When Yole Centeno started Nocturnal Prose in San Antonio in 2022, he was already well known in the Texas hardcore and screamo underground through Amygdala, the politically outspoken band he had founded eight years earlier. His involvement with Amygdala ended in September 2020 following conflicts within the group. By the time he began working with guitarist Nick on a darker, more melodic form of punk, he had spent years organising shows and tours, playing internationally and getting involved in community work.
That history is relevant to “Western Interests“, the nine-track Nocturnal Prose debut released on 28 August 2026. The record moves through goth rock, coldwave and guitar-driven post-punk, with Yole’s low, restrained vocals set against Nick’s melodic guitar parts and a rhythm section built around bassist Aaron and drummer Chuy. Its lyrics deal directly with immigration enforcement, US foreign policy, surveillance and the treatment of marginalised communities, alongside personal experiences of grief, body dysmorphia and friendships that have helped people survive difficult periods of their lives.
It also took more than two years to finish. The initial recording sessions in spring 2024 left the group with technical problems, unfinished vocals and increasingly difficult schedules. Nocturnal Prose were largely inactive through 2025 before returning to complete the album. By then, Yole had also established Total Agency, a DIY label and mutual-aid collective whose work began with Palestinian relief benefits and expanded into direct assistance in San Antonio.
To understand how these things came together, it is worth going back to Amygdala, and particularly to Yole’s role in getting that band started.
He formed Amygdala in summer 2014 after writing six songs that would become their first seven-inch, “The Horror of Never Being Able to Forget”. Following a handful of early gigs, he sent the recordings to Lars at German label React With Protest. The label agreed to release them, giving the young band an international connection at a time when much of their touring was still being arranged through straightforward email exchanges with local promoters.
“Everything about the development of the band felt so fluid. AFter playing a few gigs, we recorded and on a whim, I sent it to Lars from the legendary german label React with Protest (cry me a river) and he wanted to release it. which paved the way for us to tour internationally. Our first couple of tours in the U.S and Europe, and towards the end of my involvement were routed based on who reached out to us thru email to play their city/town.”
Amygdala became closely associated with the queer and punk-of-colour communities around San Antonio. Their music was fast, confrontational hardcore, and their politics were already explicit on 2016’s “Population Control”. A January 2017 interview with Bandcamp Daily addressed anti-colonial resistance, the need for more inclusive punk spaces and the band’s involvement in community organising.
Yole was handling much of the day-to-day work behind Amygdala as well as playing bass. He booked tours, dealt with correspondence and helped keep a band with increasingly demanding international commitments running. Their early releases and European connections eventually led to a deal with Prosthetic Records.
By 2019, Amygdala had completed seven tours and a European run, and were heading out on a 40-day trip across the US to support their second LP, “Our Voices Will Soar Forever”. Discussions about the future had begun to create disagreements. Members had different questions about the amount of touring they wanted to undertake and whether proposed touring partners were compatible with the band’s political principles.
Then COVID interrupted their plans to return to Europe.
“Covid abruptly came and our plans to tour Europe were cancelled. Time went on and we fell into isolation, friendships became distant, hardened, internally. I was asked to leave due to conflicts and i didnt plea.”
Amygdala continued after September 2020. Yole’s departure ended his own six-year involvement with the band, including the touring and organisational work he had handled since its earliest days.
For a while, he concentrated on things outside music. He completed a degree and professional certifications, spent more time dealing with his health and personal life, and eventually returned to playing drums with Sacred Games towards the end of summer 2021.
The idea for Nocturnal Prose had actually been around for years. Yole and his friend Nick had discussed putting together a post-punk band as early as 2015, but their schedules never lined up well enough to make it happen.
“I started Nocturnal Prose with my friend and guitarist Nick. We had talked about starting a post punk band pre-dating back to 2015. Tour schedules did not align for me to dedicate that time to starting one. I wasnt purposely trying to move away from Screamo but it felt natural and during demoing phases, everything was recorded between the two of us.”
