When vocalist Carlos Velazquez went to a band practice years ago, one of his bandmates introduced him to his friend, guitarist Ryan Calaveras.

As the conversation veered to Iron Age, Carlos was surprised to discover Ryan’s admiration for his favorite band. Hardcore wasn’t as popular at the time of their first encounter, and the Bay Area hardcore scene certainly wasn’t very familiar with a band like Iron Age from Texas.

That one serendipitous interaction led to the formation of hardcore/metal crossover act Doomsday seven years ago.

“It’s kind of crazy, just that one meeting with him just kinda dictated the entire course of the rest of my life,” Velazquez remarks. He met the other members of Doomsday through the scene, and after several singles and demos, the group has released the ferocious debut full-length album Never Known Peace.

Iron Age’s influence can be heard all over the LP, but elements exuding metal are also audible. There are the King Diamond-inspired dive bombs and lyrics exploring destruction and war reminiscent of Sepultura. Even guitar solos find their way into Never Known Peace– not a particularly popular implementation in hardcore.

Describing the album as “a love letter to a lot of our influences,” Doomsday’s
Carlos Velazquez and Ryan Calaveras chat about how they arrived at the album’s blend of heavy music styles, their love for the Bay Area hardcore scene, and the commitment to making Doomsday an endeavor beyond their community.

You have a really rich history of thrash metal, and then also we have the current hardcore in the Bay area. So even with the Internet giving you access to bands from around the world, has being surrounded by that had a big influence on Doomsday? 

Ryan Calaveras: I mean, growing up, I didn’t even listen to thrash metal or hardcore. I listened to mainly hip hop! That was mainly what my circle of friends at the time listened to. It wasn’t until I played guitar hero for the first time is when I started paying attention to metal. I heard the riff for “Sweet Child of Mine.” I heard the guitar solo. I was like, “I want that. That’s what I want to do.”

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, for me, I didn’t even grow up in this. I grew up in Puerto Rico. I was listening to like, Daddy Yankee (laughs). Yeah, I was into Daddy Yankee, but my dad, he was a big metal head, and when I was just driving around the car with him, I would just kind of forced to listen to Iron Maiden. Then, I heard the “The Trooper” for the first time. I’m like, “okay, fuck this shit. I can’t listen to ‘Gasolina’ anymore. I gotta switch it up.”

So what are some of the bands in the Bay area now that you feel are underrated? Could be in your scene, or outside of that.

Ryan Calaveras: I always say Extinguished 100%.

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, Extinguished from Sacramento. They’re the dopest band ever live. It’s crazy how good they are. 

Eightfold Path. I feel like they need to get a lot more recognition. It’s kind of crazy like with us, even though we lean towards metal, we’re so ingrained in hardcore. I’m trying to answer your question in a more heavy, metal-oriented way, but all I can think about is just hardcore bands. I feel like at the end of this day, this is like is a hardcore band, but if I got to think of like a band that is underrated, there’s this band from Sacramento called the Test Dream and they’re metalcore. And it is the dopest music I’ve heard in such a long time. And Chris the singer, he’s a theater kid, and during the breakdowns of the songs he just starts weeping and just being super performative. It’s the dopest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. We went on a run with them and another band we’re in, and it was so sick, seeing that every night.

So yeah, Test Dream in Sacramento, most underrated band out right now, my opinion.

Ryan Calaveras: And Manos de Fierro. 

Carlos Velazquez: Manos de Fierro, yeah. Manos de Fierro, Iron Front. And they’re just kids, you know, like at most, early twenties and stuff like that. The drummer Max for those bands- he’s like, I think he just turned 17, and he’s an actual savant. He’s an actual prodigy, genius drummer and it’s insane. It’s insane watching him do it… what he does and I struggle to play bass (laughs). It’s crazy.

Doesn’t it feel like, I don’t know if it’s because of the Internet, and having just access to so much, but kids now kind of feel like prodigies, or like these huge talents, even as teens. Do you feel like that? Like there’s these kids who not only have the music with music theory and knowledge, but they also just know bands so much now.

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, dude. I’m not gonna be like, “oh, back in my day…” 

It’s so to get into the cult shit, or the underground stuff, because it’s so readily available. It’s so easy to find people to talk with about it or how to find ways to improve, because like for me, it was either just listening to what my dad had, or just hoping something came up on my Youtube in like 2007. 

I guess when I first moved to the States it was like, I didn’t know a single thing about hardcore, and it was my coworkers that showed me this one band called Burn. That was my introduction to hardcore- that Shall Be Judged EP is still I think one of the greatest New York hardcore releases of all time, and then that just pushed me down a rabbit hole of just finding blogs and stuff. It was a lot of… I don’t want to say work, it’s just Googling shit, but it was just like just going on this deep dive of finding bands. Now it’s with Tiktok. I’d assume it’s really easy, because it’s just right there at your fingertips. You don’t really need to do much, but I mean, who knows. I don’t know how they’re finding music now.

