Skiimo might be our first proper dose of Rocky Mountain emo around here (hmm, let me see).
Anyways, their self-titled second LP has this immediate, slightly goofy joy running through it, the kind of lightly nostalgic emo-punk that can push you through a bad afternoon and leave you smiling at parts of it.
The band themselves came together just as naturally. Bryson Maddock and Brayden Lambiase moved west looking for a change in their lives, ended up living together in Colorado, and Bryson happened to have a pile of songs he had never used. Zack joined them, built a studio in their basement, and suddenly there was Skiimo.
Bryson and Brayden already had years behind them in Unamused Dave. That band has been quiet for the last few years, but the two had played together for a long time and had toured Colorado several times over the previous decade. Brayden remembered the state as a place they had wanted to return to for years.
When the move finally happened, there was no plan for Skiimo yet. Bryson had written music outside Unamused Dave, where he had never been one of the writers, and those unused songs were suddenly sitting there while he and Brayden were sharing a house.
“We had moved out to Colorado together just looking for some life changes,” Bryson said later. “Bryson wrote music but didnโt write for Unamused Dave, so he had some songs that just had never seen the light of day and so we decided, ‘hey – we live together now, Bryson has written some songs, why not start a band?'”
Zack’s arrival completed it. He played bass and sang, produced their records, and put the basement studio together.
Bryson had left friends, family and familiarity in the Midwest, along with what he called “a lot of ghosts”. His roots were there, but he had wanted to head west for years. Weirdly, he also moved with some doubt over whether he would even play in a band again, despite moving with musicians and some of his best friends.
They all lived together for the first few years in Colorado. Starting a band under those conditions was almost absurdly easy.
“Turns out, music followed me,” Bryson said. “In fact, it followed me in a way I would have never expected, considering how much time and effort the rest of the guys and I have put into Skiimo.”
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For him, that move is tied closely to what Skiimo became. He doubts this exact band would have existed if they had stayed in the Midwest, even if they had continued living close to each other. The move itself, the risk and the feeling of starting somewhere new all ended up inside the band.
Zack had already made one move before Colorado. He had left Illinois for Nashville, studied, graduated from college and was working towards a life as a musician and audio engineer. Moving away from Nashville was harder to justify on paper. He was leaving one of the obvious cities for that work and wondered what opportunities might disappear with it.
Most of his friends had already moved home after college, though, and he wanted a fresh start. Somewhere during that period he also found himself going back to bands he had loved in middle school and high school. Emo had fallen out of his regular listening for a few years. Then it came back with him.
Brayden left more behind. A relationship that could once have ended in marriage was over. He left a good job and a lot of creative friends. He also described Illinois as a place tied to tragedy, death and pain, and later clarified that his reasons for leaving were deeply personal. He had struggled there with his mental health and drugs.
Once in Colorado, his view was simple: Skiimo are “Colorado through and through.”
Their early experience of Denver made that easy to say. Bryson knew only a little about the local emo scene before the move, but Flowerhead, Lobsterfight, Buddy Bench and A Place for Owls made the band feel welcome almost immediately. Their first show was in January 2025.
“It never really felt like we were outsiders,” he said. “Everyone is so kind and wants to celebrate each other.”
7th Circle Music Collective became an important room for them. Zack singled it out separately from the bands around town. The venue hosted several Skiimo shows, including their first one and the release show for debut LP “Nothing Ever Changes”.
His local list also includes Surprise Soup, Buddy Bench, Lobsterfight, Shorts and Flowerhead. His reasoning was refreshingly uncomplicated: he likes their music, and they were nice when he met them.
Brayden has one name he always wants in the conversation too. Nate Carney has supported both Skiimo and Unamused Dave for more than a decade.
“Whenever he comes out, which is p much always, I know itโs gonna be a great show,” Brayden said. “I donโt know anyone in Denver with more amazing connections than Nate.”
Their own phrase for all this, “Rocky Mountain emo“, has three slightly different explanations depending on who you ask.
