There’s a version of this band that never came back. Still Feel Gone formed in the summer of 2016 in New Jersey, wrote a bunch of songs, put four two-song EPs on Bandcamp, and broke up in 2018 — without playing a single show. Life, as Dante Dallavalle puts it, “was pretty turbulent, to put it euphemistically.” It took years before the idea resurfaced.
Their newest album, “Presley“, sits in that late-afternoon headspace where emo, alt rock and punk blur into something that feels more worn-in than aggressive — the kind of record that sounds better with the windows down and the light going golden. Small Brown Bike and Jets to Brazil are the obvious reference points, and they track: melodic without being soft, emotionally direct without melodrama, guitars that chime and crunch in roughly equal measure. There’s a warmth to it, even when the lyrics are at their bleakest, the kind of warmth that comes from a band playing music they genuinely needed to make rather than one trying to land on a sound. Great listen!
In early 2025, Dante and drummer Chris Lombard decided to pick it back up. Both had done other bands in the years between — Dante in two hardcore projects that had earned some local traction — but neither had scratched whatever this was supposed to be. “I was really yearning to do a more introspective indie rock/emo/post-hardcore project,” he says. So they went back in.
The lineup that recorded “Presley” is not the original one. Tito Valentin, who played guitar on the early EPs, had moved on to Bayway and wasn’t available to commit. Nico Sardone, who’d replaced original bassist Ethan Baumgarten, was in a similar situation. Chris introduced Dante to his friend Igor, a guitarist who ended up writing all the bass parts as well as some second guitar tracks for the album.
The three of them — Dante, Chris, and Igor — recorded it with John Naclerio at Nada Recording in upstate New York. Naclerio has production credits with My Chemical Romance, Senses Fail, and Brand New, bands that aren’t quite in Still Feel Gone’s sonic lane but share enough of a family tree that the fit made sense. Shortly after recording, they moved Chris to bass, found Angel Amarante — an energetic drummer who also plays guitar — and put the live lineup in place.
The album is named after a blind and deaf dog adopted by Chris and his partner. She had recently died. “She was the sweetest dog ever,” Dante says, “and having recently passed away, we knew we had to name the album after her.” She’s on the cover. The subtitle reads: “May all dogs be happy and healthy forever.”
“Presley” came out January 15, 2026 on RTF Records. Eight songs, 20 minutes and ten seconds. Digital and CD.
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Three songs on the record are older — written before the band dissolved the first time: “Vulcher”, “Anthem”, and “Sad in South Orange.” The rest came from the 2025 sessions.
“Vulcher” is named after a childhood friend’s nickname, someone who moved through the same rough stretch of early adulthood that Dante did — addiction, losing people to it, trying to get out of a town that felt more like a trap every year. Growing up in New Jersey during the peak of the opioid epidemic is the backdrop. “Coming of age in the mid-aughts in NJ, we were living through the worst of it,” Dante says. The song is an elegy to that time, to the town, to the version of themselves caught inside it. “Anthem” covers similar ground — an ode to a hometown and a personal decline so fused together they became hard to separate.
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Two songs on the record are about Vincent DeFalco, Dante’s best friend, who died on September 17, 2012. “A lot of the music I’d write after that day was solely focused not just on loss, but his loss,” Dante says. “Country Club Coke” reconstructs a night when the two were working together as busboys at a local country club, then collapses that memory against the present-tense absence. “It meshes the two, and distorts the passage of time in a way that is reflective of my experience coping with him being gone. I plead with him to ‘make contact.'” “Really an Angel Now” pushes further: “another entreaty for his presence, except with the recognition that this is an empty plea, that he’s gone and for good.”
“Regular Dog” deals with what Dante describes as “the internal battle between identity, guilt, and dependence — being stripped down to instinct, feeling poisonous, needy, and overexposed; caught between self-loathing and survival, and questioning whether this madness comes from within or is the cage itself.”
“RoR’d” takes its name from a legal term — released on own recognizance, when a court lets a defendant out before trial without bail.
The song maps that concept onto imposter syndrome, specifically within the context of underground music scenes that advertise inclusivity but operate on their own rigid codes. “In a scene that purports to provide shelter for society’s rejects and weirdos,” Dante says, “it has paradoxically been a constant source of exclusion, rejection, and isolation. Dressing correctly, using the right language, signaling that you’re on the right side of an issue — all of this have become the standard which you must meet in order to fit in. The conformity of it all is especially ironic given the supposed inclusivity that’s touted as one of the virtues of participation in this kind of scene.”
“Sad in South Orange” is about infidelity. Dante is direct about it: “It is a difficult song in that sense, and it is an experience that we’ve all been on both sides of. But it is necessary.”
Dogs run through the whole record — in the name, on the cover, in the lyrics. For Dante, what they represent is specific: “They represent the best of us: loyalty and unqualified love. But those traits simultaneously make them the most vulnerable creatures. This tension and contradiction encapsulates our spiritual essence.” Their next album will be called “Otto,” named after one of Igor’s dogs who has also passed.
The band’s FFO tags — Small Brown Bike, Jets to Brazil, Hum — give a reasonable sketch of the sonic territory. What Dante says about why the band exists is probably more useful: “I can speak for all of us when I say that we don’t like being in a band, we need to be in one.”
“Presley” is out now on RTF Records. Physical copies can be found here.
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