So for the new album, you said you wanted this album to be a love letter to the records that you grew up listening to, while also staying true to yourselves. Did it take a while to find out that balance and that blend of those two aspects, and making that into a sound that you wanted?

Ryan Calaveras: It did take a while for us to dial in the sound that we wanted. Our first demo ever, I think remotely sounds nothing like us right now, and I remember when we recorded our second batch of songs, I remember handing them to Carlos, and he was like, “yeah, this is it. This is the blend.” I think we locked in from there. It was just a love letter to a lot of our influences. We always draw from Sepultura, we always draw from Slayer, Metallica, Iron Age. We just want this to be a tribute to all of those, because if it wasn’t for those bands, this band wouldn’t exist.

Carlos Velazquez: Straight up. I feel like those are like the only bands I can like confidently say that- after Reggaeton- those were the bands that I gravitated towards and still hold near to me. I feel like there wasn’t any other way.  It would be impossible to not have those influences shine through. But I also didn’t want, at least for me, I didn’t want like this album to be like a cookie cutter type of deal. I feel like, with the addition of that extra spice of Iron Age in there, it has that weird element of hardcore on top of the thrash stuff. It’s not just even necessarily just crossover anymore. 

I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but I feel like we got something pretty dope and unique in a way, so I’m looking forward to what people think of it.

I can definitely hear that blend of like the classic thrash metal, but also that Iron Age influence in there, too. I feel like Metallica, Slayer, Sepultura, they are so revered and they’re so popular outside of metal that people kind of forget how revolutionary those bands were at the time. So I feel like nowadays it’s crazy- those bands are still touring, and Slayer came back. It’s pretty wild to see how influential all those bands still are. Metal is kind of making it’s way towards the mainstream a little more. I think hardcore is, too. Do you feel that way?

Carlos Velazquez: Oh, dude, 100%! I mean, all these big fests like Aftershock. There’s a little block where it’s just hardcore bands. It’s Sunami, Snuffed on Sight, and I forget who else is on it, but it’s just core bands. It’s RBS bands with Bay bands in there. It’s crazy to think about  how much impact our area and our scene had throughout the world. It’s weird and crazy to think we’re kind of in that realm and came up with some of those bands too.

I remember doing a zine excerpt for my friend Will’s zine Power Core Fan Zine about the question: can hardcore be true to itself and true to its roots, while this big ass expansion is happening. The consciousness of what hardcore is like is becoming more common. People are listening to old New York hardcore stuff more and I’d assume, trying to bring stuff like that in, but also trying to make money off of it. Can that really coexist? Are you really a hardcore band? 

Like if the intent isn’t just to play music, it’s actually to make like a career out of it… I don’t know. I’m super proud of any band that wants to make music and do the things they want to do, because, this shit is not easy, and it’s not free. Of course you gotta do it for the love of the game. I might be getting a little off the rails with the original topic here, but I feel like if you’re a musician and this is what you truly love doing, I don’t know. I feel like if it’s truly what you love doing, you just go for it. I feel like hardcore getting bigger at this point is now an inevitability. I feel like hardcore bands getting bigger now is like good for every band coming up now.

You had Andrew Leaf from Ripped to Shreds featured on the album, so what was it like collaborating with him on the guitar solos, because it’s rare to find those solos?

Ryan Calaveras: I mean, I’m in Ripped to Shreds also. So it’s like, I just texted him. And I was like, “can you? Can you do a guitar solo?” He just sent two tracks within like a couple of days, and he’s like, “does this sound terrible?”

It’s literally just texting him, and he just sent me over a dry track. It’s already a masterpiece, and I already know I can’t replicate it. And we’re not gonna play any of those songs.

Did you have any parameters, or tell him kind of what you wanted, or did you just send it to him and let him go off on it?

Ryan Calaveras: I think the parameters that I gave him were crazy and Candlemass. That’s it, and then he just came up with it.

I was not expecting Candlemass, but that’s cool!

Carlos Velazquez: Candlemass is so dope.

Ryan Calaveras: So sick.

Guitar solos aren’t really as big of a thing as it was in the 70s, 80s. So you put pressure on yourselves to make sure they’re good, since there aren’t many of them out there right now?

Ryan Calaveras: For me, not so much, because when I put pressure on myself, I end up not getting it done. There has to be a point where I just have to let it go. Sometimes I write something and I leave it there, and I listen to the demo, and sometimes I change it, sometimes I don’t. It depends on like how it sounds with Carlos’s vocals on there, and how the rest of the band plays it. So I tend to not put as much pressure on myself. 

