Southern California pop-punk trio Super Sometimes talk friendship, growing up in real time, and making a debut album built for the live show.
In the music industry, things can get overcomplicated pretty fast.
With every streaming figure and chart position at our fingertips, it’s easier than ever for bands to get carried away chasing unreachable goals. Since emerging from the sun-soaked San Diego scene, that’s a trap that Super Sometimes have been careful to avoid falling into.
Formed by vocalists/guitarists Gabriel Muñoz and Dylan Guzman alongside drummer Matthew Ludwig as teenagers, the Southern California trio make music because they truly love everything about it. They love pop-punk, they love playing shows, and they love spending time with their best friends. Really, everything that comes their way as a result of that is a bonus.
Now signed to their dream label Pure Noise Records and currently touring with Arm’s Length and The Callous Daoboys, Super Sometimes’ debut album ‘Show The World What’s Underneath’ arrives as a statement of intent from the newcomers. Bridging the gap between the past and present of the pop-punk scene, it captures the sound of a band figuring out who they are in real time, written with a wide-eyed love for every facet of the genre.
Balancing heartbreak and coming-of-age reflections with pure singalong joy, we caught up with Super Sometimes to talk about planting their flag in the pop-punk world, working with their heroes, keeping friendship at the centre of everything, and making a debut album that shows exactly what they’re made of.
ROCK SOUND: This album really feels like a line-in-the-sand moment for you. What was your goal going into it?
DYLAN GUZMAN: Really, the mission statement of the whole record is its title, ‘Show The World What’s Underneath’. It’s us planting our flag in the pop-punk world and being like, ‘Yo, here we are’. Our first record is definitely a big deal, and so making it isn’t something that we took lightly. We waited a little while to release our first album. People think that ‘From Then & Now’ was our debut album, but really that’s just a compilation of all our previous music. We wanted to challenge ourselves when we went in to make the debut record. We’ve dreamed of making this since we started, and we wanted to do what all our favorite bands have done before. Listening to those early Blink-182 records is just magic. We tried to definitely channel that energy to make a great pop-punk album.
RS: How do you go about nodding to those influences whilst still ensuring that what you’re doing sounds distinctly like you?
GABE MUÑOZ: It just comes out naturally because of how much we listen to the bands we love. What we love about Blink is that their riffs aren’t anything crazy from a technical perspective, but they’re catchy. They stay in your head, and that’s what we try to do with our songwriting. We take different elements from different bands, but when they come together it creates our own sound. It’s about trying to have fun with it, but also keeping things super organic. To a certain extent we’re still trying to find our sound, but we’re just trying to make the best record we can.
DYLAN: When we were writing the album, it helped for us to have these focus points. We took a few records that we truly loved as references. One was Knuckle Puck’s ‘Copacetic’, one was State Champs’ ‘Around The World And Back’, and then we had others from bands like The Story So Far and The Starting Line. We had also just discovered Seaway, and their album ‘Vacation’ was a huge inspiration. The records that we were listening to at the time definitely shaped these songs, and we actually got to co-write a few songs with Nick Casasanto from Knuckle Puck. We also got to work with Kyle Black, who recorded and engineered ‘Around The World And Back’ with State Champs, and we wrote some songs with Chris Freeman from Hot Mulligan.
Working with some of our heroes in the scene taught us a lot, but it also helped keep things rooted in the spirit of pop-punk. It’s about hanging out with your friends and having these big singalongs. We’ve definitely levelled up as musicians on this record, but when you look at the DNA of the songs… It’s all pretty simple. It’s about trying to make every part as catchy and melodic as possible and hopefully making something that people will want to listen to forever. We have all these records that meant so much to us growing up, so we wanted to create something that people can cling on to like we do with them.
RS: Something that feels very central to this band is the idea of fun and friendship. As a musician, there’s always that danger of what you’re doing becoming too much like a ‘job’, but it feels as though the three of you are focused on just trying to have the best time you can with it…
MATTHEW LUDWIG: Since the conception of this band, it’s been about the friendship between the three of us before anything else. It’s about making sure that it always feels like we’re just hanging out and enjoying our time together. Of course, there were times in the studio when it felt more like working, but we still had a great time. It’s always been three best friends hanging out, doing the music thing.
DYLAN: If you’re not having fun, why are you doing it? It’s cool that people may like this album, but really, we were writing it for ourselves. We’ll always be authentic and true to ourselves, and we just want to have a good time. That comes into the live shows too, and when we’re writing songs, we’re always imagining where they’ll go in the setlist. We think about how it’s going to feel live, what part will make people want to finger point, and what part will make them want to jump off the stage. We focus on the live show more than anything, and there’s nothing cooler than seeing people move to the songs in the ways we’d imagined they would.
