Night Cap is an Austin-based, five-piece band with members Ryan King, Jake Bomgaars, Alex Alfonso, Adrian Ayala and Deryk Camazine.

By Hannah Edelman

ORANGE Magazine sat down with Night Cap to learn more about their music and experiences ahead of their next show at Spider House Ballroom on March 30.

So, tell us about the story of Night Cap.

Fonzi: Ryan King and I met at the University of Texas at Austin where we would periodically jam together in his apartment. We got a couple songs partially together and met up with our friend Randy and just started doing a lil’ three piece, playing a couple gigs in some small venues. We then picked up Adrian on the keys, the Ivory Master, and our wolf pack grew to four. After a little bit with Adrian, myself, Ryan and Randy, we decided to take things up a notch and start playing at bigger venues. Our first was “big” one was at the Sahara Lounge. Conveniently, this gentleman by the name of Jake Bomgaars was also playing a show, just Jake on a stage, lonely as hell. He played first, we played after him and everybody just really loved what was going on. And after the show we said hey maybe we should try out an orgy, everyone just doin’ it all at once at the same time. And we liked the way it sounded, everyone worked well together, the song writing was similar and everything meshed. And one day Ryan and I jammed with Deryk Camazine and the rest was history after that.

King: Ah yes, that day in the music lab we were working on a song and we just couldn’t get it down.

Fonzi: And yeah, Deryk came in and tied the whole song together and just could do some stuff I didn’t think was possible on the drums. And after that the band has just been in this upward slope with everyone just feeling each other.

If someone who had never listened to Night Cap before asked you to describe the sound, what would you tell them?

King: I don’t want to compare our sound to any other band because each song comes from a set of completely unique experiences you know? So really, our sound, I would say, is a gentle collective of soft acoustic tunes that just grow really. And you can really hear that growth in the sound. Indie rock as the genre maybe?

Fonzi: I would say that the songwriting and the basis of the songs are somewhere between fun and emotional. The actual music is upbeat and rhythmic and driving for the most part.

Bomgaars: I like how it Is an indie rock vibe without staying to melancholy. There is always a direction that we are moving in.

Can you tell us the story behind “Everest,” your most popular song right now on Spotify with more than 100,000 plays.

King: When I wrote Everest it was kind of this time of moving away from needing to be, or really having this desire to be, in a relationship with somebody. And understanding that there is more power in solitude. It is that moment when you realize you are able to really step back from depending on somebody else for self-satisfaction, emotionally.

Can you explain your songwriting process?

King: Writing for me has come from personal experiences, but also Jake and I were just talking about this the other day, that a lot of it comes from dreams, and a few of the newer tunes that I’ve written have come from dreams.

Bomgaars: I think it is really easy to be able to disconnect from something that is too real and then write a song that is based on something that is so lucid because it doesn’t have to look a certain way, so it is so easy for someone else to use it tangibly and see it through their own perspective.

Ryan: Yeah that is just powerful- being open enough in song writing to where anybody will be able to take your words, your personal experiences, and be able to connect with them in many different ways.

You guys just put out some new music, “Heat” and “Somehow,” can you talk about the new songs?

Fonzi: “Somehow” is my personal favorite song for me to play. I have the most fun playing that song, but “Heat” is actually the first song that Ryan and I ever played together. I would play drums and Ryan would play guitar and we would just switch off and it was always just a little different every time. Then when we started as Night Cap we honestly never even touched that song up until maybe three months ago, and it kind of just happened so fast and we all loved the way it sounded. We hadn’t even fully written it and we went into the studio and Ryan and Adrian went outside and wrote about 75 percent of the lyrics in the parking lot.

King: Yeah, “Heat” was one of those songs that we would just play live and it just didn’t have lyrics. Every single show we sang something different, we we would mumble it just loudly enough so that people in the crowd would be like, “yeah I know this song!”

Fonzi: The lyrics were definitely rough going into the studio for “Heat” and we probably wrote more than half that song in about an hour, not to take anything away from those lyrics, it was just that we all were flowing and we all just fell in love with the song we were writing and it came together really well. And it is definitely the fullest sounding song we have for sure out right now.

King: It was originally called “Jam 666,” but we couldn’t publicly release that.

Bomgaars: Our mothers would have killed us.

King: But for real, “Somehow” had been written for a long time as far as Night Cap goes back.

Bomgaars: And dude honestly, it was really sloppy back when I first wrote it maybe three years ago. And we just could never get the vibe right with that song until Deryk came in on the drums. And I just love the direction that song took in the end. It definitely ended up having a much happier vibe than when it started.

King: And if you really listen to the lyrics, it really is this almost dreadful song, but it such a nice vibe, that the lyrics are almost disguised behind the melody.

Bomgaars: It’s like you are looking back on it. You are passed the emotional trauma, realizing “oh yeah, that happened, but I am fine now.”

So, you guys woke up and had more than 50,000 monthly listeners with only two songs out on Spotify, that has got to make you feel some sort of way.

King: It is pretty surreal, it hasn’t really soaked in, at all. It’s just something from the time we started that we all wanted to be able to say. 

Fonzi: I’m getting a tattoo at 100,000 listeners, on the record.

King: We all wanted this, bad. You know we have been working for this for so long and working so hard and it just felt nice. I honestly thought there was a glitch on Spotify the first time I saw it.

Fonzi: And I just think we all enjoy what we’re doing a lot and just doing it is really fun, but getting that sort of validation that people are into what we’re doing and creating definitely doesn’t make it any worse.

Ryan, what is the next goal for Night Cap?

Fonzi: Canada.

King: We are thinking Canada or Japan.

Fonzi: We don’t really have a foot in Japan so we want to break that market before it breaks us.

King: But for real, there have been talks about a southeastern tour in the summer followed by a music festival, just because we have a lot of friends out there that play, new friends like Stop Light Observations and Brook and The Bluff.

Fonzi: Yeah, shout out to Brook and The Bluff. We played with them in Dallas and are super excited to play with them again, they are really great guys, really great music. And it is just great to have other bands that have done this already to kind of show you the way and bounce ideas off of and just have conversations with about what you’re doing and what they’re doing. Just to have that soundboard of people that have done more than us on our side is really helpful.

King: So yeah that is kind of in the works right now, depending on scheduling and you know, how broke we are.

Fonzi: Tee-shirts for sale!

Adrian: Buy the merch!

Did you say music festival?

Fonzi: We’re going to Cleveland baby!

King: We played a show for South by Southwest, this Battle of the Bands put on by the TANZ Summerfest out in Cleveland. We battled. We went full Ned Schneebly and came out with the win against either other local Austin bands. And they really liked us and we really liked them and they said they were going to fly us out to Cleveland for their festival on July 28.

Any last words?

King: Yeah, just hit us up NightCapatx, its our handle for anything, Instagram, Facebook. We really love talking to people who love the music.