Kill Your Idols have released a split seven-inch featuring fellow Long Islanders Rule Them All via Flatspot Records and entitled Simple, Short, & Fast. This release marks the band’s first new songs in nearly 15 years, and, if these are a taste of what’s to come, we’re in for an impressive, super-hard-hitting ride. But we shouldn’t have expected anything less from these titans of NYHC who started playing back in 1995.
The first new songs in 14, 15 years… It sounds great. What was the impetus for writing again?
So, we broke up in 2007. We reunited in 2013 and played Black N Blue [Bowl] and that was just a special show as our last shows. You’ve seen the parking lot show, you might’ve been there even. That was like a book or a movie, a better ending couldn’t have been written for this band than that last show. And we all went on to doing our own things, settling into whatever jobs we were doing and new projects, new music, stuff that was taking priority over KYI. Kill Your Idols is much too special of a band to us than doing half-ass, so we decided to put it to rest, rather than have it be an afterthought or something else we were doing.
When we did that comeback, that reunion was equally as special as us breaking up. There were signs and balloons and craziness. It was just crazy. The video on YouTube is crazy. When that happened, I said, “I wouldn’t mind doing this again.” Maybe we don’t have to be broken up. Maybe we can just exist and pop up once in a while. Then we don’t have to take the focus off anything we’re doing, but it was hard to get everybody onboard with that idea. There was also some other stuff going on that are a little more personal, but a little bit of struggle with band members. Then, we got offers to do it again and again and again. And every time we did it, there was good enough reason to.
One of those time was to do Natefest [2015], which was the benefit for Nate [Gluck] from Ensign when he had cancer and that was really special. And there were other times. And every time we did it, it was like, “This is the last one, we promise this is the last one.” I was kinda like why does it have to be so final? People enjoy that we’re around. Let’s just stay around even if we can’t do it all the time, let’s just do it when we can. And then finally I did a covers show with Mike D[eLorenzo] and Vinnie [Value] who were in KYI at one time or another, they played on a couple records. And we just did NYHC covers, and Andy [West] had moved to Florida at that point, but he was going to be in town that weekend, so we invited him. We were like, “Hey, Dean [Miller] from No Redeeming Social Value is gonna (play).” We called it Hardcore Jukebox. We did everything from Black Flag to Warzone, Agnostic Front… We did Cock Sparrer. It was a good time. It was a benefit show too. Dean from NRSV, he sang, and it was me, Mike D, and Vinnie. And Andy was in town, so, we were like, you should come and sing some KYI songs, I think people would like that, and he did. That’s when Christian McKnight called me and said, “Hey, can KYI open for Dag Nasty at Irving [Plaza]? And I was like, ‘Well, we’re not really together,’ and he was like, ‘I heard you guys did some songs. If I’m not mistaken, Andy, you, Mike, and Vinnie, is KYI, is it not? Or some version of KYI, right?!’ And I go, ‘well yeah.’ And he goes, ‘you guys are together, you guys open for Dag Nasty.’ So, that was it. We were just like, ‘OK, I guess we’re back together.’ Paul [Delaney] and Raepf [Glicken] are doing Black Anvil. I was in Black Anvil also. I’m no longer in Black Anvil. But those guys are still very close friends of mine, brothers, even, and they’re still part of the KYI family and even if they’re not playing, they’re still part of it. I got their blessing. I said, ‘Listen, we’re gonna do it with Vinnie and Mike,’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine, you guys should do it.’ So, we’ve been together in that state since. Then Vinnie passed away in 2020, which was rough.
I’m basically getting to the point of your question, which is what was the impetus to start writing. Well, since we’ve been doing this on and off, we’ve talked about writing and Vinnie was the biggest proponent of it. Funny thing is, he said we should write new songs. But it’s funny he was the one who wanted to do that, but he was the hardest one to get together to do it. But we kept talking about it and then when he passed away, right before he passed away, we were like let’s put on our noses to the grindstone. We’re gonna write new stuff and we’re gonna put new stuff out. And then he passed. And we got Anthony [Corallo] to play to fill in for the Gorilla Biscuits show we had planned. We almost cancelled that, but we decided to play it and use that opportunity to raise some money for Vinnie’s family and stuff like that, which we did. We sold a bunch of t-shirts and things like that, and all the money went to Marguerite and the kids. Anthony played so well with us, it was should we just keep doing this and the answer was yes because Anthony has always been – he never played in the band, but he was always part of the family. We’ve known him since he was 14 years old. And he always played drums so well. I play with him in Sheer Terror also, and I know what he’s capable of, so when we played that show and he killed it, we were just like let’s keep going with Anthony and we should continue writing. That’s what Vinnie wanted to do. We had songs we were working on, so we worked on them with Anthony. We have like 12, 14 songs between me, Anthony, Mike, and we picked those two to do the split with Rule Them All.
