Interview: Outta Pocket Discusses Songwriting and the Community Behind the Bay Area Hardcore Scene

California hardcore band Outta Pocket sits down with Afterglow to discuss musical influences, starting a band amidst a pandemic, and a creative process fueled by raw emotion.

Written by Mar Carmona

Photo courtesy of Luke Piteroff

Afterglow: Thanks for sitting down with me. Go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Leo: My name is Leo, I do vocals. I was born in L.A., but I did most of my growing up here in the Bay.

Chris: (I’m) Chris — I play guitar. Grew up here in Redwood City and favorite hardcore band right now is Pain of Truth for sure.

What brought you guys together? Did you know each other before the band? How did Outta Pocket start?

Chris: We’ve had little startups, friend band projects, but nothing serious. We just got together and jammed out. Once high school ended, I started a project called “Body Blow” with some of my high school friends.

Leo: I wanted to start another band with them called Scumdog, and it didn’t work out too well when the pandemic hit. We couldn’t practice and Chris and I just got fed up and started Outta Pocket.

Chris: For Scumdog, we did a lot of stuff, but the pandemic started, and no one wanted to do anything. I wanted to write stuff that I would for sure listen to. We started Outta Pocket, and I hit him up saying he could do vocals this time, and then Dylan had posted a Hands of God cover, and I was like, “Wanna jam some time?” We met up at his house, and we were there the whole summer of 2020. Writing shit, going back and forth the whole summer, cause he’s still in high school. We were in college, so we would go back and forth after class. In the fall, we recorded the three-song demo that we have out right now, and from there the rest was history. 

Awesome, that’s really cool. What would you say was the musical inspiration behind the band? Can you take me through a little bit of how that writing process was that summer?

Leo: Well, Dylan likes a lot of Chicago Midwest and beatdown bands, so I guess we go more for beatdown. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean the two releases we have out right now sound a little different. In the beginning of the summer I wanted to do more hardcore, but then I found out Dylan likes older, more beatdown bands with a lot of grooves. We mixed that up together and that’s how the three demos came out, hardcore and beatdown blended together. For the newest one, we wanted to do heavier stuff, so I got busy writing more death metal. But for the upcoming stuff, we’re still in the process of writing it, but I don’t know what it's going to be like this time.

Chris: We don’t really take parts and construct it. Me and Dylan just get to the room, plug in, and I just start riffing, he comes on top of it, and then we keep going like that until we find parts that we like. Funnily enough, for the first three songs, we did have to go back and forth, we were revising a lot of the songs to make it sound as good as it could. For the EP though, “Purest Pain” and “Endless Remorse” were all in one go.

That’s sick. How about lyric-wise?

Leo: For “Endless Remorse” and “Purest Pain,” it was also improvised. For every song we do, I listen to what they write and I yell out what’s comfortable. I say gibberish stuff and in the recording (and) I try to make words of it. That's how I write my lyrics.  

Chris: It would be like the melody, rhythm first, and then Dylan would come up with that too. I’m not really like a good lyricist, but he and Dylan are the main concept writers for lyrics.

So basically you guys jam, you think of something to throw on top of it, and then you’re like, “Oh that sounds sick, lets build on top of that?”

Leo: Yeah, I could be saying some gibberish and I’ll  listen to the recording and I’ll make some kind of word that fits into that melody.

Chris: We’ll record the instrumental part. Then, Leo would go home or in the car and he would write the lyrics, and we’ll figure out the placement for it.

Leo: We do our music mostly on what we feel.

“On Sight” is an example of one of the tracks in which you sample voices in Spanish. Where does the inspiration for that come from?

Chris: Yeah I mean movies, they’re kind of just Spanish movies, most of us are Mexican in the band except for Dylan. Most of us are Mexican, so whatever movie we grew up with, we try to remember what that movie was about. Specifically for “On Sight,” that one was more of like a Chicano movie that was placed in the late ‘70s in L.A.

I also wanted to ask about the Bay Area scene, it seems like there’s been a lot of successful hardcore bands coming out of there. Why do you think that is?

Chris: We all ride for each other, everyone supports each other. Even the smaller bands that are coming up, we’re all giving them love. We have a really big community, I feel like that's why we’re dominating. We just have an endless amount of support, not just from the Bay Area itself, but we’re talking about the East Coast, all the way in New York, Philly, everywhere. I feel like that’s why hardcore is very community-oriented and family-oriented: Everyone just takes care of each other. If a band is touring, someone always has a place for them to stay. Everyone just rides for each other. I feel like Sunami has the torch, they have a really big following and so every time they retweet someone’s music it gets seen by more eyes. 

Leo: They helped us get to where we are. It’s just sharing other people’s music and going to their shows.

Chris: We see a lot of new kids coming to the shows as well, I feel like TikTok helped out a lot, it made a lot of people come through.

Leo: There’s already a lot of new bands coming out. You just talk to other people at shows. We didn’t know anybody and just by going to shows and talking to them saying, “Hey, great set!” every time we see them, they recognize your face and you get more known. That’s how you build a brotherhood.

Chris: Like who’s going to be excited for you to be on stage if you don’t know anyone? Just come to shows, support, spend money on shirts, dude, on social media to repost that shit.

What does Outta Pocket’s future look like? Are you working on a full length album?

Leo: Right now, we can barely practice because Chris has work and Dylan’s still in school, but once Dylan graduates next month, we’ll be able to write a lot more. For the last two releases, we didn’t plan on writing just three, it's just what we could come up with at the moment until we got fed up. So hopefully we can come up with more than three.

Chris: Writing-wise, we’re just waiting for Dylan to get out of high school, and we can target most of our writing in that summer.

Sweet. Is there anything else y’all would like to mention? Any other possible projects coming up?

Leo: We do plan on touring the East Coast very soon, next year maybe overseas, hopefully if everything goes to plan. 

Would y’all like to play a festival at any point? 

Chris: Sound and Fury would be so sick. Drain’s on there, Gulch is on there. To see Gulch play their last show would be insane. We’re still pretty new and we’re still a younger band so if it takes some time, so be it, but for sure I’d be down to play a festival.

Leo: We are ready nonetheless. 

You can follow Outta Pocket on Instagram and Twitter. Listen to their music on Spotify, Bandcamp, and Apple Music 

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.