Our other guitarist, Rob, on the other hand, will try to get everything down to the T. So if there’s anyone in the band that plays a solo, 100% note for note, it’s probably him and not me [laughs]. 

So is it like a balance between both of you of him being more particular about the solo, and you being more casual about it? You have to meet somewhere in the middle?

Ryan Calaveras: I let him do whatever. I write about 90% of the stuff, including all the drum parts, bass parts. Carlos, with his magnificent voice, just layers everything. [To Carlos] Yeah, dude, you have the best voice I know, man. You could easily tell it’s you. It’s awesome!

Carlos: Thanks, dude. 

Ryan Calaveras: But 90% of the stuff… and I actually, I’ll give you more credit. It’s like half and half me and you. I tend to play stuff a little bit more looser while Rob is a little bit more technical. So there’s two different types of tone when it comes to it. You can tell it’s Rob when he plays, and you could tell it’s me when it plays, because I just dive bomb everything [laughs].

But yeah, I like how he does it, and I don’t really tell him what to do in terms of it. Despite the fact that I write the majority of it, I just let him have his reign. He’s really good at what he does. He’s one of the best guitarists I know, so I completely trust him as well as the rest of the band with their input.

That kind of works I guess for the lead and the rhythm to have that kind of synergy with each other. So when do the vocals come in? Is that something that you do after a lot of the music part of it has already been written? Is it working at the same time? How is that?

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, Ryan sends a bunch of ideas. He’s really good about having something fleshed out with his guitar. He makes fake drums in the meantime, to actually have the sound and after that,  I just listen to it, and try and get a vibe for what it is. 

After I come up with something, he’ll try and mold the rest of the song around what I sing, or like, “I actually want to do some more words here, can you do this to this part?” and stuff like that. He’s very open with suggestions, and he makes my job really easy in the band, cause it’s not just small little pieces of songs that he sends. When he comes up with a song idea, it’s like it’s crafted from a bunch of different ideas that he had, and he somehow Frankensteins that shit into an actual song. I’ve had the easiest time writing stuff because of it, because it’s like I don’t gotta do shit [laughs]! I don’t gotta do anything! I just write whatever lyrics or vocal style I think is dope and he writes around it. He’s a genius, he’s crazy.

Ryan Calaveras: Yeah, like a lot of the back and forth is between me and Carlos. He tells me stuff. It’s great.

Even though to most people, you can’t really understand it sometimes. he would mouth riff something. I would be like, “got it!” And that would be an entire song. It’s really the dynamic. The writing dynamic between us two is really good, and then everyone else, the rest of the guys in the band… they just layer on top of it.

Is that something that you built over time, or has that dynamic always been there since when you started?

Carlos Velazquez: The first thing I ever did with him, I’m like “yo, you want to start a band?” and stuff like that. I mouth riffed and he’s got it already [laughs]!

He knew what I like. We bonded over Iron Age and stuff like that. You know, I think from there we just knew what kind of sound we wanted.

I don’t really know much about music besides I guess playing it. I don’t know any theory, or any big concepts and stuff like that, but I feel like in my head, I know what’s good. And just having someone that can hear and know, like… “do an Andy LaRocque/King Diamond dive bomb underneath that” and he’ll know what I’m talking about. He’s just good. He’s really good with understanding vibe and tone.

What was the biggest challenge while making Never Known Peace?

Ryan Calaveras: “Everyday War.” Oh, yeah, that’s the one. That song was the last one to be finished, right?

Carlos Velazquez: Dude. Yeah, that song took me like, I think over two or three months to figure out lyrics for, or how to do it, just cause it was to me the least D Day-type song we’ve written yet, and I had to dumb everything down to get it just right, because with every single and release we’ve done, I was competing against myself to come up with good lyrics. Like, “I gotta pull out this thesaurus. I gotta come up with synonyms and stuff like that. I can’t have any of the words repeat. I can’t say the words ‘I’ or ‘me’. This needs to be like poetry, man!”  

I don’t know if I did that or not, but that was the goal. With this album, I felt like I gotta ease up on that, because I feel like I’m kind of limiting myself in a way and not writing what needs to be written for the song. I’m forcing something that needs to be something else that needs to happen because of some ego and stuff. When it came to “Everyday War” I’m like, “I’m gonna write lyrics like Sepultura,” and they’re not the craziest lyrics ever.

That was like the hardest part, just writing very simple, catchy things on top of a track that we haven’t written before that sounded like that. 

