New York’s Dry Kill Logic were more of the unsung nu metal bands back around the turn of the century. They signed with Roadrunner Records and subsequently left after one album, lost several band members, and then released two more albums before going on hiatus back in 2006. Though they released two singles in 2019/2020, fans were left wondering if the group would truly return. In May of this year, the band finally did make that awaited return, with another new single as well as their first live show in almost 20 years (with more to come). We were able to chat with vocalist Cliff Rigano, who discussed both of those aspects with us, along with if they will create another full-length (short answer: yes), the differences in the industry then to now, and a look back at 2004’s The Dead and Dreaming album.
Dead Rhetoric: How did your return to the stage at Welcome to Rockville go?
Cliff Rigano: It was surreal. It’s been 19 years since we played a show. It’s been 20 years since we played in the US. There was no warm up show, there were no ‘jump on a stage and play with some friends’ shows, this was ‘walk back out on stage after a generation to the largest stage we have ever been on and play to the largest audience we ever played in front of.’ I think the whole thing was surreal. It was amazing! We are really fortunate and humbled to be in the conversation of so many great bands that were playing. We were stoked to be a part of it.
Dead Rhetoric: Did you have any jitters beforehand, knowing you were going into this huge show?
Rigano: There’s always, what I would consider, the best kind of nervous energy. The kind that makes you realize how important it is and how important it should be taken. It doesn’t allow you the opportunity to just sit around and let it exist in the ether. It’s not something that is anxiety-driven or panic-inducing, it’s the best kind of energy that gives you inertia and motion. We are fortunate to still have that.
Dead Rhetoric: You released “Now You Belong with the Dead” at the beginning of this month. How do you feel the song stands out among your releases?
Rigano: We wrote that song 8-9 years ago now. When we reconvened in 2016 after about a decade away, though, we were always really close friends and always enjoyed each other’s company. We would go to dinner and hang out. We just didn’t go to the studio and write music. So when we got back together in 2016, we started writing. Those were the sessions that produced “Now You Belong to the Dead” as well as “Don’t See Ghosts” and “Vices.” It was unlike any other writing exercise we had, because we weren’t sitting down to write a body of work. We were just getting into the studio to see what felt natural and where our heads were at, both collectively and individually, when we thought about the types of songs we wanted to write. You know, who we are as musicians, who we are as fans.
So it was kind of like turning a computer on after a decade. You aren’t quite sure what works. Is it as fast as you thought it was going to be? Did the Q button fall off? What we got out of it in the end was that we still really enjoyed writing music together and the act of being creative in that room was something we still really appreciated.
So I think that when you look at “Vices” and “Don’t See Ghosts” this feels like a song that would live in that era of Dry Kill. When you put that against the body of work that came before it, I think it shows a marked evolution. We are still the same band. Audiences tell us that we still sound like Dry Kill. I will let the audience be the judge of if that is good or bad, or what that sounds like, but at the end of it all, we are comfortable with who we are. We stand in service of the songs. As long as we like the songs, and we feel good about it, I’m not sure we think about what it should sound like, or if it sounds like the right thing. I think as long as we collectively think it’s a good body of work, we are happy to release it to audiences.
Dead Rhetoric: You said everyone stayed friends and you all hung out together. What was the moment that you kind of clicked and you all said, ‘we should write new music again?’
Rigano: I don’t know if there was an epiphany – I can’t say that there was some ‘eureka moment’ like The Blues Brothers, “We gotta get the band back together!” But I think that being close friends and always talking about how much fun we had in the studio, the old stories, or being on the road, or a day in the life of the band, I think one day we just said, “What would happen if we got in a room, dusted off these instruments, and thought about what that would sound like?” Because we are still friends and have a mutual respect for each other, we just again wanted to write great songs.
