Vinnie Caruana talks loss, creative freedom, and making the most expansive I Am The Avalanche record yet.
For over two decades, I Am The Avalanche have been serving up urgent punk songs loaded with emotion and heart. Formed by vocalist Vinnie Caruana after the dissolution of The Movielife in the early 2000s, the New York band have built up a reputation for their refusal to deal in half measures, consistently transforming life’s messiest moments into some of the loudest and most cathartic songs in the game.
Returning with their first full-length in six years, ‘The Horror Show’ is no ordinary I Am The Avalanche album. The band’s most expansive collection of songs to date, it serves as a time capsule of one of the hardest periods in Vinnie’s life, written largely in the wake of profound personal loss. Wrestling with grief, mortality, friendship, love, and resilience, all while making space for celebration and hope amongst the devastation, it’s an album born from courage and pain, deeply human in every way.
Ahead of its release, we caught up with Vinnie to talk about how this chapter took shape, the universal peculiarity of navigating grief, and why he hopes these songs can become a companion for anyone who needs them.
ROCK SOUND: ‘The Horror Show’ is the band’s first album in six years, and it feels like a very important one for you on a personal level. When did you realise that this was becoming something you really needed to put out?
VINNIE CARUANA: In the beginning, it just started as, ’We’re going to do another Avalanche record’ because it made sense at that point in our lives to do it. That was a long time ago though, so the album has spanned all these different eras of our lives and was written in so many different locations around the United States.
I’ll hold my hands up, I procrastinate. Mike Ireland [guitarist] and I were writing a bunch of stuff throughout the years, and the music was flowing, but the lyrics were not. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and usually that is a bad situation to be in. If you let the music flow and ignore the lyrics, then you have this massive mountain to climb. But I write the way I write, for better or for worse. I have to do that for my own health, because it’s real. There’s no fiction happening. Staring at that every day will drain you mentally and physically, and I’ll run out of gas. I saw that mountain forming, but the music was also growing into something else. There are probably ten songs that we wrote for this album which no one will ever hear, but that’s just the way it was meant to be this time around.
Whether I was procrastinating or not, I wrote the lyrics when it was the exact right time for me to write them. It came after I experienced the most insane amount of loss. At the time, part of me was like, ‘Most of the lyrics aren’t written yet, so I guess the record’s never going to get done.’ It was a sunny day though, so I went to the park by my apartment, and I wrote the first lyrics. It killed me for the next three days. I got it off my chest, and it took so much out of me physically and mentally, but I saw the result. I went into the studio around three days after I wrote that first song. I sang it in the vocal booth, and when I heard it back, I became empowered. I knew that I needed to see it through.
It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but going back and listening to the record now, I’m really proud to have gotten to the top of that mountain. I hope the record makes my friends and family proud.
RS: As a title, ‘The Horror Show’ sounds theatrical and big, but really, it’s describing what grief feels like. It can be such a strange experience, where it almost feels like you’re sat watching someone else’s life unfold on TV…
VINNIE: That’s a very good way of putting it. It does occur to me that the album title is kind of theatrical, but it’s more about how it doesn’t even feel real when the grief hits. When it hits, it’s there for the rest of your life in different ways.
When it came time to write, the words ‘The Horror Show’ were one of the first things that came out. That was the way I articulated what I was living through. Those words and the lyrics to the title track all came together on that sunny day, and that tied it all together for me. In the chorus of the title track, I talk about the coldest summer, and the blackest blue. It’s almost like you’re watching life through a different lens.
On the nicest day of the year, I was out in the park writing the hardest song I’ve ever had to write, whilst little kids were running by with balloons. Once you’re in that, you’re in it forever. I don’t want to dwell there, but I’m a realist. Summer looks different. Spring looks different. A sunny day looks different. The best thing that I can do is write about that for myself and for anybody else who knows how it feels. Not that long ago, I didn’t know what this felt like, but I do now, and we all will eventually. I think it’s important for people to know that they’re not alone, even though they’re experiencing something that is so isolating and so unique to them.
RS: Grief is inevitable. Everybody is going to feel it, and everybody will feel it differently. What’s interesting about these songs is that they don’t just sit in darkness. The pain is there, obviously, but there’s celebration too, and love, and that sense that if you love someone that much, it’s going to hurt. Was it important to you that the record didn’t just document the pain, but also the love and life that still exist around it?
VINNIE: For myself, definitely. I had to remember that this is not a therapy session, it’s a record. It’s not all negative because so many positives have come from living through everything that I’ve lived through. I want people to listen to this record and for it to be a companion to them.
That’s the nice thing about making a record in little slivers of time, too. You can watch the way it comes together, and you can see what the record needs. You can step away from it and say, ‘Okay, you’ve said that. What else do you have to say?’ If the record just said the same thing over and over again, you’re not going to want to listen to it more than once. That’s not to say that you need to load it with pop songs, you just have to think about what you can put forth other than the agony.
If I wrote and recorded all these lyrics in one spontaneous stream of consciousness within a few days, it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. I’d have been saying, ‘Good luck getting through this record.’ It was helpful to be able to step away and see what the record needed and see how we could make the most well-rounded album we’ve ever made.
RS: That plays into the sound of these songs too. Having that time to step away, you can hear where the little gaps are and what places you have left to explore from a sonic perspective. Being over two decades into the game now, do you give yourself more permission to let go of the restraints and push the band’s sound now?
