Cryogeyser represents everything that a rock band should be in 2025.

The LA-three piece are loud, cool, emotion fuelled, and have a fluid sound that transcends genre. Listening to their third album, the self-titled, Cryogeyser, the above is prevalent. Opening with the loud “Sorry”, characterised by its droney guitars the band is known for and closing with the unexpected trip-hop inspired “Love Language”. Cryogeyser’s sound, while varying, flows naturally, staying coherent, and easy to follow across the whole album.

It’s been four years since their last major release, the two-part album of Love Is Land and timetetheredtogether, in that time the band has seen a new line up and an evolution in their sound. Their past albums aren’t forgotten and tethered into Cryogeyser lore, referenced both covertly and overtly throughout Cryogeyser.

With Shawn Marom’s vocals and guitar, Zach Capitti-Fenton on drums, and Samson Klitsner on bass, Cryogeyser made an album that makes me feel like I’m in the cover of Ride’s 1990 album, Nowhere, in the ocean floating, flowing with the waves and looking down at my body as time comes to a halt (in this scenario I’m not afraid of the ocean). To coincide with the Valentine’s Day release of Cryogeyser, I spoke to Shawn about the album and the band.

Congratulations on the new album! I love it so much. I wanted to ask, why did you choose for this album to be the self-titled Cryogeyser album?

It was about being a band made album, and less about being a project that is ever changing, even though it will be forever changing. Being self-titled it reflects the people that made it.

It has been such a long period of time between the last time we released a record and this record. I could pretend there is some long conceptual album that was made, but there wasn’t, if anything there is more of a concept of being like ‘Hey, the band is still here, there’s a bunch of songs and here they are.’

I read in an interview you did late last year that you said it felt like the current line-up was the first time you felt like Cryogeyser was complete. Did that come into it too?

Totally, the album was recorded and produced by Zach [Capitti-Fenton, Cryogeyser drummer], we spent a million hours demoing, recording, and mixing it with Sonny [Dipperi]. There is so much of us, our lives, and our time in the album that it couldn’t have ever happened without Zach and Samson [Klitsner, Cryogeyser bassist]. It really takes a long time and bands are really hard to keep together.

Why did you choose to release the album on Valentine’s Day?

It is kind of just a banger album, so it is for all the neutral homies, in and out of relationships, they should have something to do on Valentine’s Day too [laughs]. On Valentine’s Day I’m going to the MJ Lenderman show and hope that no one bothers me.

That’s the perfect way to spend Valentine’s Day.

I’m going to go to the show with my hoodie up over my head. People are going to be like ‘Karly’ [Karly Hartzman of Wednesday], and I’ll be like ‘That’s not me!’

[Laughs] Speaking about Karly; she is on “Mountain”, how did it come up to have her on the song?

We were recording in our friend’s studio; I was getting really bummed about the process and was in such a bad mood. She asked if I wanted her to sing on it and I was like, ‘Yeah’. She went in and in two takes did it perfectly, like lyrics on phone looking down and up. Pretty awesome. Karly is kind of crazy like that. I did a session once where it was my job to do harmonies and second vocals, I’m sure that everyone who was there was like ‘Why did we invite this person’. I am really bad at matching the note, even when I’m doing my own harmonies, I won’t do the harmony, I’ll do exactly what I’m singing. Watching Karly do a second vocal part was so impressive. That is the Karly speciality, on every song you ever hear her on, whether it be the MJ Lenderman songs, the Wednesday songs, or the Horse Jumper of Love songs she’s on, you hear it and know it’s her.

She is so good, I saw Wednesday last year, and I was blown away watching her perform live, it was incredible.

She puts it all on stage, I’m trying to garner that energy, I feel like I put it all in the band which can be great but can be a lot. That is the balance between making music and performing it. They toured that record for a year and watching them get more and more pro at touring that record was a cool experience.

You guys were on that tour with them for a bit, weren’t you?

Yeah, we did about three weeks with them.

It’s been a few years since your last big release. Was that something that you wanted to do?

No, I feel like I got really disillusioned from releasing the two-part album of Love Is Land andtimetetheredtogether during the pandemic. In retrospect it was such an annoying idea, it was a good record, I should’ve just waited until things calmed down. For the last few years, I have been watching everybody tour because they’ve had new records out and I feel like I was trying to work out how to make these songs into a record, which is why I say this band coming together brought a new energy to the songs. We couldn’t have made this record without working on it for this long, not because of how long we worked on it for, but because it didn’t settle in to where it used to be until it settled into the hands of the three of us. I met Sonny who mixed the record through someone else who I was trying to record with and that didn’t end up happening, we realised we didn’t have enough funding to go down that route, so we recorded it ourselves and brought it back to Sonny. It took around a year and a half to make the actual record, which already blew my mind with how long that was. After waiting for so long I was like ‘It better come out already.’

Do you feel like your songs on the album have different meanings to you now that it has been five or six years since you wrote some of them?