When we are all in a room, jamming and Jason [Bozzi] is playing guitar, Brendan [Duff] is playing bass, and I’m listening to these riffs and hearing the melodies start to form in my head, that is the dopamine hit right there. That’s the excitement. Like, I can really see what is coming to life. Once we started doing that again, we really started to appreciate how much we enjoyed it. So it just kind of happened. It wasn’t a thing where we said, ‘we have to release music,’ it was a natural evolution, or regression depending on how you look at it, of moving forward and writing music together, or going back to the way it was. But we all knew we enjoyed that part and it felt like the right thing to do.
Dead Rhetoric: So you have those three songs. Do you see the band writing, say, a body of music again, like you said? Or are you just going day by day with where things lead?
Rigano: We enjoyed the process of writing these songs. We really enjoyed the process of “Now You Belong With the Dead” as it was a wonderful experience in the studio with Greg Thomas, our producer, and just the idea of being creative in that way again is really exciting for us. So we have these shows now and the last one is in October. I think after that, we are going to head back into the studio and continue to write and start to formulate this body of work, put it together as an album, and start to think about what a full release would look like.
Hopefully around this time in 2026, godspeed and knock on wood, we would have a new album in the works. But I think the exercise, the journey is the destination, and we just enough writing new music together. So that is the part we are excited to get back to. I imagine it will culminate into something as quickly as possible, but yeah we would like to do a full record again.
Dead Rhetoric: The Dead and Dreaming came out in 2004. Over twenty years later, what do you recall about the details surrounding that era of the band?
Rigano: It was a wild time to be in the band, to be honest with you. In 2002, we had parted ways with half of the original group from the first record, we had parted ways with the record label, the publisher, and the manager, and we were really kind of starting over again as artists. We were really fortunate enough to meet Jason, our guitar player. I can’t emphasize how important meeting him was when you start to think about The Dead and Dreaming. That record is so different to the first one largely because of who we became once he joined the band. We wanted to push the boundaries of what we could do but we also wanted to write a record that we felt would be well received by audiences who were starting to come on board with Dry Kill when we were a new band.
We didn’t want to change who we were. I don’t think that was the exercise or the ask, but we just wanted to be the best version of this band that we could be. The Dead and Dreaming helped get us there, musically. We were still in between record deals. A lot of those songs were recorded as demos, and not meant to be a final album – we were in between record deals and we were still moving and shopping. But once we had partnered with Repossession, and they had committed to releasing the record in the States, and as SPV had committed to putting out the record in Europe, it became an exercise in ‘’how quickly could we get these songs.’ We all collectively held hands and said, ‘these demos feel pretty good. Let’s release them as the body of work. We’ll put a mix on it and master it.’
I think it’s easier to play general after the war now and tell you that I prefer a better snare in this song, or I prefer a better EQ in that song. But for the moment, I think that record really represents the raw energy of the band, which was on it’s second record but felt like it’s first album. We were becoming a new group. It was a pivotal time. We toured in a van, we had very little money, we played very small shows. It was pre-internet, so you didn’t have a direct connection with your audience. You had to rely on an industry to promote you whether that was editorial to amplify you, radio and MTV to play your music and videos, or a tour to take you and put you in front of audiences, you were beholden to the system.
For a small band like us, there is only a certain amount of time you can do that and be successful. Thankfully we took advantage of that the best we could. Life is a lot different now, when you start to think about emotional connections between artists and audiences. It’s much different than when we were active on that record.
Dead Rhetoric: Do you have a favorite song or two from that album that’s stuck with you over the years?
Rigano: It’s hard to pick which child you love the most, but there’s a few of them on there. I think “Neither Here Nor Missed” is a song we really liked. It was the first song we ever wrote in ¾. It’s really melodic and heavy, and it was a stretch for us. Some of the punchier songs, like “200 Years” and “Lost” are still songs I really enjoy playing live because there’s such a ferocity to the energy, and they are great songs to let loose on. I’ve always enjoyed songs like “With Deepest Regrets…” and “Paper Tigers” because they were more melodic and had more of a depth of character around the melodies and the complexity of those melodies, which for us at the time was a stretch.
There are different aspects of the record that I appreciate now, so it just depends on what I am reflecting on. Sometimes one is my favorite today, and it’s a different one tomorrow.
