Alliteration has been rocking in the Hudson Valley for ten years, and are clebrating their ten year anniversary at the end of April. Specializing in melodic hardcore, their songs orbit a variety of subjects– death, love, hate, depression. With one album under their belt and another coming out, it’s safe to say they represent one of the most important aspects of a community: the elders.
Located squarely in the Hudson Valley, Poughkeepsie serves as a central nexus for the hardcore scene. The scene was dead for a few years, rotting in the quagmire of COVID and high cost of living. Bars sprung up and quickly took over the place of the Chance Theater, the main venue for hardcore and punk shows in the area. They began hosting shows of all kinds, giving life to a local scene that was thought to have died off from COVID. At the same time, we saw a revival of the music scene in neighboring New Paltz, a twenty-minute ride across the eponymous Hudson River and through the mountains. What was once a college town has seen an explosion of basement venues, letting the underground scene evolve and contort with the background of the college kids and sleepy tourists.
The space I held the interview was a bar called Reasons and Ruckus. I met with them in the dining area, the sounds of the kitchen staff echoing with the chatter of bar patrons and the clink of glass in the other room. We could feel the cold wind coming in from the glass door behind us, the freezing night air of a late New York winter raising goosebumps on the back of my arms.
Dying Scene: Could y’all give your names and instruments, for the record and for me?
My name’s Ryan Kealty, I play bass.
Xavier, I play guitar.
And I am Mike, I play drums.
DS: Have you guys been to any of the basement shows around here?
Kealty: Not recently. We’d like to, but we’ve been to a couple before the start of the year.
DS: Have you been in the New Paltz scene at all?
Kealty: Snugs.
Mike: Snugs is great.
Xavier: Snugs is great, but I played there three times in a row and I just had to take a break. It’s just…
DS: Grimy?
Xaviar: Trough bathroom.
DS: So very different from the scene in Poughkeepsie.
Kealty: Yeah, it’s grimy.
DS: Very different experience compared to mine, where I’ve only been to the basement shows with the shitty moshers. The last show of yours I went to I got a bruised rib in the pit, and then I went to a house show and it’s just like, “what the fuck is going on?”
Kealty: Look, I don’t want to hate–
Xavier: It’s good that they’re there!
Kealty: –but like, I grew up around here with the metalcore shit, and going from that to the New Paltz scene where people are kind of pushpitting the entire time. I will say, if I am going to see some indie shit, I don’t need someone throwing elbows the entire time. It’s good that they’re there.
DS: Please be careful with the elbows, he’s trying to shoegaze.
Kealty: Exactly.
Mike: Pushpits are perfectly fine! And like, look, when I was 23 I tore my ACL in a mosh pit, but, y’know, pushpits are fine. We’re not trying to do like, blood for the blood gods here, maybe sometimes as a treat.
Kealty: I like pushpits, but I’m getting older. I can be in a pushpit and not feel it the next morning.
DS: So how old are you guys?
Xavier: I’m 28.
Kealty: Yup, me and Xavier are both 28.
Mike: Turning thirty next month. I’ll be fuckin thirty.
DS: So you guys have been in the scene a while. Do you guys remember what the scene was like when you first started?
Kealty: I remember what it was like in 2015.
DS: Expand.
Mike: The Chance and the Loft used to be the place where every band went, where every band went, where everyone went on Fridays and Saturdays, and like, eventually it stopped being a local scene, but after a while it stopped being a local scene and they only had touring bands show up. And that’s really disappointing! Because I remember being fifteen, sixteen and going there on any given Friday, saying “somebody I went to high school with is playing here tonight.”
Xavier: Now, to add on to that, it was kind of slow at first because, wasn’t it Jeff Benning–
Mike: Oh, Jeff Benning.
Kealty: Jeff Benning. (wheezing laughter.)
Xavier: He fucked over a guy, whatever.
DS: There’s always a guy.
Xavier: Yeah, that was kind of a shift–hey how’s it goin’ man?
Kealty: You can’t see but my parents just showed up.
(Everyone at the table laughs and chatters for a moment, Kealty’s parents walk away.)
Kealty: I don’t know why but I just shook my dad’s hand. I just felt awkward from the interview. (Laughs. )
Mike: That’s unhinged.
Xavier: Anyways, so, anyways, the scene started shifting to like, touring bands. There were some local bands but they were all being forced to sell tickets way harder because, Jeff Benning fuck you, and then My Place Pizza came in in like, 2012, 2013?
Mike: Oh my god, My Place Pizza.
Kealty: Yeah, My Place Pizza was this pizza shop literally across the street from where we are now. It is no more.
Mike: Yup, it got bought out and killed by COVID.
Kealty: Yeah, and My Place started to kick in, they’d get touring bands three or four days a week, mix in a bunch of local bands. I can’t speak to the Loft as much, but My Place had touring bands four or five days a week.