Their first demo appeared in February 2022. The songs drew on dark punk and goth, with the two musicians recording the early versions themselves. As the group developed, the music settled into a more expansive post-punk sound, where melodic guitar lines and steady bass figures could carry songs for longer stretches and Yole could work with a different vocal delivery.
There is an obvious difference between Amygdala’s abrasive hardcore and the controlled, melodic approach of Nocturnal Prose. Yole has never described the change as a conscious break with screamo. His earlier bands, touring commitments and the people he continues to play with remain part of his working life.
The completed “Western Interests” makes room for several related strands of post-punk. The guitar writing on “Echoes of Sorrow”, the title track and “World Burns To Death” is more unsettled and angular, with melodic figures running against a firm bass-and-drum pulse. “Withered Rose”, “Laughing Spell” and “Droplets From The Rain” lean further into sustained melodies, while Yole’s largely monotone vocals give the songs a distinct delivery.
The music has clear connections to the darker guitar-driven bands of the 1980s, particularly The Chameleons and Asylum Party, as well as later post-punk. Nick’s guitar is central to the arrangements, often providing the most expressive element while Aaron and Chuy keep the rhythmic movement consistent underneath. It is a style that gives the words plenty of space without requiring Yole to abandon the directness of his earlier work.
Originally, the band had intended to get the entire record finished during spring 2024, ahead of several tours Yole had arranged as a stand-in bassist for Soft Kill. A Nocturnal Prose autumn tour was also being planned around the prospective release.
The recording ran into problems.
“The state that it was left in, was with no vocals, and lots of noise from the amps bleeding into the drum mics that led to the engineer wanting to give it another shot. Pair that with other tour commitments with other bands, and it felt near damn impossible to get back into.”
With no finished vocal tracks and unwanted amplifier bleed captured by the drum microphones, the engineer wanted to revisit the recordings. The band’s other commitments made finding a suitable period increasingly difficult.
Nocturnal Prose spent much of 2025 inactive, although the members continued to see and speak to each other. Their overlapping involvement in other San Antonio bands helped maintain those relationships. Faulty Cognitions had recorded an album and were spending time supporting it, while Yolquetza also occupied some of the same musicians.
In autumn 2025, Yole contacted the others about resuming work on “Western Interests“. Once the Faulty Cognitions commitments began to ease, Nocturnal Prose found the time to return to the studio.
The album was recorded at The Cornpound with Joshua Bloodsworth, mixed by Jason Tucker Audio and mastered by Matt Ibarra at STR Mastering. Bloodshot Lens supplied the artwork. The final version appeared in August 2026, almost two and a half years after the first sessions began.
The title carries a reference to Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures”, which Yole approached through a similar kind of wordplay. His definition of Western interests is explicitly political and concerned with the conditions of daily life under capitalism.
“The title is inspired by Joy Division’s use of word play with Unknown Pleasures. all the pain and suffering in this world stems from imperialism, capitalism, from the way that we feel, from the foods that we eat, from the gas we pump into our cars to create this illusion that we are living in 1st world comfort, when the reality is we have no affordable healthcare, we have families and everyday people struggling with homelessness, drug addiction, food apartheid, and a lack of mental health resources.”
He also condemns the actions of ICE and US financial and military support for Israel, connecting both to his opposition to imperialism and institutional violence. His political language is forceful, and it has remained consistent with the positions he expressed during his years in Amygdala.
“Post Punk is Political” is the phrase Nocturnal Prose chose for the album’s public description. Yole sees the politics of post-punk as part of a history that includes anarcho-punk, anti-war music and bands working across punk’s various underground communities. At the same time, he has no interest in demanding that every post-punk or darkwave group address political subjects.
“Well to be fair, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, that post punk/darkwave groups want to separate politics from their music. this might be controversial ,but perhaps those who really oppose that sentiment could just be apolitical or have never been involved in punk spaces.”
