Client Spotlight: breakk.away

Composed of five high school bandmates, breakk.away formed in early 2022 after being invited to the STARMUS festival in Armenia. Vocalist Jessica Li, guitarist Case Fadell, keyboardist Jorge Gonzalez Diez Gutierrez, bassist Tomomi Kimura, and guitarist Romain Dammann were friends to start, and when presented with the opportunity, thought “let’s do this.”

They are now ready to release their first single, “I’ll See You When the Night Comes,” after receiving experience working with big names in the industry, like Nathan Smart and Jens Bogren.

They are an alt-metalcore band who pull elements from other genres like dreampop, EDM, post-rock, cottagecore, and many more, with inspirations ranging from Lana Del Rey to The 1975 to Rosalìa to Charli XCX. 

“But truthfully, that barely scratches the surface,” Fadell said. “We all come from diverse musical backgrounds, from metal to indie to jazz, and it all kinda gets lost. We mostly write just when we are hanging out, maybe watching horror movies and eating Wendy’s or something.”

In those casual hangout sessions, breakk.away finds themselves working and eventually emerging with a song. 

“Sometimes I’ll come with a skeleton of a song or a palette of songs,” Fadell said. “Maybe it’s just lyrics, a riff, or some piano chords. There’s really no set process.” 

“This first single really delves into the post-rock/pop plus metalcore-ness,” Fadell said. He also noted that their “unconventional approach” to metal, as well as the heights they take their genre-bending to, set them apart to the point where “sometimes it’s not even metal anymore.”

“I’d like to think our different music tastes and influences not typically seen in metal help us bring new ideas to metalcore,” he said. 

As their first release, breakk.away worked on “I’ll See You When the Night Comes” for about a year. They finished it back in March 2022, sent it to their producer Nathan Smart that summer, and then to Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios for mastering after that. They then got the art and video done in September 2022 by Jim Highes at Northary Studio. 

“We finally decided to release it as a few of us had to work on college apps and regular work,” Fadell said. “I myself had SAT prep, so I couldn’t focus much on music. But then, come around to 2023, we got back into the swing of things, and many more songs queued up, so with everything ready to go and the following few songs getting worked on ready for the next releases, we decided it was time to start the engine on this project/band.”

breakk.away can be found on their Instagram, and “I’ll See You When the Night Comes” can be streamed on Apple Music, Spotify, and more.