So, we wrote over the pandemic. We just sent the ideas back and forth, we recorded those two songs. Anthony recorded them. He’s an engineer. But that’s it. That’s what started it off. It’s slow for us. We have music, we don’t have a whole lot of lyrics so we’re trying to put it together little by little. But we’re back as best as we could be, with work and families and jobs and whatever we’ve got going on.
About putting these two songs out first, I guess it was a no-brainer to do a split.
We have big, big plans. Once we started writing the music during the pandemic, we just got delusions of grandeur. ‘Oh, we’re gonna do a full-length and we’re gonna do a split with this band and we’re gonna do a split with that band.’ It turns out it’s not as easy for us to make this happen as we thought it would be. The music part is easy because Mike and Anthony and I all live relatively close together here on Long Island, and we send stuff over the Internet. We can put it together without really getting together. Andy, on the other hand, lives in Florida these days and he’s not technically savvy, so there’s no way he’s gonna be in on the Internet part of the writing. We have to just send him complete songs. He’s like an old dog and you can’t really teach him new tricks. He needs to write with at least one of us around. He needs to be in the room. He can’t get inspired just listening to the songs. A little bit he can, but in the old days he needed to be part of it, and he still needs to be part of it. So, we have all this music and we really can’t do much with it unless Andy is around, which is not often.
When we recorded these two songs, he actually had two loose sets of lyrics written. He was coming up to play shows with us. I forget which group of shows we did, but I said, ‘When you come up, we should get you on tape, singing these songs.’ So, he sent me his loose scribblings of lyrics, and I said, ‘These are good. I can finish these.’ So, that’s what I did. I kind of bound them together and made two whole songs out of the two ideas he sent. And he came up and he listened to the songs on the airplane and recited the lyrics I sent him over and over, and he got up here and he was so nervous. He was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ And then boom he just delivered those two songs like it was the old days.
But that’s how we have to do it. When he’s up here, a little bit at a time, and unfortunately that’s how we’re going to have to do it and it’s going to be slow, but we are going to have a full-length out eventually and maybe some other stuff. But I really don’t wanna get too ahead of myself because it’s so far down the line now at this point. We have shows coming that are going to correspond with Andy coming up here to record a couple songs. And that’s just how we’re going to do it from here on in.
Just about you with this band having a new release out, does it feel reinvigorating, reenergizing?
It totally does. We enjoy getting together just to be together. When Andy’s up, he stays at my house usually. My son gets a kick out of hanging out with Andy, loves hanging out with him. And Andy’s a really funny guy. As shy as Andy is, he’s super funny. My son always can’t wait for Andy to come up. My wife Mary really enjoys having Andy around. He’s a great houseguest and we look forward to seeing him. And as a band, me and Mike and Anthony enjoy hanging out. Vinnie, God rest his soul, we enjoyed being with him. It’s more about hanging out, but then we get to play shows, and the shows we play are always an event and it’s always special and the people who come to see us it’s just a special thing.
There’s a feeling I get when I play with KYI. It’s a feeling we all get, playing with any band is awesome for all of us. We just love playing music. And playing in Sheer Terror… Sheer Terror was one of my favorite bands growing up. So, getting to play in the band has been super for me. I always enjoy it but there’s something about KYI. When we broke up, I felt like there was a void and I felt like maybe it was wrong that we weren’t together. And then it’s hard to keep the same people in the band all the time. Not everybody can always do it for whatever reason it is. But Andy and I agreed when we got back together this time around which is a few years ago at this point, I think it was 2016 or 2017 that we opened for Dag Nasty and we were together for good at that point again. I think Andy and I decided then that as long as we’re alive, this band is a band. We’re just gonna keep going. There’s a family. There’s people that aren’t even in KYI right now that the door is open, they’re welcome to be in the band whenever. But Mike and Anthony are the solid line-up and they’re brothers and we love getting together and we love playing and like I said, when we do it, we’re high off it for weeks. And we don’t get to do it that often. And honestly, that’s probably a good thing. That’s why when we do it it’s special.
