Dissonance - Interview 2026

Yo!  I am super pumped for the upcoming EP!  Let's start off with who we are talking to and what you do in the band?

Hey my name is Alexandros Hatzikyriakos and I play bass in Dissonance and I am one of the two founders of the band.

Who are all the members, their roles, and ages?

So, the members are as follows, Dylan Cruz is our vocalist and was also responsible for the recording and mixing of the upcoming EP and he is 25 years old, on guitars we have Jared Davis, and Jared McGuire, Davis being 23 years old, and McGuire being 27 years old. George Alvaro is our drummer and he is 20 years old, and lastly Alexandros Hatzikyriakos on bass and I am 22 years old.

How did Dissonance start?  Were you guys in other bands?  What's the story?!

Dissonance started as an idea and remained that way for a decent amount of time, in 2023 I had come up with the name and just sat on it cause at the time I had no one to jam or write with, and no one with similar interests was really coming my way to really help get the project started. Later that year I had met Jared Davis at a show out in Long Island, and we really hit it off, he was going to school in Binghamton at the time so we didn’t ever jam till many months after the fact but we still kept in touch cause we were into a lot of similar bands, and both had desires to make a brutal death metal band. In 2024, I had made a draft of the logo and me and Jared had agreed to meet up to write some songs not long after and from then on Dissonance actually became something tangible. 

We had limited time so we would have writing sessions once a week for a month and that’s how we came about writing the EP that will be released this year. We wrote four songs and ultimately scrapped the first one cause we felt like it didn’t do justice like the rest of the material, and after these main writing sessions we would make slight changes and tweaks to the songs, where by the fall/winter of that year we had the full EP written but only the guitar and bass parts as we didn’t have a drummer or a vocalist. Around this time, Jared had to begin planning to move to Virginia for work and we still were left with no drummer or vocalist, but before he moved, we ran into George at a show. He was just goin around the venue asking people if they play instruments wanting to be in a band and then he ran into Jared and they talked for a little bit and exchanged information.

I reached out to George a few days later and he had sent me a clip of him playing Suffocation as a warm up and we had mentally decided that he was definitely going to be our drummer. We jammed with him and he just fit right in, he came into that first practice already having his own drum parts ready for all the songs, and we gave him full creative freedom to make any changes, or add cool drum parts/fills and it just felt good. At this time, I was in a band called Coronary Thrombosis, but I would shortly move to another band from Yonkers called Scumbag and that’s where we met our vocalist, Dylan. 

I had gone to a few Scumbag practices and Dylan knew about Dissonance and expressed interest after we had put out a post seeking a vocalist, again we were super hands off that being that we had no lyrics prepared, we kind of just gave him the themes we were going for and he came up with some really sick lyrics, vocal patterns, and dynamically switching from highs to lows it really came together.

After we got Dylan on vocals we had started to prep for recording the EP very shortly after, and we did drums first, guitars second, bass, then vocals. We thought we were content with this lineup as we were sitting on the EP and preparing it for release, and trying to find the right label, and finalizing the mix, when we started discussing the prospect of getting a second guitar player and that’s when we had reached out to Jared McGuire. 

I knew Jared from his other band called Death Island, as they’re good friends of Scumbag, and after playing some shows together and getting to talk to him, I’d find out he is super into brutal death metal and it immediately caught my attention that he could potentially be our second guitarist. We sent him the material to learn and after some prep time we had a full band practice for the first time and he really held it down and we were down to welcome him aboard. 

Now after two years, we finally have a solid lineup that’s ready to begin work on our full-length, and it is super exciting to be able to go from writing songs as a two piece to a five piece, a lot more creativity, and ideas to share and bounce off of and I really believe that what’s coming next is going to be a huge step up from what everyone will get to hear soon.

4. - Congrats on the NSE signing!  That is going to put so many new ears on the ep!  How did that come about?

Thank you, we are all really happy that the band got signed to New Standard Elite and it really had been the goal from the start on where we wanted to be signed, and where we wanted the EP to be released. We really just love all the bands and talent on the label and wanted to be a part of it, after the release was finalized and we were scouting labels, I had emailed Ryan Baker over at NSE and just explained who we are, dropped a link to all the songs, along with the information regarding the release, and then we waited a week or two before we got a response. He said that he liked it and that he was going to send it over to Dan Osborn as well and then we waited another week or two before he said he would like to sign us, and now here we are. All of us were super excited to have this opportunity and Baker so far has been super cool to work with.

How did you guys name the band?

The name was chosen by me and it was based off the definition of Dissonance, that being a lack of harmony between musical notes, and a clash between two disharmonious and unstable elements. With the riffs and the overall tone of the songs we wanted to create something that is unpleasant, unsettling, and uncomfortable, along with a dark and depressing atmosphere, so the name of the band though not relating exactly to the definition, is meant to represent the feelings associated with the music, the imagery, and the general lyrical themes. Suicide, depression, self-mutilation, drug-abuse are all unsettling things, and when we combine it with compositions that give off these evil/dark emotions/atmospheres, I thought the name would really do it justice, and it is almost used as a synonym to explain and try to push how we want people to perceive our music and our art.