Xavier: And the best part was the owner, six-seven, really nice guy, he didn’t really charge for shows? Pretty often he’d let us book shows for free. Like I’d tell touring bands “hey, I’m gonna give you twenty bucks for gas, it’s a free show.”
Kealty: That’s the other thing too, there used to be a lot of free shows. Granted, it’s rough now, so I get it, but there used to be a lot of them.
Mike: And everyone wants a cut at every step.
Kealty: And that’s not inherently bad! Everybody deserves a cut at every step, everyone deserves to be paid for their labor, but with DIY margins there’s only so much money to go around, and when people want that cut it can make what little there is to go around a lot less.
DS: That leads me to ask, every basement show I’ve been to has been packed, so what are the margins?
Xavier: That really depends on the house. Some houses are cool and say “okay, we’ll only take a small anmount and leave the rest to the bands,” and sometimes we’ll walk away with one, two hundred, just from doors.
Kealty: On our weekender tour with Stand And Wave, we got three hundred just from doors.
Xavier: Yeah, and some houses would be packed, they’d have speakeasies, then they’d look at us and say “Here, forty dollars” and we’d say we’ll never play here again. And at that point you’re profiting off of underground musicians and not paying back into them.
Kealty: I know that if you’re running you’re little underground speakeasy, you should get paid for it, but if you’re making money off of bands, especially if they’d travelling–
Xavier: Alliteration does not endorse illegal bars!
Kealty: Nope! But if you have a bar and you’re using bands to make money then you shouldn’t be exploiting them.
Xaviar: I feel like that’s happened a couple times, where we get fucked and then we tell eveyone “Yeah, we’re never playing here again.”
Kealty: Not to say we hate house shows, but there’s an ethical way to do it.
Mike: Of course. With every endeavor you do, pay yourself. I think that’s very important now, and that sucks to say, never do it for free, find a way to pay yourself, especially now. It’s hard out there. Especially for musicians. Cymbals are like, three or four hundred dollars.
Xavier: Then stop beating them so fuckin hard.
DS: Don’t stop doing that!
Kealty: I remember when we first started Mike had Xavier write “hit harder” on the drumheads. And we’re musicians, we need to make a living, so the fees are really expensive. We were hemorrhaging money the first few months for the love of the game, but now we can pay for all of our studio time and pay our fees, but we all still need to pay rent now.
DS: And you guys have a new album coming out, right, did you want to talk about that?
Kealty: Yeah, it’s a full LP. We’re not quite sure how we’re doing release strategy.
Xavier: Yeah we just got finished tracking it so we haven’t decided yet.
Kealty: Definitely, we have ten original tracks, and a cover and we rerecorded two older songs.
Mike: Which two songs is a mystery, it’s a surprise.
DS: On a record or on digital?
Xavier: We’re gonna try to get it on vinyl.
Kealty: Now that we have the money to spend and not hurt ourselves, especially since we all pay rent, we’re gonna try and get it printed on vinyl. And if we have enough money, maybe Reject but that’s a 20% chance. I would like to get that album printed.
Mike: How many years has it been [since Reject came out]?
Kealty: I think four years.
Xavier: Five?
Kealty: Three and a half since it came out in October.
DS: That leads me to asking what your inspirations are. I’d peg you for like, Agent Orange and Against Me!, early crustpunk shit. too
Kealty: I think you’re giving me a lot more credit than I deserve, I’m not really “versed in the lore.”
DS: Then how about just an album that you think of.
Xavier: Okay, this is what I say every time: Microwave, Pup, the first Microwave album, Much Love, the second Pup album, The Dream is Over, and My Ticket Home, “Stranger Only.”
Mike: That’s the second time that’s come up today.
Kealty: Yeah, those are our collective inspirations, along with Say Anything —
(Groans around the table.)
Mike: Oh my god, yes.
Xavier: No, no, not me, not anymore.
Mike: When you were writing, yes.
Kealty: With your vocal delivery, I can still tell.
Xavier: Yeah, I can’t beat it out of me, it’s cringe as fuck.
Mike: Max Bemis, trash human, but he made good music.
Xavier: Did he though? There was a song he wrote that went “I kill, kill, kill little girls.”
Mike: Yeah but he wasn’t advocating for it.
Xavier: But he still said it!
Mike: But it’s funny!
Kealty: Moving on, for me, when I’m writing, I think my personal inspirations outside of our collective ones would be like, I would say, Defeater, I’m a big fan, I would say Trade Wind, which is an Indie side project with the guys from Stick to Your Guns and Stray From the Path. Defeater, Tradewinds, Every Time I Die, and, fuck it, Microwave. And Movements, not my favorite but they have great songwriting. And Balance and Composure.
