Photo by Marlon Lenoble
Cryogeyser was essentially a solo endeavor for Shawn Marom until their latest self-titled album. While Marom occasionally collaborated with friends on previous releases, the addition of bassist Samson Klitsner and drummer/producer Zach Capitti Fenton significantly shaped the new record. Marom explained how this solidified the band’s direction during our conversation about the album, released earlier this month. Cryogeyser’s earlier work, primarily singles and EPs released on Bandcamp from 2019 to 2023, showcased Marom’s talent for light, shoegaze-influenced indie rock. However, this new album demonstrates a more focused approach, with Marom and the band crafting ’90s alt-rock inspired tracks reminiscent of The Breeders (“Sorry”) and Veruca Salt (“Fortress”). The shoegaze guitars remain, but now they’re complemented by harmonies, tight drumming, and warm bass lines across the 11 tracks.
Due to the fires that were ravaging the Los Angeles area, this conversation was pushed back a week or so. That’s how my chat with Marom began.
How have things been the last month for you living in L.A.?
SHAWN: L.A. is so big, but so small. Geographically, it’s big, but socially it’s pretty small. I was randomly in the desert, demoing and going on some vision quests, if you know what I mean, by myself in this shipping container. It’s kind of this energetic shipping container that I always end up in in Joshua Tree. I was there the day before all the fires started, and then they started and I was like, “Whoa,” so I stayed one extra day and was like, “I probably should go back.”
I live in Echo Park. I came back after the big, windy day, so I didn’t really experience it. I’m more experienced watching the community band up around it. For me, it’s still just really absurd. There’s a documentary called Los Angeles Plays Itself, it’s like 3 hours long. It talks about the infrastructure of L.A. as like a lack of infrastructure. It’s almost like a Hollywood set, so the fires have felt really surreal to me. I have people I know whose houses burned down, so there’s the grief. Everyone is bringing out Joan Didion, everyone’s trying to get into “How did this happen? What does it mean? If there were giants watching this, would they be laughing? This was L.A.‘s fate the whole time.” As someone who grew up in the valley, right over the hill from Topanga Canyon, it’s just absurd. It’s absurd that you can’t drive the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] right now. It’s absurd that they’ve closed our beaches. This is a very obvious climate crisis moment we are in in so many ways and that we’ve been in.
It sounds like the songs for this album aren’t necessarily new, I read that you wrote them between 2019 and 2023.
SHAWN: It took so long to make the record and to find the right way to make the record. Although I write songs pretty regularly, so many of the songs are from 2019, fresh off a plane from Denmark, and so many of the songs are something I wrote 3 weeks before that that ended up on the record. But it really is from a time period. I’ve never worked that long on anything. When I’ve seen people work for a long time on something, I thought they were just working for a long time on it. For me, a lot of the time was asking, “How do we put this out?,” “Who’s going to mix it?,” “Where’s the money?,” just a bunch of random shit that actually wasn’t working on the record. But, we did work. I keep saying we put 10,000 hours into the record. I can’t really put my finger on when every song was written but, over time, it’ll come to me. It was somewhere between 2019 and 2023.
Do you have a batch of songs now that, if you had time, money, access to a studio, you could go in and start recording or do you work in cycles where you’ve got a songs, you record them, you promote them, you go out on tour and then once all that’s finished, you start thinking about what’s next?
SHAWN: I definitely write all the time. I’ve started working on demos and I don’t really know what to do with them yet. Self-releasing has been an experience and I’m not sure I want to do it again. Maybe future me is going to be like, “Good job (self-releasing). You own everything.”
There have to be pros and cons with being on a label. They can put more bodies behind promoting something and getting music to more people than you can do by yourself. But, with the internet, you can do so much on your own.
SHAWN: Totally. With a marketing team, there’s more people on the ground thinking about how to move it forward but for bands that aren’t signed, it really is just the band moving it forward, both playing and working together on stuff.
Is that how you’ve handled your career up to this point? You’ve done all the legwork, the hustle?
SHAWN: We were on a label for the first record but things are really different now. There was no TikTok. For bands my age, when we were all 23 and in L.A. playing and getting picked up by labels, you could just post on Instagram and be a semi-popular person and have people listen to your band or post about another band. And then everyone’s listening to that band. It was like that post-MySpace, post-Facebook mentality. I feel like that way of doing things did something back then, because I remember getting signed to this label and then getting picked up by Ground Control [booking agent]. Once I got picked up by Ground Control, by word of mouth, this other big label is like, “What’s up?” That was kind of the rock star dream in my head, like random people are calling me at four in the morning. But, now, you really can do it yourself if you want to. I feel kind of weird about being on TikTok so sometimes I feel like I’m working against the marketing. I don’t really know how to market myself that way, but I’ve been on Instagram since it began as an editing app, so I know how to use Instagram.