For Bryson, Skiimo needed a name that still connected them to Midwest emo after leaving the Midwest. Colorado has skiing, he skis himself, and “Skiimo” got there quicker than naming the band Rocky Mountain Emo.
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Brayden remembers the name in equally practical terms. It was a short, simple way of explaining the band, and it translated well once they were living in Colorado.
Zack’s explanation is funnier. The Rocky Mountain emo tag mostly gives them something to say when somebody online points out that they are not actually in the Midwest.
“And it looks nice on a shirt.”
Zack also admits that he barely thinks about band names. Across all the music he has played, naming a band has always seemed closer to an administrative requirement. In his ideal world, nobody would need names at all. You would mention a band and everyone would somehow know which band you meant.
A lot of Skiimo’s humour works like that. Song titles include “Nah, Iโd Win”, “O Shirt Brother, Where art thou?”, “Yoinky Sploinky”, “I Will Burn This Buffalo Wild Wings to The Ground” and “The Gang Gets Mogged”. Pop culture, anime, internet language and dumb jokes sit all over records dealing with depression, anxiety and pretty rough periods of life.
Bryson has dealt with depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD and anxiety for most of his life. Songwriting gives the thoughts somewhere to go when his head is moving too quickly, and also during the opposite periods when he feels completely burnt out. He has written down thoughts that were actively hurting his mental state and turned them into songs.
The titles give everybody some air.
“The music itself can speak to mental state,” Bryson said. “We might as well have fun with the titles.”
Zack gets the same kick out of it.
“Writing a song about being depressed and then giving it a dumb name with no relevance to the lyrics, to me, is one of the greatest joys of being in an emo band.”
He thinks the jokes make deeply personal lyrics a little easier to put out into the world. He would probably give the songs stupid names anyway.
That mix is especially clear on “The Gang Gets Mogged“.
Bryson wrote it towards the end of 2025 about depression, everyday life and looking back at the happier kid he remembers being. Part of it arrived while he was travelling around Japan. He was sitting alone on a train in Kyoto, staring out of the window, when loneliness hit.
He likes songs that suddenly contain names of faraway cities, so he kept Kyoto in the lyrics as a small geographical mark from where part of the song came from. Zack later rewrote the lyrics in the section he sings but kept the Kyoto reference.
The title went through its own trip. At one point there was an anime reference attached to the song. Zack eventually saw a clip of looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular talking about a hypothetical 2028 election between Gavin Newsom and JD Vance and declaring that Newsom would win because he “moggs him to death”.
Zack proposed “Getting Mogged to Death”. Their shared love of “Itโs Always Sunny in Philadelphia” took care of the rest, using the show’s familiar “The Gang…” episode naming style.
Bryson remembers the broader internet “mogging” joke as the starting point. Zack cannot remember why they eventually attached the title to this particular song.
They all agreed quickly on using “The Gang Gets Mogged” as one of the record’s singles.
Bryson also uses it when explaining what changed between the two Skiimo albums.
Some of “Nothing Ever Changes” had been sitting around for years before the first LP came out. He hears a lot of himself from that period in “O Shirt Brother, Where art thou?”, especially how strongly his happiness depended on what other people thought of him.
Moving across the country messed with the certainty he had felt about himself five years earlier. He started asking whether Denver was the right decision, whether his life actually felt fulfilling, and, at his lowest points, whether he was even being a good dog dad. In 2024 he went through several panic attacks tied to those questions.
“The Gang Gets Mogged” comes from a later place. Bryson hears more acceptance in it, even with depression still sitting right there in the song.
As the band’s main writer, he also accepts that his relationship to Skiimo’s songs will always differ slightly from Zack and Brayden’s. They share goals for the band. They hear the finished songs together. Bryson has also lived with thoughts behind them that nobody else hears during an ordinary day.
Zack hears the jump between albums through the control room.
He chose “Donโt Rush Me” from “Nothing Ever Changes” and “Yoinky Sploinky” from the self-titled record as his two points of comparison. They are his favourite mixes from each album. Between them he changed microphones, guitar and bass pedals, mixing methods and mastering techniques. He thinks the second album hits harder and holds together better, even though he was already happy with the first.