VINNIE: There were a lot of situations like that on this record. Each time we came back into the studio, we naturally found that things got pushed to a new place. There’s a song called ‘True Legends Never Die’ on the album, and I wrote the music for that with the full intention of giving it to Michael Smith, who sings in one of the biggest hardcore bands in the world, Pain Of Truth.
I wasn’t specifically writing a song for Michael, and I don’t even know if Michael wanted anything from me, but I write all the time. My wife has more of a nine-to-five setup in her life, but I’m more of a night owl. It’s not uncommon for her to go to bed and for me to go to my practice space and write. I wrote that song as an exercise, and it’s one of the wildest places we’ve ever gone in an Avalanche song.
The ‘no rules’ thing sounds silly, because obviously there aren’t any rules, but it’s hard sometimes. The last record we put out was during the pandemic, and we never toured on it. Growth never happened as a result of that, so we felt pretty stuck. I don’t feel like we’re following up that record with this one. I feel like we’re starting fresh with a new mindset. This time it’s like, ‘How silly we were to even think about anything conventional. Let’s lean into every single direction that we may or may not want to go.’
The songs that make the records are generally the ones that I can step into and feel confident and enthusiastic about. That’s usually when I start pacing around the apartment or the practice space. Once the pacing starts happening, I know that song is going to be on the record.
RS: The flow of the record is incredible, and you’ve been able to capture so many stages of grief and the different ways those emotions play out. You’ve got something like ‘True Legends Never Die’ which is super confronting, and then you have something like ‘5:55’, which hits in a much more fragile, visceral way…
VINNIE: The music dictates it. ‘5:55’ goes to a dreamier place, and although I could get a similar point across by yelling over a high-intensity musical composition, that’s not what the song needed.
The flow of the record also comes down to Brett [Romnes, drummer and producer] being a master of what he does. At this point, he’s making massive records. Every time we make a record together, I can see what he’s learned since the last time I worked with him. He played a massive part in the fluidity of the record.
I like the heavier Avalanche stuff, but I wouldn’t like a whole Avalanche record to be like that, and it never would be. There’s always going to be sweetness and melody. I like heavy music, but for the most part, I’m a melody guy. I love melodies and finding new things that make me feel fuzzy, songs that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
RS: The video for ‘God’s Travel Plans / The Horror Show’ is incredible. What did you want to get across with that visual?
VINNIE: We knew we wanted to lead with ‘The Horror Show’, and we knew we couldn’t do that without also showcasing ‘God’s Travel Plans’, which is the intro track to the record. When I wrote ‘God’s Travel Plans’, I was on an aeroplane, and I was very stoned. I was finishing this three-part documentary on the Gilgo Beach killer, which is the biggest serial killer story from where we grew up. We grew up there during the time in which it happened, but I knew very little about the intricacies of the case. The guy got caught last year after 20 years of them trying to solve the case, which had a lot to do with the inadequacies of the Suffolk County Police departments. I was disgusted when I finished it, and I wrote the lyrics to ‘God’s Travel Plans’ on a piece of paper, not knowing what I needed it for.
Musically, ‘God’s Travel Plans’ was just this little moment. We built an entire song around it but eventually scrapped it and went back to how it originally was. Then Brett suggested that it should be a segue into something else, in the same way that the track ‘Osprey’ on the record is.
We were in the van doing some shows with Thursday last summer, and me and Mike were sitting on the same bench in the Sprinter. Brett said to me, ‘I think that song should be first on the record.’ I looked at Mike and was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to be the first track on the record. I have control here.’ Brett was completely right. It should be the first thing you hear on the album, and now it is.
We knew that if the title track was going to exist in video form, ‘God’s Travel Plans’ needed to be attached to it. I had a lot of chats with Jesse Korman, who directed the video, and I explained to him what this record is about. He and the video’s star Michael C. Williams understood it, and the way they put those ideas across was so perfect. I wanted them to be respectful of where this is all coming from, but there has to be poetic licence. Not everything can be directly on the nose. In the video, our actor is seeing all these moments of his life that he can’t have back. He’s coming to terms with it, struggling with it, but trying to live with it. We were so nervous around Michael because he was amazing in The Blair Witch Project. Getting to watch him act was incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever received so many messages being like, ‘What the fuck, you guys made a big rock video!’
RS: The magic of music is that you write it about one particular thing in your life, but then thousands of other people will hear it and tie it into moments in theirs. Knowing people are about to hear these songs and sit with this album front to back, what do you hope they’re able to take from it?
VINNIE: I’ve been resistant to doing a track-by-track of the album because I want people to experience this fully. I hope that this is 30 minutes where you feel every human emotion possible. I want people to engage with it, and to be present for the ride so that they’re digesting what we’re putting in their ears. A lot of people don’t listen to a whole record, but I’d love for that whole experience to happen at least once for everyone. For just half an hour, I’d love for you to feel your feelings through the highs and the lows.
What I’m going through is entirely unique, but we’re all going through our own version of that, and if we aren’t right now, one day we will. Really, nobody’s alone. In an increasingly isolating and stressful world, to know that we have each other is sometimes all that we have. When I listened to the record recently for the first time in a while, I felt comforted by whoever that guy was that climbed that mountain. I don’t know how he did that, but he’s not me. He was some other stronger dude, and in that moment, he knew he had to do it. I don’t know who wrote all those lyrics, because I’m not strong enough to do that. I must have been on acid for those entire few months when I wrote them, but I’m happy that I did.
‘The Horror Show’ will be released on April 10 via Rude Records/Equal Vision Records.