How do you measure success? At what point do you say to yourself, “This is working”?
SHAWN: I feel like there was this experience at a show that we opened for Citizen where these 18-year-old girls were like, “We can finally get in to see you.” To me, that is cool. I think success is being able to tour all the time is always what I’m telling everyone I want to be doing. I want to be on the move. That hasn’t been the reality lately working on the record and putting it out. I feel trapped by it. But getting to play shows all the time and making enough money where everybody feels like this was worth it and we can have fun while doing it will make it feel successful.
You have had the chance to tour in the last year or two with both Wednesday and with Wednesday’s singer Karly Hartzman on her solo tour.
SHAWN: Yeah, I did both. I toured with Wednesday and then I did a solo tour with Karly recently, in December. We’ve toured substantially in that way, but there were big pauses, like making this record. We’re kind of sustaining. I haven’t put out a record in so long. I feel like it was amazing that we were getting tours without any new music. It was amazing to me to go on a headline tour back then and have so many people care after not putting out new music for so long.
While I’m a big fan of Wednesday, musically the two of you sound different. They incorporate pedal steel guitars and have an Americana sound. When you got the tour, did you know them? Was there a personal connection?
SHAWN: Me and Karly were talking on Instagram and were fans of each other. And when Wednesday played their first L.A. show, we opened for them, and we stayed good friends. I remember asking Karly what Wednesday’s genre is and she said “regional music.” I thought that was so cool. Don’t try to ask that girl a genre. She’s going to tell you, “I’m a North Carolina girl, and this is music from my hometown and my life.” She’s the coolest. I’m always so impressed by people who can write like that, because I try really hard to write a song like that, which I think I finally accomplished. For me, it’s always like metaphor and feeling and immersive landscape writing. It feels so vulnerable. I feel like there’s something like twee that’s not in my music that I kind of wish was – opening a 7-Up, walking down the street, kicking the can into the gutter.
Not necessarily asking about influences but where does your music come from?
SHAWN: I’ve been writing these songs trying to figure out where they fit, working with previous bandmates or random people I was trying to get these songs through with and then Zach joined the band as our drummer, and he was able to find his production brain. It was really cool to watch. He’s the kind of drummer who really understands feel and even just practicing these songs in the room with him, Me and Samson were like. “Whoa! He glued it.” I never had a drummer like that, at least on the recording, so it was amazing to have everything glued together by such a conscious separation of parts. Once he started producing it and does stuff like adding a second guitar and stuff like that, he became a full-on producer. I think it’s my messaging, my songwriting and a lot of freedom to explore more of the influences that I like, because he was really able to elevate the sound while still keeping it what it was without it being like a derivative copy, or something like that. He wasn’t going in and changing my guitar chords. It was the song, and then maybe moving something and not having endless parts, but having a hook, things that weren’t in Cryogeyser’s music before mostly because somebody wasn’t in the band to be like, “Hey, we should structure this more.” I think it is kind of cool that I was allowed to make this endless flow of music. It is really cool to hear my music organized. Sometimes I listen to it, and I’m like, “I didn’t even realize it’s me.”
You’ve got a great singing voice. When did you realize as a kid that this was something you should be doing?
SHAWN: At summer camp, there was this activity you could do during the day. It was in Simi Valley and we’d go to this weird hiking path and there was this old tile table that somebody installed a million years ago. We learned from this guy Mark; we were all writing songs. I still have a Facebook, so the videos are somewhere on there. I used to sound like a mini-*Amy Winehouse*. People were really responding to me having a good voice. When I was like 14 or 15, and then into high school, I was a really good singer. I think I always really wanted to make the music I’m making now; I wanted a band. I think a lot of the early discovery stuff with my music is, of course, being little Amy Winehouse. It’s not a bad intro to singing.
Where do you fit within the L.A. scene? Do you still feel like you’re part of the local scene or are you a national touring band that may occasionally book an L.A. show?
SHAWN: I feel like the pandemic really separated a lot of stuff and closed down a lot of stuff and slowed down momentum on a lot of local stuff that didn’t really need the labels like I was saying before, where there really was this word of mouth kind of scene, friends, parties. I remember the first show back from the pandemic, we played this giant house show, and it was so, so sick. It was crazy, just like a million kids. And then they had a gabber rave, because that’s what Gen Z does. Really crazy.