It’s so funny how interviews develop as some people ask the same question in different ways. Before I was like I have such an emotional distance, but even today if I ask myself what it means to me, I feel emotionally fragile, nostalgic and a little melancholy, so I am like ‘Bitch, do you ever learn anything?’ I was telling someone I was listening to it last week and I was like ‘Woah, I made this’ and it was the first time I felt like this in a really long time. Some songs I wrote the day after getting broken up with my ex for the second time, I wrote “Stargirl” in rage in the same way I wrote “Sonic Peace” in rage. All these songs are so emotional, so it is like, when am I ready to play it? I don’t want to give people the song unless I’m ready to play it. “Hive” was supposed to be on Glitch, but I couldn’t bear to play it. It was this love song I felt so honoured to write, but then the relationship fell apart and it was so hard for me to hear it. With these songs there is an empowerment with how much I was trying to accept something and then having to accept this whole process. I thought it was going to take a lot less time to put out this record. Even the newer songs are old to me now.

What’s the newest song on the record?

I’d say “Fortress”, “Love Language” was revamped so hard, it wasn’t even recognisable to how I wrote it. It was a time capsule, for a myriad of reasons, you’ve got the pandemic, new band mates, a big tour so we couldn’t record the record, so much shit. It means a lot of different things to me but at this point I’ve worked so hard on it that it is a thing I think I will process and enjoy a little bit after it comes out.

There is a lot of influence in the album that hasn’t been in your previous music for example, “Love Language” feels like it’s the Cryogeyser take on a trip-hop, Dido style song.

Yes! I was just bracing myself to see if you got it.

Wait, really? I got it straight away [laughs].

It’s Dido, Enya, Seal, Massive Attack, and Imogen Heap. It’s supposed to be like you are strapped into your parent’s car in the early 2000s, they have three CDs in there and the Parrot Navigation system that they can take off and on. You’re looking out the window, you are short enough that the seatbelt is up across your neck, and it is the soundtrack of the movie of your young life. What is so funny with the resurgence of everyone thinking all that music is so cool, I don’t know if I thought it was cool, but it is definitely the soundtrack of being a young kid in the early 2000s. That one was really cool for me, there is so much attachment to how I play guitar in the music, having Zach and our friend Ryder produce it and really just singing on it, even though I wrote the melody and guitar parts I got to feel like a pop star, having that distance from it. I’m loving the Dido reference.

It has a bit of “White Flag” in it.

Okay, thank you! There is also “I’m No Angel” which I definitely took inspiration from but that has a bongo. Actually, there might be a bongo moment in “Love Language” I can’t remember, but there is an airplane noise. That was the most exciting part about mixing it for me. I would come to Sonny with so many ideas when we were recording it and he would be like, ‘Dude that happens later’, then when I got to sit down with him and be like ‘That line where it says, ‘My life an arrow, an airport at departure’ on the down beat can you put a plane sound?’ He did it and it was so cool. That is what you can do with that studio, trip-hop, pop music, you can do it in a rock band but not as easy. That song is really special for me, I put it at the end to see if anyone would even make it there.

I thought it was awesome to have a song that sounds like nothing you’ve ever done before.

I had never been able to do that, it is like what I said about “Hive”, I couldn’t put it out because it wasn’t the right time. With Zach and Samson’s ability to home in on their influences compliments on my lack of that ability, it made it work. That song made me want to put out an album with just produced tracks.

I am really curious about “timetetheredforever”, especially because of the title track of your 2021 EP, “timetetheredtogether”. Can we talk about the story of the song and its place now as sort of a sequel to the original?

I’m really meta, I’m a Sagittarius…

Wait, epic. Can I guess your birthday?

Yeah. Are you a Sagittarius?

I’m a Capricorn. Are you born on the 11th of December?

I’m the 5th but thank you for guessing December, I am not a November Sagittarius.

Oh, you aren’t giving November Sagittarius.

Yes, thank you. Basically, there are two commonalities between them, they’re both really raw, exactly what I mean to say to one person, they’re both about the same person, they’re both unfinished, not because I couldn’t finish them but because I was working on a million other things, and they are both the choruses of a song I was already working on. Structurally it was the same experience of writing them. I didn’t want to put “timetetheredforever” on the record, I really wanted to make this rock record that was hard, and no one was going to call it dream pop, but Zach was like we really need to put this on the record.

I wrote it feeling really strong feelings for this person, so it was a continuation, but it was also an acceptance which is kind of the same air of “Blue Light” where it is like ‘I really want to meet you where you’re at, but I shouldn’t have to look so hard for you’.

“timetetheredforever” references a bunch of other shit on the other albums, it is like, ‘Don’t leave me behind/It’s not what you want/Take me back to the island’, Love Is Land [Cryogeyser’s 2020 release]. I was in a new relationship that was just making me feel so moved on from where I was before and I never thought that I would and you can hear it in the music. I was writing as if it was an echo of the past. It felt right to give it the same treatment. I also think Cryogeyser runs on lore, I don’t know if anyone else cares, but I am just referencing other songs in other songs so there will be a tether between all of it for me at least.

“Love Language” is the last song on the record, this is my last question. What is your love language?

The last lyric is, ‘My love language is singing in the shower’ but I think my love language outwardly is gifts, planning things, and it’s also that, but it’s hard to get. It is also balance, I am realizing after everything I have been through, meeting people where they are at is what I want to bring to the universe. Maybe my love language is more than just gifts looking back at that song, it was more validation which is why I relate it to “Blue Light” because that song is about having to follow someone so hard just for their validation.