Optometrist, father, musician – Rory Rodriguez is a man who can be many things. His is also a name you know well, as Dayseeker finally explode. It’s not been an overnight success for the post-hardcore crew, but, says the frontman, that’s just given them perspective as they hit paydirt…
When you spend a lot of time cutting your teeth, your bite becomes pretty sharp.
This seems to be the philosophy observed by Dayseeker, following the breakthrough success of their fifth studio album, 2022’s Dark Sun. Remarkably, that record arrived a decade into the Orange County post-hardcore outfit’s career, and right now they’re primed to explode. In the intervening years they’ve gradually chipped away at their craft, just as vocalist Rory Rodriguez is doing to his green nail polish right now, as he speaks to Kerrang!.
“When we were first starting out, we had a few friends in local bands at the time that had what felt like these meteoric rises,” says Rory, as he contemplates the positives of being on a slower climb. “There was a song, or a viral moment, and their careers looked set to catapult. I felt great envy and asked myself, ‘How do they do that?’ And I remember a manager at the time telling me, ‘Your music has a lot of substance and character to it, so it will take longer to catch on.’”
That manager, it turns out, was right on the money. This is exactly what’s happened to Dayseeker, just as the sudden burning brightness experienced by some of their peers petered out.
“Those bands had success for about a year but don’t exist anymore. Given how things have happened for us, more gradually, there’s a chance it might last longer because it wasn’t some overnight one-hit-wonder thing.”
Perhaps because Dayseeker have survived, and now flourished, in a landscape in which many acts perished, Rory admits to experiencing imposter syndrome.
“You get used to being at the bottom when you’ve been there a long time,” he says. “We did a show in San Antonio recently, and there were 3,000 people there to see us, which resulted in the show having to be moved to this outdoor section. It was a very surreal experience, because we’ve been supporting bands for the past two years and when we were playing for a lot of people, we felt it was their crowd. But when you’re headlining and you know that people are there to see you, it doesn’t feel real sometimes. So we’re taking in any new success and appreciating it for as long as it lasts.”
Rory’s own journey towards a life in music was just as gradual. He picked up a guitar at 14 and began writing songs a year or two later while in high school. Unable to find anyone to share those musical passions with, he ploughed his furrow as a solo performer in the Dashboard Confessional mould. His material was as anguished as Chris Carrabba, too, given that this period coincided with a particularly painful break-up, with someone Rory thought he’d end up marrying and starting a family with, precipitating a period of depression and, eventually, songs that showed him the cathartic power of the creative process.
“I put out an EP under my own name,” he recalls. “I took it off the internet a while ago because it sounds horrific! I was so upset about the break-up and was trying to find my way, so I wrote five or six songs about that relationship and what we’d been through. As soon as I finished [the EP], I had my first taste of what I get to experience a lot of the time now: the acceptance of a bad situation. Then I was zenned out about everything – I knew that I’d move on, she’d move on, and it wasn’t the end of the world.”
Rory’s career started to move on too after high school, albeit modestly, when he met like-minded folks looking for a singer and he joined what he calls his first “horrible” local band.
“There was a scene of young kids playing metal and hardcore. I feel that’s where I grew up and got used to performing. We weren’t very good but it was fun, and when you’re young, you’re just interested to see where it goes.”
Eventually, that journey led Rory to Dayseeker, alongside guitarist Gino Sgambelluri, the only other member of the band who remains from their early days.
“I’m very grateful to have him,” Rory says of a friend and bandmate who over the past 12 years has provided support and humour, as well as innovative riffs and “lifesaving” vocals. “He’s a great singer and if I ever need to take a breath for a second, he can take over a line.”
Talk of what Rory learned from Dayseeker’s early days isn’t awash with the usual or expected tales of youthful overindulgence and hedonism, but lessons of an altogether more wholesome and professional nature.
“We learned how to be punctual, the importance of showing up on time, to be polite and to do your job well,” he explains. “Back when I was in local bands, I was hurting my voice because I could yell my head off for an hour and it didn’t really matter. But then you get onto a circuit where you have to do the same show every night for a month, so I had to readjust some things. Overall, though, I think the main thing our early days taught us was to be humble.”
Even with these lessons on board, the years of toil with little to show for it pushed Dayseeker perilously close to calling it a day before the release of their fourth album, 2019’s Sleeptalk.
“Right before it came out, I felt like if that album didn’t do well we might quit,” Rory admits. “I didn’t know if we could keep touring for months and come home with $200 in our pocket. It’s not sustainable.