Dead Rhetoric: What can fans expect from your upcoming shows in June focused on The Dead and Dreaming?
Rigano: These are our two headline shows, and they are the only two we are going to do this year. We have been fortunate in being offered some amazing festival days that we want to take advantage of to get in front of as many fans at one time. For these shows, we are looking at them as intimate affairs that we can spend with die-hard audiences that really have been around for the decades in our home town of the tri-state east area. We want to be able to go through the albums and appease fans who appreciate them, and tell some anecdotes about the record and play some songs that we have never played live.
A fun fact about these upcoming shows is that for Of Vengeance and Violence, our third album, we never played in the States. The band had gone the way it did before we could play here. So this will be the first time we are playing any of those songs for this audience. We are going to play at least one track, and through the selection of singles we wrote a few years ago. So we are going to play a collection of songs that go through the band’s history that we can reflect on with folks who have been there the whole time. I’m excited to do that, it’s a different environment than the festivals so it should be pretty interesting.
Dead Rhetoric: That said, there’s a whole new crop of bands now inspired by the nu metal scene. Do you feel Dry Kill Logic offers a certain appeal to a new generation at this point?
Rigano: I am in constant awe of the new groups that are out there today. Whether it’s European or US stuff, music is so heavy today! It’s awesome! I love it! The heavier the better, and I am just kind of amazed by the character of singers voices, the tones of guitars, it’s an interesting question in where does a band like Dry Kill find ourselves. I’ll be honest. I wouldn’t know how to answer that question if we didn’t see such a robust audience on streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify. It’s younger audiences. It’s not necessarily all 40-60 year olds who were there with us back in the day in those small rooms. It’s younger audiences – 70% of our audience is 25-44! I think 62% of them are 21-35. I don’t know how these new audiences are getting turned onto the band, maybe it’s discovery on their end, a reference from a family member, or a friend who is really into the scene, but it’s interesting to see a new generation of fans gravitating towards Dry Kill.
To be fair, I think that maybe we can play in these festivals and see audiences into the band, and then play headline shows and see people reconnecting in a deeper, more meaningful way with the music. I think that’s what we have to offer folks. There’s a lack of pretense around Dry Kill. We don’t’ have the pomp and circumstance of our contemporaries. Legacy or new, we just are grateful to be here and we hope that level of just, I don’t want to say authenticity because everyone is authentic in their own way, but there is no pretense. There’s nothing other than this. Whether we are hanging out in the bar, hanging out at the merch booth, I’m up on stage and people are in the audience, we are always going to be the band that we are. Maybe that is something that has endeared us after all these years. It’s tough to tell. I guess the audience is going to the ultimate arbiter of that one.
Dead Rhetoric: That’s really cool that you have managed to cultivate this younger crowd. In talking to some other bands, some of them just can’t seem to grab the younger audience. I think it’s impressive that without going out and touring, you were able to hook a new audience.
Rigano: I’ll be honest, and I say this for perspective, but I think it’s funny when you think about it this way – if you had put us on this tech timeline, we started at cassette tapes and ended at Myspace. They invented YouTube six months after we stopped touring. To your point, when you think about audience engagement, requirement, and retention, and how do I get a new fan, we didn’t even have social networks until 2018. The only reason we got them is because people were squatting on our names, so we felt like we had to own them. Why give it to someone else, and then they are running some weird thing out of your url because you didn’t use it?
We don’t have an overly prescriptive social tone of voice, we don’t have an evolved stage presence, it’s not like that. It’s just who we are and we plan things as we go that we believe are interesting and compelling. To be fair, I think this works in some ways to our advantage because we aren’t necessarily beholden to the trappings of today’s social audiences. When you start to think about how additional engagement works, we can come and go as we please. We can just not [laughs] and everyone has lived a fine life. We are just taking things one step at a time and seeing, but we don’t have many answers as to how we have done it.
It’s a recurring theme, but we are just very blessed, fortunate, and humbled that anyone remembers us let alone listens to us. Much less come to a show. To all fans, we can’t thank you enough. All I have is gratitude.