Was KYI the first band you played in?
No, I played a couple of high school talent shows when I was younger. With my metalhead friends. One of them was cool, but the one we did the following year, things got out of hand and friends of ours were moshing and stage diving in a school auditorium, they closed the curtain in front of us. We stepped in front of the curtain as the curtain was closing and we kept playing. So, the drummer was behind the curtain and we were in front of the curtain and we were doing a Slayer cover and we just kept playing. Then we really, really obnoxiously took advantage and started playing, I think it was a Napalm Death song or something. I don’t remember. Something really fast and noisy. Then we got disqualified. But it was such a ruckus, that night I was like, ‘this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I don’t want to do anything else.’ At that point we had all already been sneaking out and going to shows and hanging out till three, four in the morning. You remember how it was back in the day. A show started at ten o’clock at night. You’d come back from Sundance or from CBGB’s, you’d come back at like five in the morning. But when I started getting into going to shows and playing, I just wanted to do it.
I kicked around with a couple of silly things that went nowhere, and then finally my first real band was Big Sniff which was me and a friend of mine. Remember In Your Face from Long Island? The singer lived up the block from me. In Your Face just broken up, we asked if Marc [Adams] would sing with us. So we did that and then Marc let us in his house and we jammed on some stuff and he was like, ‘yeah I’ll play with you guys.’ Then, long story short, it was just me and Marc and he was like, ‘I can get two guys from Ludichrist to play with us.’ It was Mike [Walters], the bassist who played on the second Ludichrist record, Powertrip, and Alan [Bazin] the drummer that played on the first Ludichrist record. So I had two different guys from Ludichrist in the band and I was like 17 or 18. These guys were seasoned musicians, and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe it.
Once I got to know them it was cool. Those guys became mentors to me. That band didn’t last long but we played around a little while. And then eventually, I had done other stuff with Marc through the years. I played in a band called John Henry with him and Ernie [Parada] and Ernie was in that band playing drums. But that band was Ernie’s idea. Ernie kind of took that idea and the feel of that band kind of became Grey Area. I always say that, but Ernie would probably say that’s not true. But if you listen to John Henry and you listen to Grey Area, there’s different people doing different things, but the feeling is very similar to Grey Area. Ernie did all the writing. That’s kind of how I ended up in Sheer Terror because Marc was playing bass for Big Sniff so I started going to Sheer Terror practices and hanging out. I’d ride with them in the band to shows and stuff like that. Just from hanging around is how I ended up in Sheer Terror. Being in Sheer Terror was very helpful getting KYI to move forward a little bit because I met people playing in Sheer Terror who were like, ‘What’s this other band you’re playing in?’ It led to us being on Blackout [Records]. It led to us going to Europe our first time. I’ve been doing this seriously since I was 15. Fifteen is when I first got onstage.
I was wondering about how you got into punk and hardcore or just rock ‘n’ roll in general. Were your parents into music?
Yeah. My dad and my mom were very much into music, my dad especially. My dad was definitely big into rock ‘n’ roll, but when disco happened… I was really little, but him and my mom were really into that.
It’s funny because the earliest punk like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Johnny Thunders, all the original guys, they all shit all over disco. They shit all over everything that was going on back then. Whereas I grew up enjoying that stuff. I still do. I get yelled at by Paul Bearer [Sheer Terror vocalist] if I say I like Electric Light Orchestra. But I grew up listening to that stuff and I like that stuff. As time went on, I always liked heavier rock ‘n’ roll, and when I was like 11, I got really into the original hip-hop that was around, like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa and Run DMC. I loved those first two Run-DMC records and the Fat Boys and Kurtis Blow. I guess people say, what’s that got to do with metal? But to me that was heavy. The beats were heavy, and the subject matter was heavy, and the delivery was heavy. Later on, it made perfect sense for Public Enemy to do a song with Anthrax. There’s something to that. It was heavy and it was gritty, and I liked it and it moved me.
