tour starts and ends very far from Florida where we’re from. It starts in Seattle and ends in Worchester, Massachusetts, so we’re trying to play some shows on the way out and on the way back, as well. It’s gonna be a little of a longer tour for us. When all’s said and done, I think it’s close to six weeks.
PopHorror: Are you still headquartered in Florida?
Joseph Mabry: We’re all Orlando-based, all of us live here. Actually a couple of us basically live in the same neighborhood. Our drummer and our bassist, they live two streets down from each other, and then I live basically just across the street from there, too. It’s pretty sweet. But yeah, we’ve all been here for so long, so it’s home. It’s the headquarters.
PopHorror: For any of our readers who haven’t seen you before, can you talk about what a typical Capstan set is like?
Joseph Mabry: I will say that we are what I would call kind of a weird band. We jump around a lot genre-wise from song to song. I imagine for people who really don’t have any idea who we are, and they go to a show that we’re on or a bill that we’re on, and they’re expecting us to be, the way we start the set, more of a post-hardcore band or something like that. But then we kind of jump all over the place from our more emo stuff to our more kind of pop-inspired stuff to the more metalcore stuff. I think we tend to throw people for a loop the first time because we can get pretty heavy, but we’re also, like I said, a little bit all over the place.
But people seem to like that though at the same time. As much as you might hear two different songs of ours and think it’s maybe two different bands almost even, I think it’s all in the realm of music that people tend to like as a whole, what I would call “scene” music, between metalcore to pop-punk to whatever and all the stuff in between. We love so much of all those genres of music, that we’ve never been able to really stop ourselves from writing songs that sound like they don’t belong together on the same album. It’s just kind of our bit now at this point.
PopHorror: And even your new songs, all three of them are totally different, like from “Bloom” to “Heart to Heart.”
Joseph Mabry: Actually four now! On Friday we dropped a new one, too. This fourth one [“Arrows”] is kind of, I would say, the most pop punk-y, in that genre-sphere. We dropped the first two songs at the same time, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We led with the metalcore one that’s probably the heaviest one we’ve ever released up until now, and then backed that up a couple days later with “Heart to Heart,” which is obviously trying to be more on the pop-y, pop punk side of the spectrum.
We love doing that. We love those types of music. We just write the songs as they come to us, and we feel that we don’t have to try to make everything fit together. There’s so much great music and so many iconic albums that do sound like — and I’m not knocking those because I love those, too — where you can tell that every single song, I won’t say sounds the same, but it’s got the overarching sound through the whole album. Whereas with us, there’s definitely twists and turns and detours along the way. That’s just because that’s the kind of music we love to make.
PopHorror: Can you pick one or two of the new songs and explain the inspiration behind them? How they came to be?
Joseph Mabry: “Heart to Heart” was a big kind of collab song between everyone. Lyrically, me and Harry, but also Boz, too. That one is really special to all of us I think because all three of us who I just mentioned, we’re all recent fathers. I think as we’ve gotten older now, we tend to really value our relationships a lot more, and really try to nurture them. Writing about that type of subject matter, it’s a big point of growth for us too as a band and as artists, and what we choose to speak on, things that matter as much as we can.
And I will say that overall, that’s going to be kind of the same with those other songs as well, like “Bloom” and “Arrows,” the song I mentioned that we just released, as well. All of them sort of have themes of love in kind of different ways, but if you had to sum it up as something with just one word, it would be that. And then the more metalcore song “Bête Noire” that we released is sort of on the more sociopolitical… I cringed even saying that. I consider it just more social problems than anything, not to preach like I have any fucking answers. But I’m upset, as many people are, I think, and for different reasons.
PopHorror: You mentioned that some of you are recent fathers. Do you try your new music out on the kids yet?
Joseph Mabry: They heard so much of it. These new songs, we actually recorded ourselves and engineered and produced ourselves. So we were doing it at our houses, at my house and Harry’s house, and just had babies around the whole time. So they’ve pretty much grown up listening to Capstan music their whole lives.
PopHorror: When you release new music, is it nerve-wracking at all, just with social media and how everyone has something to say anymore?
Joseph Mabry: From what I’ve seen in my mounting years doing this, I’ve noticed that — and I’ve seen this happen with a lot of artists — you care at first, especially when you’re younger. It always means so much to you. Obviously, you’re making art. But the way I was affected by it before, I would be upset. I would take it somewhat personally. Over the years, and like I said, I think everyone goes through this, you definitely not only are just like, “Fuck it,” but me, I love the hate comments. I look for them, they make me laugh so hard. It’s just amazing, I don’t know why. I get serious chuckles, all of us do. Every time we see a decent hate comment, we’re just like, “Did you see this one?” They’re definitely a lot more entertaining than the comments that are good.