Once we finally got it, I was like, “oh, my God!” It went from my most hated song on the album- I wanted to cut it- to like, we wanted to make it a single because of how dope that song is. I feel like trying to get more of ourselves on the album beyond just the influences was really hard, because we said we wanted this to be like a love letter, and it’s really easy to throw back on the things that you know, the things that you like. Trying to put more of yourself into it is a challenge because like… “oh, this sounds dope. Oh, wait! This is just a Slayer riff. We just stole a Slayer riff [laughs]. We gotta write more of ourselves into it.” 

I feel like once everything, at least on my end, when everything was finally done, I felt like, “oh, this is it! This is like what we’ve been trying to do the whole time.”

Is “Everyday War” in some ways also your proudest moment for making the album since it was a challenge and you broke through that?

Ryan Calaveras: Oh, yeah. We got the final tracks after we did all the layering and we’re like, “oh, my God!” I was like, “amazing.” It was one of the best songs on the record. It was going to be the last single.

Carlos Velazquez: Instead of “Pain Dweller.” Yeah, we released that, but we realized now we need to like, write like we need to have, like the Hescher battle vest song be the last single. It needs to happen.

How do you choose the singles? Is that something that one of you does in the band? Do you talk about it a lot?

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, we talked about it. Yeah, it’s mostly like, “man, I feel like every song could be a single. All these songs are good” and stuff. And we just had to really think about what we’re gonna release. Because I feel like the first two, “The Outlaw” and “Never Known Peace,” were the easier ones, cause I feel like, you know, “The Outlaw”- that’s such a dope song. We have a vibra slap thing on it [laughs] and people need to hear that.

And “Never Known Peace”- I knew that one’s for the core, that one’s for the hardcore kids and it has a tambourine in it too, so people also need to hear that. Yeah, but then the last one… it could have been any other song. It could have been “Everyday War,” could have been “Killing Fields.” I think Ryan wanted “Eternal Tombs” to be a single. I feel like that was such a big like accomplishment on our end that we had such a hard time trying to figure out what could be worthy of being a single, because every single one of these tracks has weight to it.

Ryan Calaveras: And when we write these songs, we don’t really look at singles like the perspective of which could be a single. We have other people tell us that, like when we were recording our record, our producer and engineer, Zack Ohren was saying,”this is the single.” 

Do you like getting input from other people with the singles? And do you do that with the album too, though ? When you’re writing the album, do you get input from other people as you’re writing it?

Ryan Calaveras: I mainly got input from Ben and Zack, but they were more taking a back seat. If they heard something that they can make a suggestion on, they will say it, and… prior to this record, it was me writing it and Carlos writing the lyrics and recording it. I tell everyone, “play this exactly how it is. I’m not changing a damn thing on this.”

Carlos Velazquez: Yeah, we were very closed off for this.

Ryan Calaveras: Yeah, and now that we have the best players in the game, in my opinion, in this band… everyone like I said before, is good at what they do. I trust them completely. So with this record, I opened it to a more collaborative effort, including outside ears. Because I mean to the band, everything sounds great. Everyone’s gonna say, “sounds good,” but I want to hear it from an outside perspective. So we had put in their effort and their input.

So as my closing question, I want to ask, how do you feel that the band has grown since the Depictions of Chaos EP? Whether it’s musically, whether it’s personally between each other, how have you changed?

Carlos Velazquez: I feel like we got to a point where we know what we want to do more. Now, I feel like when we weren’t expecting a lot of the reception after Depictions. We just wanted to make music and release it. After it got some attention, it kind of brought the questions like, “what do we really want to do as a band? Do we want to tour? Do you want to make this a full time thing, or do we just want to keep it like always- kind of toured every once in a while, like just release music, have fun?” 

After the second EP, the self-titled EP came out, that’s when we were like, “we want this.” We want to go on bigger tours. We want to start out as the supporting act for bands, and get our name out there and hit the road- put in the work to grow this band because we don’t see ourselves doing anything else. I want to make this my life. And I feel like that’s the biggest thing, because after me and Ryan talked and we agreed, we asked the rest of the guys. Like, “this is what we want to do. Y’all are down?” And they’re like, “absolutely.”

I’m hoping that people see what we see in this album and we can start doing what we want to do.

Ryan, what do you think?

Ryan Calaveras: I think that like a lot has changed since Depictions. We started off as no pressure to do anything really. We just want to see how far we can take this. I remember talking to Carlos about it. We didn’t even expect the opportunities we would get. We thought we would just stay within the Bay area, not go anywhere outside the Bay area. Just do anything- what we thought is cool.

It was more like we had to find ourselves a little bit and kind of align ourselves with what we can do and just recognize that, hey, we’re actually pretty in sync and I think we can take the next step. Personally for me, it’d be a disservice if I just stop this. I’ve been playing music for a really long time and for me to just stop it here… it’s pretty much a really big part of my life, so I want to take it as far as I can. With the guys in Doomsday, these guys are my best friends. I couldn’t think of any better team to do this with.