Xavier: We’re listing what we like?
Kealty: Yeah, like stuff that inspires you.
Xavier: I listen to Billy Woods the rapper, straight boom bap, New York, you know what the fuck it is. (Mike laughs in the background) I’m actually not joking.
Kealty: You were so psyched to see him last month, that was a long time coming.
Xavier: It was awesome! Billy Woods put out an album with his producer Kenny Segal, that shit was gas. Only show I’ve taken videos at in like five years cuz I loved the songs. And like, I don’t know, I listen to a lot of random stuff. Some days it could be funk, some days it could be jazz. Grant Greenlock, West Montgomery, Dorodio, fuckin, what are they called, anime intro music.
Mike: Anime intro music, yeah. First season anime intros, that’s gotta be a genre.
Kealty: That’s gotta be a genre.
DS: That’s called OVA.
Xavier: I listen to a lot of weird underground rap, like Earl Sweatshirt, he’s more mainstream now but in general stuff like that. For punk albums, I like Deafeter, Balance And Composure. I wanna say I listen to a lot of Freethrow cause I can’t listen to Say Anything anymore, cause they’re cringe.
Mike: Honestly, I saw them for their 20 year anniversary, with Israel Boyd, and like– I had fun, but I’m disappointed by it.
Xavier: Gauge The Way is also sick.
Kealty: Oh, also, The Wonder Years, Soupy has my heart. I say this piece all the time, but I’m so tired of like, Blink-182 singing about jacking off when they’re all fifty years old, like grow up. The Wonder Years have aged gracefully, I feel.
DS: They have one good thing and they’re not gonna stop.
Kealty: They had songs about being sad and lonely, and now he sings about being sad but being strong for his wife and kids. I feel like that’s beautiful.
Mike: As an almost thirty-year old man, I feel like I can relate to that still. Yes, like, give me my pop-punk, but I wanna relate to the lyrics. I don’t wanna be like, “And she left me at prom,” I don’t remember, I never went to prom, and that was also twelve years ago, bro, I don’t know.
DS: Yeah, like, you hit a point with the music that you listen to and you say “fuck, this isn’t for me anymore.” But the people who make it are still making the same way they’ve been making it for all these years and you ask “what are you doing?”
Mike: It was so long ago for you, over twenty years, just let it go.
Kealty: I also really like August Burns Red but it does not inspire my music. I am not a metal musician.
DS: That was one of the things I really liked about [your album] Reject was that it starts in this very melodic hardcore space, kind of grungy, and by the end of the album it’s really hardcore punk. Was there a reason or an inspiration for it, because there’s a full gradient along the album.
Kealty: I love hearing interpretations of our art. I don’t think we intended to do that with the writing, but we’ve always kind of just wrote what we feel like writing.
Xavier: I like to say what we write is just a capsule in time of how we feel and Everything that’s going on in our lives at that moment.
Kealty: Yes, exactly.
Mike: Which is sometimes why, not in a bad way, sometimes we hold on to songs for a while. Not that we don’t like the song, but like, “This song’s different for me now.”
Kealty: It needs more time to cook.
Xavier: It needs to not suck.
Kealty: Yeah, like, for example Avalon messaged on an Instagram story about playing “Joke At A Funeral.” Xavier actually wrote that in like, 2016 as a solo song, didn’t like how it came out, and then we sat on it for a few years. And then we said, I guess we’re gonna release it as an Alliteration song. And one of the songs on the LP we just recorded, “Bunny”, was written around the same time that was written and now we’re comfortable with it.
DS: So there’s a process.
Mike: I think we’re getting a lot better about that.
Xavier: We’ve either written things, and then liked it, and then released it or we’ve written things, didn’t like it, and forgot how to play it.
Mike: We’ve been official with how we write things, like–
Xavier: Where’s the poop song?!
Mike: Don’t talk about that, put that down.
Xavier: where’s the poop song?
Mike: Put that down! Put that down.
Kealty: we’ll come back to it, we’re sitting on it. It’s gotta ripen.
DS: It’s gotta ferment.
Mike: Yes, exactly.
Kealty: I think I’m getting better, but Xavier has a quicker process.
DS: How long have you guys been writing? Do you write fiction?
Mike: I was a game master for a Dungeons and Dragons, briefly, got all my friends into it, then they stopped playing without me, in a good way, in a good way. All my friends who went to the LEGO movie without me, fuck you, I put the idea out there.
Kealty: In my defense I was DMing for a year or two, and Mike was in the group, and everyone stopped showing up, so I stopped hosting it.
DS: That’s how it goes!
Kealty: It happened cause of COVID. But outside of music, in terms of creativity, I do more painting and diorama building. I like building miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons, I think it’s nice to have DnD as an excuse for your creative outlet. Cause it’s like, “You’re really busy and have all this stuff to do, you have no time to be creative,” but I can go “you’re running DnD later this week so you should probably paint it.”