He cites The Mob, Flux of Pink Indians, Rudimentary Peni, Crass and Oi Polloi as part of that tradition. The Sound and The Chameleons, despite their different musical approaches, also wrote songs confronting war and capitalism.
“Stating that post punk is political is not reinventing the wheel here by any means.”
The opening track, “Echoes of Sorrow“, makes the political direction immediately apparent. Its lyrics describe a child injured beneath rubble, a family drowning while trying to cross a border, and a teacher killed while protecting a student. Those images are placed together as examples of violence and suffering that the narrator believes governments and institutions have allowed to become normal.
Yole connects the song to the border between Texas and Mexico, Palestinian experiences under Israeli occupation, and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. He also raises allegations concerning shared surveillance technologies and training relationships involving Israeli security forces and US border authorities. These are connections he makes in discussing the song, and the lyrics present them from his political perspective.
He links Uvalde to the influence of financial interests on American gun policy, with particular anger at the political resistance to stronger restrictions after mass shootings.
Elsewhere on “Western Interests”, public events and personal experiences occupy the same record.
“More Than Human” is rooted in Yole’s history of body dysmorphia. The song’s repeated wish to be “more than human” comes from the struggles he associates with his body and with generational trauma. The lyrics return to private distress, the difficulty of disclosing personal experiences and the feeling of having exhausted the explanations that once helped him cope.
“Withered Rose” deals with being raised in an immigrant family and the experience of living in a country whose promises of opportunity can be undermined by discrimination. Yole describes it as an anti-fascist song.
“Withered Rose is an Anti Fascist song about being brought up from an immigrant family, like the story of many, that came to this country to pave a better life for themselves and their family.”
The image of a rose losing its colour in the rain refers to people targeted because of their ethnicity or perceived immigration status. Yole specifically mentions racial profiling and the suspicion directed at people who are assumed to be undocumented.
The repeated reference to broken and stolen dreams points directly to the American Dream, and the gap between what immigrant families may hope to find in the United States and the lives they actually experience.
“All this is heavy but I still believe love will break the chains.”
That belief also runs through “Droplets From The Rain“, one of the album’s most personal songs. Yole wrote it about despair and a renewed friendship that helped both people survive a difficult period.
“More than Human carry much of my personal history of body dysmorphia, Droplets from the rain is a song about comfort and despair and the rekindling of friendship that saved me, saved each other because we were no longer fighting to stay alive, alone.”
The song remembers nights spent together, the sound of passing trains and the comfort of having another person nearby during periods when neither was coping particularly well. Its references to trauma and survival are direct, without any attempt to offer a simple resolution.
“Laughing Spell” also deals with friendship and the ability to find moments of enjoyment during political and personal turmoil. The song moves from memories of being together in the streets to a morning in which ICE activity has become part of the surrounding environment. Affection, political opposition and memories of ordinary time spent together coexist in its lyrics.
“Mourning Sun” and “JOKER” deal with people Yole loved who died after suffering serious mental-health problems. “Mourning Sun” remembers someone who struggled in isolation while still showing warmth and humour to others. “JOKER” is more explicit about death and its aftermath, addressing someone whose jokes and laughter remain in Yole’s memory.
These losses sit alongside the political songs throughout “Western Interests”. Yole draws on experiences involving people he knew closely, as well as events unfolding outside his immediate circle. The writing remains personal even when the subject is state policy, immigration or war.
Some of that work also happens through Total Agency.
Founded in 2024, Total Agency is an independent DIY record label and mutual-aid collective based in San Antonio. Its early activity involved organising benefit shows to raise money for Palestinian relief. Yole had met a friend named Moureen, originally from Gaza, through organising spaces in the city. Following 7 October 2023, she returned to Gaza to work with Shabab Gaza, a mutual-aid group providing food to displaced residents through a soup kitchen.
Total Agency subsequently expanded its work locally, helping distribute meals, hygiene products and wound-care supplies on San Antonio’s West Side. Yole describes the area as having experienced long-term neglect and displacement, and sees the work as a direct way to help people with immediate needs.