PopHorror: I always like to ask bands, I know you guys have been around for a couple years, your origin story and how you formed?
Joseph Mabry: We have been around a long time. We’re dads, we’re old, we’re mid-30s almost, pretty much there. The band Capstan actually started in 2012. Anthony and Harry met each other at Full Sail, a recording school in Orlando, and they were friends with Scott, and they were the first three who kind of started everything. They did all the early stuff for a little while. There were a couple early members changing here and there, and then Boz and myself both joined in 2014. He joined beginning of the year, I joined a couple months later. But we had all lived together for a while, we all had a band house together. That’s the lineup that we still have to this day now, almost 10 years later, about to be 10 years. Wow.
And then that’s when we started getting really serious about it, being like, “We gotta book our own tour, do a DIY tour. We gotta get out on the road, we gotta play as many shows as possible. We gotta upgrade our recordings, we gotta record for real, do everything right.” Or what we thought was as right as we could, not actually knowing any successful musicians. But we did all the stereotypical street knowledge things you would do as a band. We tried to really grind and all that. That’s when the touring started in 2015, 2016, 2017, every year. We started, the first one was straight DIY, Boz booked the tour. This was in 2015. And the next year, we did two tours, and then more people showed up. And then 2017, we did four tours and then more people showed up. And that’s usually how it works for most bands that come up in the touring scene. And then 2018 was the year we got to do Warped Tour and Silverstein brought us out on tour at the end of that year, and that’s when things were really looking up. We were on a great trajectory. In 2019, we did the UK with Trash Boat, and we did some good headline shows that felt really good.
And then COVID hit. Still haven’t recovered. But we’re trying. As everyone knows, there were a lot of bands that literally broke up when COVID happened, and luckily that wasn’t us. But even so, things definitely changed as far as momentum. After touring started again, we just didn’t have, or haven’t had, the offers or drive to go on tours. We don’t have the steam that it seemed like we had before everything shut down.
But we have released, in my opinion, our best music still everytime. Every album we would like to think is better than the other one. And as far as this new music, these songs we’ve been releasing now, once again, we’re much more excited for them than we ever have been. It’s funny because, I guess like I said, you feel this way everytime. I bet every artist does. But we feel this is not only the best thing we’ve done, but we feel this new music is like a step above. We think we’ve really found some growth within ourselves, especially when it comes to… like I said, we self-produced these songs, with the exception of, I’ve gotta give a shoutout to my good friend Brian Lada from Belmont, who did do some production for us on a couple of these songs, so that was pretty sweet. But doing all the recording and everything ourselves, mostly self-producing it, we feel like we’ve kind of hit our stride and hopefully aged. I don’t know, I’ve always been a late bloomer myself, personally, in pretty much everything in my life. I think we’re all, my brothers in the band, I think we’re in a place that we’re really, really happy about now with new music. So very excited about what’s to come.
PopHorror: And it seems like people are really enjoying it. I was going through YouTube and going through some comments. The one, I wrote it down, it said, “They’re a sinfully underrated fucking band.”
Joseph Mabry: Of course I do read every single comment on everything ever, so I did see that one. On some songs, I think it might’ve been “Bloom” on YouTube, it didn’t have a single hate comment. I was like, “Where’s the hate??” But yeah, I did notice that it seems people are actually really digging these songs so far, and who knows? Maybe there’s more coming, I don’t know.
PopHorror: Well I was going to ask, these songs, are they going to be part of something bigger? Maybe another album?
Joseph Mabry: I legally am not allowed to say anything…
PopHorror: OK! Next question… as far as this new music, are there any favorite bands, or any influences that you draw from?
Joseph Mabry: So for the heavier, metal kind of stuff, I would say… a heavy band that Scott and I have listened to a lot that’s really cool, they use a lot of electronic production while being really heavy, is ten56. I will say that our drummer Scott is always influenced by The 1975, that’s pretty much his favorite band. I’m also gonna say that, a band that always influenced me, but writing more songs in the style of “Bloom” and the softer stuff, I’m a huge Mayday Parade fan, so I feel like I have a lot of influence from them when it comes to that style of music. But then I will say as a whole, it’s all over the place, from very heavy, we love deathcore, death metal to 1975. Scott and I have also been really into the techy, progg-y stuff in the past. We still love those types of bands. That’s why it plays so much into the way we write our music because all five of us love so many different types of music. So we’ll just write them all.
PopHorror: In addition to the tour, and the thing that you legally can’t talk about, is there anything else upcoming that you just want people to know?
Joseph Mabry: Keep your eyes peeled. We’ve dropped four songs in the last two months, so who’s to say what’s gonna happen in the future, the immediate future?
Thanks for speaking with us, Joseph! Catch Capstan on tour with Holding Absence beginning in January.