Dead Rhetoric: Going off of that, looking at the music industry, how do you feel it’s changed since the time the band started? I know it’s a totally new world, but what strikes you the most?
Rigano: Maybe the most overarching thing I have seen is how self-sufficient you can be in this business. In every band there’s always this person. They act as the manager, the promoter, the tour manager, and they do the work. If you are that person or are in a band with that type of person, I think now that mindset can really be funneled into driving success for your group very quickly. Whether it’s understanding social strategy and how to impact an audience over time, or understanding platform dynamics and how to run paid media and creating awareness in certain channels for your group, understanding how to tour efficiently.
You don’t need as much gear as you did back in the day, so streamlining what you need to perform effectively, and the work that you are willing to do on the road. You don’t need a bus, you don’t need 15 crew guys. You need 3 able-bodied people and a head on your shoulders and you can do the same things everyone else does. You can buy the same lighting and stage packages, sound equipment – the ability to be successful is what I am most impressed with in today’s music business. Again, we mentioned earlier, in 2004, you had gatekeepers to reach the audience. There wasn’t a way to connect meaningfully with your audience unless you were playing live shows. And you still needed an agent and promoter.
It’s fascinating, and I have a tremendous amount of respect because I don’t think any of this is easy. It’s a lot of work, so I have a lot of respect for all the artists that can do it. I don’t think I do it very well [laughs] to be honest. I’m learning as I go. It’s with childlike wonder that I can see all the possibilities in front of artists in front of me, and I think that part is exciting. It’s stuff we didn’t have available back then.
Dead Rhetoric: Speaking of gatekeeping, moving through the scene in the late ‘90s and 2000s, there was a bit of a divide between nu metal and the rest of the metal scene. Do you feel like that’s something that has more or less disintegrated at this point?
Rigano: I think what I see now, as I start to think about to ‘our return’ after 20 years. For the legacy artists who were able to be successful when we were around and they continue to have success, I think that their thought leadership is reflected in their knowledge and wisdom and ability to be successful album after album, year after year. It gives them perspective that was new to the industry as a whole. I think new artists are coming up in the industry with a different mindset. It’s collectively more enabled, empowered, and engaged.
I don’t see any elitism in today’s music scene. I think if there was any elitism in our heyday, it wasn’t from bands or artists. It was from an industry that just thought the good times would never end. The ability to dominate and dictate how the industry would be run, that would be forever. You had Napster, streaming sites, and consumer’s desires to have singles instead of albums; if all that didn’t come into play, maybe it would still be the case. But it’s been democratized now so I would say that elitism was attached more to the industry than that of the artist.
Dead Rhetoric: As you worked through back then, what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced as a band?
Rigano: Sometimes it felt like, I guess if you think back to the evolution of the group. We started in 1994 and we signed with Roadrunner in early 2001. We parted ways in 2002, signed our next deal in 2004 and then went on hiatus in 2006. If there were any seismic shifts in that time, I think it was just the length of time it took us to get to certain stages. If you start writing in 1994 and get signed in 2001, there’s a shift in music between the beginning and end. 2002 was the start of the metalcore scene, and the winding down of nu metal.
So by 2006, the New Wave of American Heavy Metal had fully embraced music and bands like Killswitch [Engage] were on top of the world. Bands were exploding, like Shadows Fall, Chimaira, and the list goes on and on. For us, from a timing perspective, we always felt a little bit behind the trends of the moment. Music was what was ebbing and flowing. There weren’t so many changes like Napster and social platforms until after. So right at the tail end of our career is when everything took off where you could work faster. You were beholden to a system, so we worked slower than we would have liked to, which has impact as well.
Dead Rhetoric: Any other plans this year besides the two upcoming shows and festivals?
Rigano: We have the headline shows in June, we have RockFest and Inkcarceration in July. August and September we are off from the road so we will probably start thinking about writing a little bit, then in October we have Aftershock. Once that’s done, we will be back in the studio and that will hopefully become the next album from the band.