Before the band had gone on stage, I asked the members of Catcher what I should expect from their show. They had one word: Energy.
And, indeed, that’s what I got during their hour set. The energy was almost overwhelming at times. Running through the crowd in the middle of songs and crashing into crowd members and his own bandmates, Austin, the lead singer, ravaged the stage. It perfectly embodies the sort of “chaos” that can be heard during the live rendition of their songs.
“We’ll give it our all every time. I think you can tell that we’re really giving it 100% and giving it all of our energy. That’s feedback we’ve gotten, and you know that’s really what it’s all about”
Catcher is a New York-based Punk Rock band who is currently doing an international tour with the fellow NY-based band Been Stellar. In an interview Catcher had told me that this was both bands’ first time touring around the country. However, this isn’t Catcher’s first tour back since the start of the pandemic, they said. They mentioned that they performed a handful of local shows and had a chance to test out new material.
What was interesting, when discussing the band’s plans pre-pandemic, they originally planned to move to the UK.
“We picked the right place to go; but we took like a gamble . Our initial plan was to move to the UK. And then COVID happened and we had to reassess. It was a big risk moving to New York. At one point we were struggling to find guitarists. But it worked out. We found the right venue to play at and we tried songs out. We’ve had these great shows. We’ve met all these great people have also met a lot of local bands to play with.”
When discussing the songs themselves and if they imagine how they’d sound on stage beforehand, the band had this to say:
“Sometimes we’ll be like ‘oh this is a good live song’ but we aren’t necessarily trying to write it for a live show. Some seem like they would be great live and some of them don’t. And ones that we haven’t expected to do well, like we have a song now that’s six minutes long. It’s very slow. We thought everyone was going to hate the song but they loved it.
Sometimes we do say that we need fast songs for the stage because we have a few slow ones. And so then we set out to make some. I had some drum beats and some stuff like that and we set out to make faster songs that way. In that way we did write for the stage.”
If you get a chance, definitely check out Catcher during their North America tour. You won’t want to miss out on their performance.
Catcher
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Photos by Michelle Castillo