We’re headlining Lodge Room on March 28th, so we haven’t really been playing any L.A. shows. We’ve played a couple where we were like first of four on the Citizen four-band hardcore bill. And we played with Squirrel Flower at Lodge when we were supporting her on tour. I think we played at Teragram with Wednesday for two nights when we supported them. And we played at El Cid when we last headlined LA, I’m surprised.
This feels a little bit like a local band thing, but do you have an album release show planned in L.A.?
SHAWN: We haven’t really decided yet. Part of me wants to save it for the March 28 show but maybe we’ll have a listening party. We had a party for our first single release, and that was really fun. We played in Samson’s backyard. I’m going on a solo tour with Spirit of the Beehive at in fourteen days. I haven’t made any merch for our tour coming up. I just have so much to do and practice my own stuff and the band stuff, so we’ll see.
When you’re playing solo shows, do you travel with the artist or band you’re supporting or do you rent a car and chase the van around the country?
SHAWN: We’re definitely a minivan band, but not anymore. We had to get a van for this one, because we can’t get away with not bringing drums. I’ve somehow made it so that we’ve never brought drums. I’m sure people are talking about Cryogeyser like, “They never bring drums.” I won’t say I don’t like playing solo, it’s just not something I ever thought I’d be doing. When I toured with Karly, we took the Wednesday van. For the Spirit of the Beehive tour, my friend hooked me up with her random friend from Glasgow who’s gonna drive me through the UK. And I’ve been calling him Stan with the Van. He’s literally named Stanley, and he has a van. He’s driving me from Glasgow down to Bristol and back.
How big is your world of music friends outside of LA? Do you know bands from New York and Chicago and Asheville and Nashville and Austin? Or do you follow a bunch of bands on Instagram but only know them because of their music?
SHAWN: Definitely have connections to other cities. It’s a big web. It’s something similar between me and Karly. Talking to other people who make music and getting to tour with people I admire or that I was a fan of is my favorite part about it. Like, I was such a big fan of Draag, and I guess Drag was such a big fan of me, and I just was too nervous to talk to them for years, and that was 2019. Draag supported us on our headline tour, and they’ve now put out a beautiful record and are working on another one. I’ve got homies in Philly. Got the homies in the UK that I’m gonna go finally meet in real life. It’s nice to have the network. Instagram is still like Facebook so we still got some communication in it. Maybe you can talk on TikTok, but I don’t have TikTok, so I don’t know.
Have you ever visited or played in Ashville?
SHAWN: I’ve never been, but Karly has a whole talk that she gave on tour about the disaster in Asheville, and how it was completely unexpected, because it is this laid-back place, kind of protected, she thought, and I think others thought, kind of like L.A. people thought, from this climate crisis that everyone else is going to experience.
Is there any lyric on the new album where you think, “Damn, that was a good line”?
SHAWN: “I hear one door closing, holds another open.” That or I think it’s cool that I got away with, “I’m eating it fast, and I’m eating it well” which is funny because I’m fucking eating shit right now. I think it’s cool that I’m getting away with that and no one’s really identifying it or caring.
To close this out, is there a song or an artist that, when you hear, it takes you back to a very specific time and place in your life?
SHAWN: “Sorrow” by Life Without Buildings. All my music, besides this album, is about this breakup that just shattered my 23-to-25-year-old brain. It was the second time we broke up and I was on the plane from Denmark. There was no cell service, and I was in literally purgatory from a breakup on a 14-hour flight and the only song downloaded was “Sorrow” and I think I listened to 7,000 times.
You hear that song now and you’re back on that plane?
SHAWN: It used to be like that but I hear it now and I’m like, “Wow, I really had such a commitment to suffering.” I chose to do that on a whole flight. I think I was sleeping with it in my headphones. I was just fully immersed in whatever that song was. There’s a lyric in it and it’s tattooed on my arm, and it’s been in my Instagram bio since I was like 20-years-old and it’s never changed – “Don’t walk away from the people you meet.” That’s what I heard over and over and over again on the whole flight. I try to live through my music in that way. I don’t like being that vulnerable in my music, but I can’t help it.
Have you ever had anyone come up to you after a show and show you a tattoo they’ve gotten of any of your lyrics?
SHAWN: Oh, yeah. I’m always like, “Why did you do that?” I think it’s sweet. I’m like, “Wow! You care?” I felt that way on the solo tour. I’m like, “Why are you guys here?” It’s cool to see somebody I don’t know across the world be touched by something I’m saying. I didn’t really think that would happen for me. So that’s really cool.
