KOYO

There’s a lot of musical history on Long Island, especially when it comes to hardcore and punk. It was that heritage that the six members of Koyo wanted to pay homage to with their band. Formed in 2019, the six-piece, now five piece – vocalist Joey Chairamonte, guitarists Harold Griffin, TJ Rotolico and Mike Marazzo, bassist Stephen Spanos and drummer Sal Argento – all played in different bands in the scene but had been friends for years. It was when they all happened to be home at the same time that idea of a new project was floated and Koyo started life. They managed one gig before the pandemic hit, but the subsequent downtime allowed them the time to really hone their craft and the direction of the band.

As such, Koyo exists both in the past and the present. That’s something you can hear in the music they’ve released to date, but especially within the fabric of “Ten Digits Away”, the first song that they’ll be releasing on Pure Noise Records. A seamless blend of hardcore and emo, it infuses elements of the latter into the framework of the former to create a song that bristles with energy and emotion in equal measure while creating something new and unique in the process.

Koyo is now the project – above all the others they’ve been involved in – that its members are most focused on. That care and dedication can be heard easily in “Ten Digits Away”. Recorded in a studio on a farm in Flemington, NJ by Such Gold’s Jon Markson, it’s a song that also captures and reflects on – in trademark Koyo style – the tentative and temporary nature of existence. But within that fragility is also an urgent call to make the most of the time we have while we have it – because it could all end at any moment.

To that extent, “Ten Digits Away” transcends time to position Koyo at the beginning of the next phase of its existence. Truthfully, it wasn’t meant to become a priority, or even last this long, but there’s something about this project that its members can’t shake. Nor do they want to.