GABE: There’s nothing like writing stuff that comes from your heart, giving it your all, and then seeing people sing it back to you. That’s so rewarding.
RS: The first track people heard from this record was ‘Afterthought’, which was a hell of an opening statement…
GABE: As soon as we wrote that song, we knew it was the opener of the album. It’s abrupt, and it gets straight into it. As it was coming together, we just knew it was the one we’d share first. It’s just so fun.
DYLAN: That’s the song that we wrote with Nick from Knuckle Puck and Sam Guiana, who has produced loads of great pop-punk records. When we left the session that day, the song wasn’t even complete, but we all knew it was the opening track. It encapsulates a lot of the different vibes on the record. It has verses that are a little more melodic and melancholy, and then this huge chorus with a mix of the two vocals.
We were actually inspired by Pierce The Veil a little there, because they’ve talked in interviews about why they chose ‘Dive In’ as the opening track on ‘Misadventures’. They’ve said that it’s the perfect representation of the whole record, and that if you listen to that song, you almost get a taste of the whole thing. That was definitely on our mind when we were thinking about the order of the album.
RS: Let’s talk about the album’s title track too, because that feels like it’s going to be a huge moment in the live show. How did that one come about?
DYLAN: We wrote that song with just us three in the basement, and it was one of the quickest to come together.
MATTHEW: We jammed it through maybe twice in total, and then the song was written. It was unbelievable how quickly it happened.
DYLAN: It’s our personal favourite on the album, and the one we’re most proud of. It has a very nostalgic feel to it, and that just comes from three best friends jamming in the basement. Looking back at how lengthy the songwriting process was for this record, and how many different sessions we had, the way that song came together feels special. After it was completed, we spent a lot of time looking at every section of every song and saying, ‘What can we do to make it better?’ The title track was the only one on the entire record that we brought into that process and went, ‘Actually, it’s kind of perfect’. How you hear it on the record is almost exactly the same as it started.
The end section of it is almost our mission statement for the album, and it’s where the title came from. Rest in peace Chain Reaction, but if we were ever to headline a venue like that, that’d be the part where we’d close out the set with everybody piling onto the stage. We have to shout out Arm’s Length here too, because touring with them and seeing them play each night was so inspiring. They know how to do those big singalong parts, and it’s almost like going to church or something. They make it this whole moment in their live show. I hope when we’re headlining, we get to have that moment with this song.
RS: As we said, there’s a whole load of fun to be found in these songs, but there’s also a lot of reflection, vulnerability and emotion. What have you learned about yourselves whilst working on this album?
DYLAN: We started the band when we were aged between 15 and 17, so this has been a huge part of our lives already. Gabe and I are barely 21 now, and Matthew’s still 18 years old, but we still like to look back at how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. We started in 2023, and we’ve already signed to the label that we’ve dreamed of being on since we were kids. We’re hitting all these milestones, and we’re doing it so much quicker than we thought we would have.
We got into our feelings a lot with this record, especially on a song like ‘Common Place’. I love seeing how close we’ve grown together. Being in a band definitely puts a strain on your personal relationships, and you give up a lot of important parts of your life. You do that to be able to chase a dream though. ‘Common Place’ was very nostalgic, thinking back on the days when we started the band, and how much simpler it was back then. It’s also about how grateful we are to be where we are now though. It’s the only acoustic song we’ve ever released, so I hope people like it.
MATTHEW: A lot of this record is a coming-of-age thing. We’re all really young, so we are growing up and learning as we go with this. We want to be authentic about that, and our goal is just to be ourselves with this.
RS: When people sit down with the record for the first time, what do you hope they understand about Super Sometimes?
MATTHEW: I hope they can see that we’re having a lot of fun, and I want them to know that there’s a lot more to come from us.
DYLAN: I hope that people are open to us going in a lot of different directions on this record too. There are songs like ‘Always You’, ‘Learned My Lesson’ and ‘See This Coming’ which definitely take things in a different direction for the band, and I think that’s important. We’re inspired by all different types of music, and we don’t want to be seen as a one-trick pony or be confined to writing songs that sound a certain way. If we released a debut album that focused on just one type of pop-punk, that might be all that people want from us going forward.
We want to write songs that will appeal to people who like aggressive pop-punk, people who like old-school pop-punk, and everyone in between. We’ve done our homework when it comes to this scene, and we’re stepping into a new era of it now where there’s been a real resurgence of new pop-punk bands. We want to pay homage to a genre that is timeless whilst trying to make it our own.
