As The Callous Daoboys make a play for their next era with new album I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven, we meet mainman Carson Pace for a world-exclusive interview to dissect what to expect from the mathematical maniacs, what they had to prove to themselves, and why it’s ultimately all about acceptance…
“It started with the pursuit of just being annoying,” Carson Pace recalls of how The Callous Daoboys’ chaotic collage of genres first crystallised. They knew they wanted to be subversive and polarising, to have fans dancing and moshing in one corner while those further back furrow their brows, trying to make sense of the whirlwind unfolding in front of them.
Ultimately, The Callous Daoboys want to challenge you – and they’re laughing in the face of convention as they do it. They’ll turn your brain upside-down and shake it like a piggy bank while letting off party streamers at the same time, such is the effect of their angular yet playful mathcore that doesn’t merely flirt with other genres as it does wrestle with them. Take What Is Delicious? Who Swarms? from 2022’s breakthrough album Celebrity Therapist, with its snapping riffs melting into suave jazz-pop. What about Pushing The Pink Envelope, which screeches from thudding metal to fizzy Europop with some electronic twists en route? Then there’s fan-favourite Star Baby, whose magnificent saxophone-led end section is a thing of wonder when witnessed live.
On Carson’s part, he’s making the music he wants to hear.
“I’m not interested in art that goes down easily,” the vocalist explains at his Atlanta home, his nose still slightly stuffy from a bout of flu that’s finally taking its leave. “In my life, the things I read and watch is all challenging stuff, stuff that I might not even get on the first pass. I’m very much trying to make something that I would find challenging.”
Buoyed by a love of bonkers bands like The Chariot, Carson was just 19 when The Callous Daoboys started life in 2017, alongside guitarist Maddie Caffrey and violinist Amber Christman, while bassist Jackie Buckalew would join a year later. There’s been some line-up changes along the way, but they’re now completed by guitarist Daniel Hodson and drummer Marty Hague.
Although the key players and sound have evolved over time, the one thing the band always knew they needed was a stellar live show. In recent years, the Daoboys have made themselves truly unmissable onstage; their shows a neon explosion of energy with some truly batshit transitions. Cascada’s Everytime We Touch into Star Baby, for example, is a weirdly brilliant combination, and they’ve been known to chuck in a cheeky sing-along of Sweet Caroline PA between songs too (just watch their K! Pit session for proof). Carson’s also got some ingenious mosh calls in his back pocket – during their epic performance at ArcTanGent in 2023, he crowed, ‘Show me just how free your healthcare is!’
“The music wasn’t really good enough to match how much energy we were putting into the live show,” he considers now. “We thought, ‘Well, now the music has to get better.’ Then I was at an age where I had things that I wanted to say and we had music we were very passionate about, then the energy that we’ve been pursuing live started to match the music.”
Carson acknowledges that while the band initially “started off from a childish place”, they have managed to mature over time, while still retaining their esoteric essence. Or, as he succinctly puts it, “We’re still being annoying, by the way.”
The Callous Daoboys have often been told by new fans that they fill the 11/8-shaped hole in their hearts left by The Dillinger Escape Plan. Comparisons to Every Time I Die have abounded, too. While both certainly aren’t unreasonable reference points, the most important thing for the band is that they sound like nobody but themselves. The last time we heard from them, on the 2023 EP God Smiles Upon The Callous Daoboys, they were catchier, shinier and intriguingly, more accessible, but they still refused to sink to the level of an easy listen.
And yet, the thing Carson that loves most, is melody. If anything glues their wild hybrid of sounds together, it might just be that.
“It’s funny, I’ve been noticing that when we were trying to make the heaviest shit in the world, all I listened to was pop music. Now we’re trying to make pop music – I hesitate to call it pop music as there are still some breakdowns in those songs – all I’m listening to is the heaviest shit I’ve heard in my life. I really try to push myself as a vocalist and get better at clean singing every year that I do it because I don’t naturally have that ability. But I can come up with melodies all day; that’s what my strong suit is.