“Mutual aid in practice is community care. We practice it more than you think, unknowingly. Ever just buy someone food cuz you saw that there was a need to be met? If so yes, you might be an anarchist.”
Yole wanted Total Agency to release Nocturnal Prose’s first LP, with a particular focus on physical editions by queer, trans and punk musicians of colour who also take an active role in their communities.
“I knew that I wanted to release Nocturnal Prose first LP, and to me, it just made sense for it to be a label that prioritized releasing physical media from bands of QT/POC that consistently do punk shit and give back to their community. With the height of censorship due to the threats from the administration, I believe we have to preserve art, art that is deemed radical. Physical media will outlive streaming services.”
There is a direct connection to things Yole was discussing almost a decade earlier. During a 2017 interview with Bandcamp Daily, while Amygdala were still touring behind “Population Control”, he talked about participating in community organising, protests alongside a local union and work with young people.
Back then, he described Amygdala and hardcore as a substantial part of his everyday life, alongside school and organising. He also mentioned plans to start additional punk and hardcore bands, joking about creating an Amygdala family tree.
That interconnected network of musicians is still apparent around Nocturnal Prose.
San Antonio’s hardcore, screamo, goth and post-punk communities have their own audiences, although mixed bills remain common. Musicians move between bands, help organise shows and continue working together across styles.
“At times they feel seperated but there have been mixed bag shows and they happen often, But yes between the respected scenes, there’s a revolving group of people that start new bands and hold it down.”
Nocturnal Prose members are involved with black metal band Yolquetza and melodic punk band Faulty Cognitions, whose sound Yole relates to Hüsker Dü and The Replacements. Krigsaar play fast, economical d-beat and share musicians with KLASSENMORDER and Infest of Rage.
Funeral Service also have overlapping membership with Fatal Fatigue, WIMP, The Bows and Youth Camp. Screamo band Once More share musicians with See You Soon. These connections help explain how people remain active across multiple projects, even when individual bands go through quieter periods.
Yole also points to Sacred Games, Detach, Ordis Mortis, Caspa, Morta, Cel Shade, Harmony’s Demise, Sunday But Hours Away, Set Up, Of All Their Broken Parts, Insulin, Heaven Denied, Voracious Contempt and Fear of Loss as part of the local picture.
The people organising and hosting shows are equally central to how the city works. He names No Mames Distro, Out With The Goons, O’Death Cafe, Fermentia, The Cornpound, GateSix, Menace Music, Satanic Panic, Belalcazar Presents and Paper Tiger.
The Cornpound has its own place in this particular story as the studio where “Western Interests” was recorded. Total Agency’s benefit shows and relief work operate within the same broader community of musicians, organisers and people involved in underground music.
For Yole, revisiting Amygdala in 2026 brings him back to the records and the audiences who connected with them. His departure was difficult, but he continues to value what the band accomplished and the role it played for marginalised queer, trans and punk-of-colour listeners.
“Amygdala was a huge chapter of my life, I hold the records we created, and what the band meant to marginalized QTPOC, will always hold a special place in my heart. We did amazing things that will carry us a lifetime.”
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With “Western Interests” finally released, Nocturnal Prose have begun booking shows again. The band have a Texas run and a New Orleans appearance planned for 23 to 25 October, with Midwest and East Coast touring being discussed for 2027. There have also been conversations about playing in Europe.
“Currently everything is fluid, and we are staying steadily active. Western Interests is out, and now that these songs are out, it’s exciting to see the reception.”
“Western Interests” is available digitally through Nocturnal Prose’s Bandcamp, with a hand-numbered run of 100 clear translucent vinyl copies with opaque pink splatter issued through Total Agency. Hamburg’s Brainwasher Records have also released a limited cassette edition of 60 copies. The digital album is currently available on a name-your-price basis.
A “Western Interests” T-shirt is also available, with $10 from each sale pledged to Water Is Life Gaza. The band have committed to publishing donation documentation once the orders are fulfilled.