A huge amount of what Zack knows about recording came from Sputnik Sound. He estimates around 75 percent of his studio education came through interning there and working around two Grammy-winning engineers.
One tiny piece of Sputnik ended up directly on this album. Zack recorded Bryson’s guitar cabinet with an AEA KU5A, the same microphone Mitch regularly uses for guitar cabs at Sputnik. More broadly, Zack still goes back to what he learned there about microphone choice and placement whenever Skiimo are recording.
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Producing a band he also plays in has caused surprisingly little friction for him. If anything, having that knowledge inside the band is part of why Skiimo have been able to put out so much music quickly. Bryson normally writes most of the song alone, then Brayden and Zack enter the process.
Zack also came into Skiimo without much experience as an actual bassist. He had already written and produced plenty of music, though, so he approached the instrument through song structure and arrangement.
“I think itโs changed the way that I play compared to if I were a real bassist who knew how to properly play the instrument.”
Brayden picked a different pair of songs to show the change: “I Donโt Think We Do Those Here” from the first LP and “I Will Burn This Buffalo Wild Wings to The Ground” from the new one. His brother sings most of both tracks, which made the comparison especially obvious to him. He hears more confidence now, along with a jump in recording and production quality.
Both remain among his favourite Skiimo songs.
Calling album two simply “Skiimo” came from all three of them. They made the decision after “Nothing Ever Changes” because they wanted the next record to say, in the shortest possible way, this is us.
That also put Calvin on the cover.
Calvin is Bryson’s dog. He lived with them during the three years they shared a place in Colorado, and the band came to regard him as a fourth member. Using him for the artwork made perfect sense to them.
The album came out on August 7, 2026. By August 14, Bryson said it had already passed 40,000 Spotify plays.
More people hearing Skiimo means more of the one part of modern band life they seem genuinely tired of: social media.
Zack called it their biggest real point of disagreement. Their ideas about the band, the music and the future rarely cause problems. Posting does.
Bryson summed up the problem as needing social media to reach people and also feeling painfully aware of how cringey band content can become. Somebody posts something, somebody else dislikes the vibe, and they go back and forth.
“I wish we were back in the days where bands just could create music and tour – not also have to be content creators.”
Zack feels the same way. They would all rather spend that time making music or playing shows.
Touring has already taken Skiimo well beyond Denver. Albuquerque and Mesa became part of that outward route, and California gave Bryson one of the biggest surprises so far.
Chico went completely off.
“People went nuts at that show and it was packed,” he said. He still does not really know where that amount of support came from. Most of their California shows went well enough that he is already itching to get back.
The East Coast has changed Brayden’s expectations too. Years earlier, Unamused Dave had a rough time touring through Massachusetts. Skiimo returned to New England and got a completely different reception.
Sour City Tapes are based in Massachusetts and have become close collaborators with the band. Zack already expected some activity there because his friend Cam, who runs the label, has connections across the area. The size and closeness of the scene still caught him off guard. Skiimo are due back on the East Coast in October.
After all the moves, old bands, panic attacks, studio work, tours and arguments over social posts, the three still describe Skiimo in pretty basic terms.
Brayden has been making music with Bryson for years. All three came into the band through different routes and built their own way into being musicians. Skiimo clicked quickly because the goal was already shared.
“Weโre all just out here trying to pay our bills in the meantime, and make music for the fun times.”
SKIIMO are hitting the road this October, out there planting their particular strain of emo straight into peopleโs hearts, one room at a time.
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If youโre anywhere near these spots, go let them mess you up:
Oct 1, Nashville, TN, Cobra
Oct 2, Birmingham, AL, The Firehouse
Oct 3, Atlanta, GA, Rocky Mountain Pizza
Oct 4, Charlotte, NC, Milestone
Oct 5, Philadelphia, PA, Philly Style
Oct 6, Long Island, NY, Massapequa VFW Hall
Oct 7, New Haven, CT, Jitter Bus
Oct 8, Pittsburgh, PA, Government Center
Oct 9, Kalamazoo, MI, Satellite Records
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