“I wish there was more of a story to it than that, other than I love catchy hooks and I love pop music. I love Fall Out Boy and I've always said that the first Panic! At The Disco record [A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out] is absolutely the reason why we're a band. It changed my whole outlook on music.”
Eight years on from that P!ATD-inspired formation, it’s now time for the next phase of their evolution. As Carson puts it, it’s both more immediate and more challenging than what came before, but once it gets in your ears, this paradox will reveal itself.
Welcome to I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven…
The Callous Daoboys could have gone with two different big-name producers for what became their third album. They had some preliminary talks with both (Carson declines to say who they were, believing “there’s no need” to), but the energy was still inexplicably off.
In the end, they rejected illustrious CVs in favour of someone who actually knew them and their music inside out. The band brought in Dom Maduri, who they’d known for almost a decade and someone Carson considers one of his best friends. He also worked with them on God Smiles Upon The Callous Daoboys.
“The second we confirmed him as producer for this record, everything just made sense. We knew what he could do and that he’s extremely talented and can make these songs the best that they can be.”
Helpfully, Dom also lived in the band’s native Atlanta, just a 20-minute drive away. Rather than making a short commute, however, Carson moved in with him while they were working on the record last autumn.
“I was sleeping in a room with no windows,” he recalls. “I would wake up and there would be no sunlight. I would just immediately walk out and we would start working. It was like living in the record. We really, really honed in on what we wanted the record to be and I don’t think it would be what it is without him.”
“I would wake up and there would be no sunlight… It was like living in the record”
That sense of pride is entangled with anxiety. Three months away from the album being thrown into the hands of fans, he is “so, so, so nervous” about release day. Anyone would be, having to clear the hurdles they already set remarkably high for themselves on Celebrity Therapist, a wildly unique record that catalysed immediate word-of-mouth buzz and brought the band both opportunities and adulation from all corners.
“In my head, nobody likes our music, but the pressure of outshining [Celebrity Therapist] was a lot, man, and I still feel it a lot,” Carson admits. “We pushed ourselves in the studio and I pushed myself so hard songwriting-wise. This is the only record where every song had, like, seven demos – Lemon is the only one that was close to how it started, and even then, we pulled a full minute out of it. When I was writing these songs, I was like, ‘These are going to be the best possible Daoboys songs ever.’ A couple of therapy sessions later and I’m all good, but the pressure was unbelievable.”
This creative exertion won’t all be for nothing. Somehow, the Daoboys have outdone themselves just as Carson hoped, and I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven is as daring as ever – and the quirky song titles remain a constant (Idiot Temptation Force and Douchebag Safari to name two excellent examples) – yet all its extremes are more pronounced. There’s the jaw-dropping, bladder-puncturing riffs of Schizophrenia Legacy and Full Moon Guidance to the irresistibly catchy Two Headed Trout – what Carson calls, “The most Panic! At The Disco song on the record.” The album’s midpoint ushers in two of their softest songs to date in the form of the aforementioned Lemon, perhaps the purest distillation of what a turn-of-the-millennium Daoboys pop song might sound like, and even a jazz-flecked ballad in the form of Body Horror For Birds.
Closing the record is the 12-minute Country Song In Reverse. It almost resisted creation at first – “the Murphy’s law of songs” as Carson puts it – with the band battling through technical glitches on his laptop and issues with the demos when they came to record the guitar parts. As Carson was writing it, more and more ideas came to him and the song quickly passed the seven-minute mark, then eight, then nine, and it just kept going into double figures.
Ultimately, it became an attempt to write a properly long song just to prove to himself that he could.
“I’d written a nine-minute-long song for Celebrity Therapist and everyone hated it,” he recalls. “I remember the Zoom call so well. Granted, we had different people in the band back then but our old drummer and keyboardist were the only ones with their video on and they were hiding their faces, they didn’t want to show how much they disliked it. In hindsight, it was a terrible song.”
