By rights, Varials shouldn’t exist. “This band, on paper, should have arguably broken up, but we didn’t because this is what we want to do,” bassist Mike Foley says.
Such is their dogged determination, they’re still here over a decade after forming. Having survived a gauntlet of changes, they’re arriving this time with their fourth album, ‘Where the Light Leaves’, in tow. And if that silences any naysayers along the way, even better. “There’s always going to be people betting against you,” he shrugs, and Varials are finally getting to stick a couple of fingers up in the air at those they see as against them. But dealing with change has become ingrained in their journey.
Straight out of Philadelphia, PA, Varials have been around in one format or another since school. Formed in 2012, the original lineup consisted of Mike, drummer Sean Rauchut, guitarist Shane Lyons, and initial vocalist Jared Pileri. After Jared’s departure, Travis Tabron took over for their 2017 Fearless Records debut ‘Pain Again’ and 2019’s ‘In Darkness’, two records that bulldozed them into the metalcore fray. By 2020, Travis exited, and Mitchell Rogers stepped in.
Cut to a fractious few years, a break became inevitable after winding up the touring for 2022’s ‘Scars for You to Remember’. In that period, they parted ways with Mitchell, and Shane, who had left in 2017, returned to the board. In truth, this outing marks Varials’ return from the brink. “In a weird way, it didn’t really feel like we were still a band until ‘I’ll Find The Dark Drop’,” Sean says. “It felt so fragmented,” Shane adds. He’s also not the only new face on the scene.
Joining the ranks this time around is Skyler Conder. However, he’s not exactly a new face to Varials. Skyler has been part of the group since the early 2020s: he even tracked “75 or 80%” of ‘Scars For You To Remember’. But Skyler was at a point in his life where joining full-time wasn’t feasible, so he drifted away into other bands.
“Fast forward a few years, and Sean was calling me. I picked it up, and we were chatting a little bit, and he asked me if I wanted to come in on a couple of tours,” Skyler recalls. “And obviously they’re my boys, so I was like, Yeah, no doubt, and the rest is history.”
The rest of the band put Skyler’s being a good fit down to his creds, coming from a similar “hardcore-hardcore adjacent underground scene” as them, according to Sean. “Our band can’t just be fronted by anybody; it has to be somebody with the right upbringing in our scene.”
“Our band can’t just be fronted by anybody”
It’s this basement-dwelling hunger that breathes throughout this new chapter of Varials. It harkens back to their early days, while sounding more mature and understanding that this is it. Sean continues to explain that the seeds of this latest effort were somewhat made for Skyler in its infancy. “This record is heavy, so Sky was the first person that came to my mind. It’s like, well, we’re gonna try to do this again one more time, and it’s gonna be super heavy and aggressive the way that we always liked it, we need somebody that can fill that role well.”
The majority of the original V4 was written without a vocalist in mind. It wasn’t until the four of them went to the studio to get Skyler involved that ‘Where the Light Leaves’ began to take shape, and half the songs they’d written initially were scrapped. “A lot of them were rewritten while we were recording,” Skyler remembers. “Shane had an idea of how I was going to sound, and he was like, All right, well, fuck these songs, I’m just going to write all these new ones and I think that worked out perfectly because it made the record even heavier than it was prior.”
“It’s funny, because the record truly just sounds like what Varials is supposed to sound like,” Shane adds. “Sean, we’ve been playing music together for like 15 years, but it’s like we’re finally arriving at, ‘Okay, this is what we sound like’!”
The time between 2022 and now was a break born out of necessity. The group needed some time to gather itself as each was going through their own external trials and tribulations. This turbulence bled directly into the album.
“When we were going into the studio, we were all dealing with so much stuff behind the scenes in our own lives, and I think that definitely played a big part as to why the album is so pissed off and it sounds so aggressive,” Skyler explains. Their personal struggles weren’t the only source of tension. Watching their peers surge ahead during their quiet period didn’t just sting – it forced them to question their place in the conversation. “We had to return, and we had to pull up and come in like we belong, basically,” Shane says. “This is the start of the next sentence in the Varials story.”
This is why the Varials’ return had to be filled with shock and awe. It wasn’t about defiance – it was about definition. It’s a brutally heavy, total reset. It also arrives off the back of a record that didn’t quite reach their own standards.
As Shane says, “How do I word this? I don’t think [‘Scars For You To Remember’] sounds like Varials.” With a nu-metal bent and an ambitious, conceptual framing, he puts the skewed ideas down to the personnel at the time. “We did have to hone in on what makes us awesome after coming off a record like that. This absolutely had to be the biggest statement the band could ever make.”
“This absolutely had to be the biggest statement the band could ever make”
However, the ambition hasn’t died down. The world they’re building for ‘Where the Light Leaves’ is as consuming as the darkness within. It reaches out from the music and bleeds into the visuals. It’s the first time they’ve been able to properly focus, and with a tight team on board, they were able to, as Shane puts it, “take the music, and then kind of wrap this whole aesthetic world around it.”
‘Where the Light Leaves’ isn’t just heavier – for the first time in years, Varials sound like themselves. For Skyler, it represents the best of the band: “How you can fall down and get back up and keep fucking pushing.
“That’s one thing on the record I talk about a lot is going through this mix of emotions, and dealing with mental turmoil and feeling like I’m stuck and in this very stagnant space mentally and in life,” he continues. “And you can keep pushing on, you just gotta do it. I think that’s what this record holds dear to us as a group.”
But what they hold dear most of all is the joint understanding that it is all systems go now. “We want to be on the road all the time, obviously we’ve got to take a little bit of a break and be at home and chill, but be on the road as much as we can.” Likening the previous iterations of the group to “an old piece of shit Honda Civic that wouldn’t run right,” Sean’s analogy is apt for this new era of Varials. “Shane said this the other day,” adds Skyler. “Now it’s all gas, no brakes.”
Varials’ album ‘Where the Light Leaves’ is out now.
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