I still love Judas Priest and AC/DC, I got into that stuff because my cousin was always working on his car and listening to loud, heavy rock ‘n’ roll. He’d be blasting Billy Squier in the neighborhood while he was working on his car. When Back in Black came out, and he was blasting that out while he was washing his car, I was like, ‘wow, that’s the heaviest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.’ Def Leppard Pyromania, I remember I lived on that record. I like heavy guitar music. Then I got into the whole thrash metal thing early on, and very quickly while I was getting into that, I got into Cro-Mags and the first SOD album. It’s debatable if it’s punk or hardcore, thrash metal but it’s a crossover. Which brought me to DRI, and I got into Motorhead. Metallica started wearing Misfits shirts and GBH shirts. I just started buying records of shirts that the guys I liked were wearing. If Dave Lombardo had a Verbal Abuse shirt on, I went and checked that out. Or a Dead Kennedys shirt, I went and checked that out. So, I guess I got into punk through metal. I think a lot of guys my age pretty much found it the same way. There’s a few exceptions. I’ve definitely met guys my age who were into New Wave and got into punk that way. There were definitely a couple of ways to find punk rock, but I started going to shows. My first concert was Jethro Tull and my next concert was Hades and Indestructible Noise Command and The Beast at Sundance. Then I got into hardcore. My first real hardcore show was Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, and Bold at Sundance. All three of those bands together.
Damn.
My grandfather was big on music, he played keyboard, he played guitar, but he stopped because he injured his fingers. But he was always big on music. At the age of 60-something he bought Van Halen records. My grandfather was into big band music and country music, and he had Van Halen records. He had disco records. He liked it all. Me and my cousins were like, ‘Pop, you like Van Halen?’ And he goes, ‘What’s not to like about Van Halen?’ And we were like, ‘Well, you’re kind of old,’ and he’s like, ‘You guys don’t know nothing about music. If you listen to Van Halen, Van Halen is big band music with guitars.’ And he hit the nail on the head. It really was. He said that David Lee Roth could’ve been one of those guys like Duke Ellington, a showman. That’s what David Lee Roth was all about. So, my grandfather knew. My grandmother would be screaming at him to shut that stuff off. She’d yell at him if he had any music on, even if he had music on that she liked, she’d tell him to shut it off. The poor man, he got yelled at his whole life.
But he’s the only one in my family that really encouraged me to play music. Everybody else was like, ‘It’s a waste of time.’ He would just say to me on the side, ‘Do it for fun. If you have fun that’s all that matters.’ When Big Sniff recorded, and we made our first 7” and then we made a CD that came out in Europe, he was so proud of me. Think about it back then, ‘92 maybe, if you put a CD out, even guys I was friends with back then didn’t have CDs out. Local bands, everybody was putting vinyl out. That was the only thing people could afford at the time. We put a CD out and I remember Tommy [Corrigan] from Silent Majority was like, “You guys made it.” Because it was a CD and not vinyl. It’s so silly. Think about it now, people throw their CDs in the garbage.
When did you change to a four-piece?
Oh, so throughout the history of Kill Your Idols, we fluctuated from four-piece to five-piece, just depending on a great many things, like if we kicked somebody out and we were about to go on tour or if somebody left and we were about to go on tour, we would just be a four-piece. Touring, the less people the better sometimes. You’re limited on space, you’re not really making much money to begin with, so there’s less people to go around. That works out better too.
I think Kill Your Idols sounds great as a five-piece, but we need the right people for that. It’s hard for me to play with some people, other guitar players, because I have a style, and it’s gotta be somebody who matches up perfect. When Hugo [Fitz] joined, right before Vinnie passed, he was great with us when Vinnie was in the band. Then the pandemic happened, and when we got back together with Anthony, something was just different. Something wasn’t gelling. I feel terrible because we love Hugo. That’s why we asked him to be in the band. We love him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s part of the family. And he was in 64 with me, and he worked out so well in 64 and especially when we recorded, the sound of our two guitars together, sounded so well, that I asked him to join KYI and Mike and Vinnie and Andy were all very much into that idea. It took no discussion at all. It worked out and he recorded the 7” with us, and I don’t know what happened. We just parted ways after that.
Let’s wrap up with the upcoming plans.
So, basically the split is on Flatspot. We’re planning on doing a full-length with Triple B. Hopefully sooner than later. We are planning on doing a split with The Path from Vermont. And hopefully we’ll be able to nail that simultaneously with the full-length. Those recording sessions will yield whatever we’re putting on that split. Let’s hope. Also, Blackout Records is going to do a vinyl box-set of all of our old catalogue, so we’re working on that. We sort of fell off it because we can’t get vinyl made nowadays, it’s on the backburner, but it is a plan. And that’s it. We’re just gonna keep playing shows whenever we get a chance to.
Listen to “Simple, Short, & Fast” here:
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Photo courtesy of Matt Viel