The first single "Disgust in Erysichthon's Rapacious Desire" is already making waves, with the comments on the video all praising the production, art, and all around style.  How has the reception felt to you guys?

The reception has felt really good, there was some speculation as to if the music would be received well by the community especially considering a lot of the trends in the scene at the moment, so when we saw a lot of praise and support behind it, we were very surprised but also very pleased. A lot of work went into these songs and this release so to see word already start spreading about it, and have people comment on the production, and the art work, and the song itself really means a lot to us all and has us very eager to continue writing so that the next release is even better.  

I also love the band logo!  You did that?  Can you talk about how long you have messing around with that sort of thing and what your process is like?

Appreciate it, this is still the only logo I have ever made and basically, I was taking a night class where we couldn’t use any phones or laptops or it was an automatic failure and we had three hours in there. I sat down one night in there, and started sketching the logo and I looked at it afterwards and I was like damn I think that’s the one. I took a photo of the logo and then touched it up on Procreate and that was that. Logos are still something I want to try doing more of but at the moment that’s the best of my capabilities.

Who the fuck is Erysichthon?  I'm trying to research but got lost. He cut down a sacred grove of trees and made his daughter a slave?  Am I even close?  How did you guys decide to go with this this?

Yea so, Erysichthon is a figure in Greek mythology who cut down Demeter’s sacred grove of trees to build himself a banquet hall. As punishment he was cursed by Demeter with insatiable hunger, thus leaving his family impoverished, sold his daughter to slavery, and eventually consumed himself. The song tells and modern interpretation of this story from his daughter’s point of view and the interpretation is surrounded around the concept of drug abuse, the parallels of this story and those of an addict who lost everything align, maybe not in the form of someone eating themselves in the end but the way they lose everything to this disease/curse.

Originally, we had the idea to sample a scene from a splatter movie called Naked Blood, where some chick is eating herself, the sample never ended up making it to the EP but we took that scene and Erysichthons story and used it as inspiration for the theme of the song which ended up staying. 

So Dylan recorded, mixed, and mastered the release.  His "Hanging Garden' stuff sounds cool also.  Is the production stuff a big part of his background?  Where do you guys record?

Yeah, so Dylan brought up the idea of fully recording the EP for us when we were searching for options, and then fully recording it eventually resulted in him mixing it, and we really had no skepticism we believed he would put out an awesome product. Outside of the Hanging Garden release and our EP, recording/mixing is something he has showed much interest in as far as doing it more frequently, and he is also going to do the recording and mix of the upcoming Scumbag EP, so far all his mixes sound great and it seems like the more he works on his skills in that field the better it gets. We recorded the drums, bass, and vocals all at his house, and our guitarist Jared Davis recorded his parts at home in Virginia, and then he sent the Stems over to us so Dylan could mix it all. We took a day to record all the drums because we had to move George’s kit from the city to Yonkers which was a pain, then we took about 2-3 sessions for guitars and bass respectively, and vocals went through a good bit of revisions for how Dylan wanted to layer things and what techniques he wanted to use, so it took him around 4 or 5 sessions in total . Multiple sessions for the strings and vocals really gave us the ability to focus on key parts and listen back to a previous session knowing what we want to change/improve while going into the next one. Overall, the recording process was super comfortable, and fun, and I really don’t see why we won’t take the same approach when we do the album.

I am of course a big Jon Zig fan, who killed the cover artwork by the way, but what really caught my eye are some of the more unique pieces on your instagram done by Overactive Imagination?  Will these be used for anything?  They are great!

I’m really glad you like those pieces, the artist is Isabella Randazzo, and she did all the artwork pre the Jon Zig cover, she actually made the original EP cover before it was suggested that we get it redone by Zig by Baker, so the whole art concept with the woman in the tub was originally done by her and it got “Zigified” as I like to say. The other pieces notably the blue girl will be used for merchandise at some point for sure, and we actually have patches underway with the one where she’s ripping apart her face.

When can fans expect "Seduced By Self-Mutilation"?

The full EP will hopefully be out by Spring time, fingers crossed another month or so, we are super eager to have everyone hear the full product. 

Can you tell us some artists than have greatly inspired the bands sound?

Man, there are a lot, it would be tough to pin down each influence but for sure bands like, Defeated Sanity, Gorgasm, Malignancy, Cerebral Effusion, Guttural Secrete, Regurgitation, Suffocation, Disgorge, Deicide, Internal Suffering, Deeds of Flesh, Inveracity, Disavowed, the list just goes on and on but those are some notable ones for sure. Oh, and George loves Lividity an unhealthy amount so they definitely are in there.

Thanks a lot for your patience and answers!!Any last words for you fans?

Thank you, and I speak for everyone in the band when I say we deeply appreciate all the support we have been shown at such an early stage and we are really excited to keep moving forward and create more sick music, and get to your city to play for y’all soon enough. Stay tuned for the EP and everything else to come, much love!

DISSONANCE

NEW STANDARD ELITE

ISABELLA RANDAZZO

JON ZIG

SCUMBAG

CORONARY THROMBOSIS

HANGING GARDEN

DEATH ISLAND