Xavier: I have my own solo project, @xavier_ayy follow me baby, aye, I started a producer account trying to do a more Kenny Beats type thing, we’ll see how far that goes. I’m trying to play with other bands but it’s flaky, cause musicians are flaky. I know from experience.
Mike: We’ve all done it.
Kealty: I started casually playing in a cover band with my coworkers, we don’t gig. We just kind of jam. It’s fun to meet once a month with a bunch of 45 year old dudes and play like, Sweet Child of Mine or Sum-41. There’s a couple people my age, a couple people like fifty, so it’s a give and take. I wanna start doing carpentry but that’s expensive and I don’t have enough space.
Mike: This is news! This is news!
Kealty: yeah, it’s calling to me.
Mike: I wanted to try blacksmithing, but that’s tough. Recently I did track down an embroidery machine, and for awhile I was doing all the embroidery stuff we had but the machine I had crapped out on me. I managed to track down another machine, and that is coming back, so if anyone embroidery stuff I’ll do it for the love.
Kealty: Hit my mans up, he’s gotta pay that machine off. We also do our own screen printing for merch, and I also do that for friends’ bands.
Mike: And if you wanna hang out and have me cook for you, I’ll do that. I was a chef for a while and I want to get back into it. It’s my love language.
DS: You guys have been on the scene for so long, do you have any major inspirations? Anyone you look up to in the area?
Xavier: Take One Car where’s that fourth album! Where’s that fourth album godamn it!
MIke: They haven’t released since 2012.
Xavier: One Fell Swoop, that’s dating myself but I don’t give a fuck, they were dope.
M: Ourselves, Ourselves was dope too.
Kealty: There was this band from Albany that came here a couple times called Artisan. They were a melodic hardcore band (Mike: They were so cool.) There was also this other melodic hardcore band from Connecticut I like called Homestead. Those guys are good friends, if they ever formed another band and wanted to gig we’d be so down.
Mike: I hope they hear this, honestly.
Kealty: I saw Luke and another guy opened an ice cream shop.
Mike: I remember that. “Yeah, I gotta go help my family with, like, an ice cream shop.” And I was like, that’s the most wholesome thing, you do that.
Kealty: These christcore bands just be wholesome outside y’know.
Mike: Who’da thunk! The most violent mosh pits you’ve ever seen, terrifying vocals, and then like, “yeah, when I’m not doing this, I’m saving puppies.”
DS: “I love my family!”
Mike: “I love everything, I love cats, I love dogs, I love all the little animals. And I love watching sweaty people throw themselves against each other in a bloody mess.”
DS: What else are you gonna do on a Saturday night, really.
Mike: It’s the best thing to do, really.
DS: Or on a Thursday.
Kealty: Yeah, it is a Thursday. Tonight’s show is on a Thursday, for context. I think one of the things I liked most from our early years was like, I liked seeing people go crazy for my friends bands, and then kind of made me hungry too. Like even though they were all younger than me I looked up to Crosscheck. Seeing how they made everyone go insane made me think I wanted to do that one day.
DS: I think you’ve got that.
Kealty: Yeah we’ve definitely got there.
DS: You’re pretty primo on the local scene.
Kealty: I think we’re definitely scene elders at this point.
Mike: definitely.
Kealty: so for us at the time, scene elders were like all the oldheads in HVHC bands but like their individual bands didn’t stick around but the same guys did (Xavier:Where’s that fourth album!) so like, Take One Car, Ourselves, and a coupel others were the elders. But my question to you Avalon is, who do you, for your perspective, see as the scene elders. Aside from us.
DS (Avalon): You guys, Scott from DXPC Live, there’s definitely Ovid [the owner of the bar] because he knows everyone, Noelle at Doors at Seven and all the people who crew with her. I table at shows sometimes, to give away free clothes, and they’re like “C’mon! Come do it!” and it’s cool butI didn’t think it would be this easy. No Momentum fucking definitely. The Getoffs maybe not but they definitely have the vibe.
Kealty: When were on the Reduce Reuse Recycle show they were on our radar, and that was like two years ago.
DS (Avalon): And I heard that they were gonna breakup soon, maybe.
Kealty: Oh really?
DS (Avalon): yeah but I heard that when I was fucked up so it might be wrong. I’m not super sober half the time I’m here, not alcohol, so it mightbe wrong. It’s crazy, I’ve benn to more bars after I stopped drinking then when I did drink.
Mike: The DIY scene has a way of bringing you to bars like that.
DS: Yeah, exactly. Now, lemme get a picture of all three of you… Now kiss.
Kealty: I think the best genre of Alliteration picture is me and Mike freaking out Xavier.
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