“Thankfully,” he grins, “that was a big turning point.”
These days, the somewhat shy but sweet-natured Rory, who’s spent his life “bouncing between” Orange County and Los Angeles, does a lot to work on himself. When he’s not on the road, as is the case at the moment, he attends therapy and regularly works out. His priority, however, is his daughter, Hazel.
“I’m grateful that I get to be a parent,” he smiles. “It’s my favourite part of being alive.”
Rory celebrated the three-year-old on Dark Sun’s closing track, Afterglow (Hazel’s Song), its lyrics articulating the aching pang a musician father goes through when it’s time to leave home for tour (‘I’m on the road, missing milestones / Counting the days ’til I’m coming home / No, don’t forget me when I’m gone / The single greatest thing I’ve done’).
Despite these words of regret, the song is ultimately a celebration of an achievement leagues above ticket sales and streaming figures – as well as a reminder, on an otherwise sombre record, that better days are ahead. Plus, Rory reasons, ultimately this is what he does, how he supports his daughter, and it could even act as a positive example of the possibilities outside of more traditional lines of work.
“I’m hopeful that when the time comes, she can explore a career that she’s passionate about,” he says. “I’ve shown her it’s possible.”
“Passion” is a word Rory uses a lot, and is evidently the measure he uses to decide where to put his efforts. He’s no stranger to the nine-to-five grind, having trained as an optometrist, a job he’d regularly return to between tours.
“I’ve worked in optometry my whole life,” says Rory, sporting a pair of rather natty specs himself. “I’m not speaking ill of that profession because I could have been working in much worse places, but I wasn’t passionate about helping people pick out glasses. I liked the job for the most part, but did get some patients who were just absolute psychopaths I had to appease.”
Dark Sun largely dealt with Rory’s father succumbing to cancer, making it a record he was “more emotionally invested in than I was with anything else”. Not that Dayseeker’s other records have shied away from difficult topics; the song Starving To Be Empty from Sleeptalk, for instance, explores issues of self-image and body dysmorphia, informed by a friend’s eating disorder. Given that Rory writes about the experiences of others, as well as his own, has this ever caused any issues in his personal relationships?
“Thankfully no,” says Rory. “But I put out a song a few months ago about somebody I’m not on the best of terms with. There was a part of me that wondered if that person would know the song was about them, but they haven’t said anything, so I hope it was vague enough that they didn’t know.”
The song in question – featuring the lyrics ‘And the bridge I burned was soaked in my own kerosene / But I can’t take the way they won’t look back at me’ – is Bliss In Misery by Rory’s other band, Hurtwave, which is a project that scratches an entirely different creative itch for him.
“I like a lot of really slow, mellow rock music. I can’t do that much in Dayseeker or fans would be like, ‘You’re putting me to sleep here!’”
Rory clearly cares a lot about his listeners – though not in the way some of them imagine.
“A girl gave me a letter at a show,” he recalls. “It was very in-depth about her ideas of us romantically, and how she was sure I had written a song about her. I had literally never met her in my life, so that was quite scary.”
The singer cares enough, though, that he has been sensitive to the more impulsive appraisals of his band’s most recent work.
“I’ve been on the other side, when a band puts out an album that I didn’t love, but I’ve never felt the motivation to go to their social media and let them know I didn’t like their album,” he says. “When we put out Sleeptalk, it felt like our old fans thought we’d cracked the code on our band and new fans couldn’t believe they hadn’t heard us before.
“When we put our Dark Sun, I didn’t think it was that crazy of a genre jump, but there were people who said it was too slow and wasn’t Sleeptalk, holding on to that record like it’s the Holy Grail. It felt personal to me to have people saying it sucked on the day it came out, halfway through listening to it. It took me a second to snap out of it.”
Now, Rory and his bandmates – Gino, bassist Ramone Valerio and drummer Zac Mayfield – are in the midst of making their next album with Dan Braunstein, who produced both Sleeptalk and Dark Sun. Having started work on it in September, they’re aiming to complete it early next year, factoring in a touring cycle that includes dates in the UK and Ireland, as well as producer Dan’s similarly busy diary.
And at this juncture, it looks set to be another emotionally taxing opus.
“I feel like it puts all of our other music to shame,” enthuses Rory. “Maybe there’s a happy song on there… but it’s pretty dark so far.”
This article originally appeared in the winter 2024 issue of the magazine. Dayseeker tour from December 7 and play Download Festival 2025 – get your tickets here.
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