Thankfully, he’s much prouder of this attempt.
“The way that song finishes off, with all the little references to other songs it has in it, I’m very proud of. I feel like [the length] is all worth it.”
The next time The Callous Daoboys touch down in the UK, they’ll be opening for Silverstein. To fans, that’s huge. To the people in Carson’s life who live outside of the alternative bubble, that sentence can register like a foreign language.
This is the nucleus of I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven, a concept album examining Carson’s battle to for acceptance from the people in his life who can't grasp the magnitude of his band’s achievements, or don't understand when they've done something substantial even if, say, they don’t have a song on the radio.
It means there’s a rather strange polarity between the worlds that Carson inhabits.
“So much of touring involves constant validation – not only does the crowd clap after every song, but they come up to the merch table and tell you how amazing and awesome you are. That makes you feel like a fucking rock star. I go home and go to work and people treat me like anyone else.”
“There’s a want to be accepted by your peers and your parents and the people around you”
Last year, the band played a Christmas show where they fired through their 2019 debut album Die On Mars in full, at The Masquerade in their hometown. They sold it out and were presented with pins that read, ‘I sold out The Masquerade’. Carson showed it to his boss at work, who didn’t understand what that accolade meant.
“He didn’t care. He was like, ‘Yeah, they could give those to anybody. You could probably just go to the venue and buy one of those’.”
This interaction is the tip of the iceberg.
“[I had this] constant dread around talking about what I do around my family and people I’ve dated and stuff like that, where what I do isn’t exactly making me millions of dollars, but that's not why I do it, obviously. There’s a want to be accepted by your peers and your parents and the people around you. I can't constantly scream at them, ‘There's a select group of people that think I'm an A-List celebrity, so why don't you start treating me better?!’”
As he started unpacking this, Carson found himself wandering towards the idea of turning his feelings into an overarching concept. He’s not a huge fan of concept albums in general and so never intended to make one – “Most concept records are like circus music to me so I tend not to like them” – but the overarching theme stuck out too strongly for him to ignore. From there sprung the concept of the Museum Of Failure – an institution existing 300 years into the future in which the album’s songs are displayed as relics – in to which we're welcomed during opening track, Collection Of Forgotten Dreams.
We know The Callous Daoboys already have an idiosyncratic sense of humour, but this narrative device isn’t a means of them poking fun at themselves. It’s a projection of personal anxiety and a philosophical way of thinking about legacy. They know what they put out into the world lasts forever, so what they’re asking is this: if something’s immortalised, can it really be a failure?
“Because of the internet, anything can gain an audience. It’s all going to be out there forever and to me, that’s a measure of success,” says Carson. “The fact that anybody connects with it is a measure of success, but to society at large, and to your family and friends, it is a failure if you really want to boil it down. But to me, I’ve already succeeded.”
Funnily enough, on the subject of legacy, we’re speaking to Carson on the day Black Sabbath announced the metal show to end all metal shows, a final reunion of the metal godfathers with a drool-worthy line-up of special guests. When asked about how he wants his band to be remembered, this is what Carson points to as an example.
“In a perfect world, we’re playing the final Callous Daoboys show when we’re 80 years old and I sound like the penguin from Toy Story 2 trying to scream up there,” he says. “That's an ideal world, of course, but I want to keep going. I want to keep making great art. I want to keep making things that I'm interested in. Obviously, I would love for us to be able to buy houses off of this stuff and that's always what I'm going to shoot for.
“But ultimately, I think that I just want to be able to say that we tried our best, that we made a really great run at it, and you know that we did everything that we could have done. I think that if I ever half-ass an album, my career should be taken away. I'm never, ever going to half-ass anything that I make, whether it's for this band or another band.
“That’s what’s important to me – that we never quit.”
I Don't Want To See You In Heaven is released is released May 16 via MNRK Heavy – pre-order your copy now.
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