Life keeps getting bigger and better for Dayseeker’s Rory Rodriguez.
When Revolver catches up with the vocalist, he’s just gotten home from his band’s successful European tour with Motionless in White, where they played a series of packed rooms across the continent. Rodriguez reflects on a show at London, UK’s Alexandra Palace, in particular, as a notable mile marker for Dayseeker’s continued rise in the heavy-music scene.
The act had played the venue back in 2024 supporting Pierce the Veil, and he recalls that the English concertgoers “weren’t particularly going crazy” for Dayseeker that night — politely attentive, but not in the palm of Rodriguez’s hand. This most recent show was different, and notably took place in the wake of the band’s game-changing 2025 release, Creature in the Black Night.
Steered by hypnotically hummable first single “Pale Moonlight,” the record is a nexus point between nocturnal, synth-throbbing pop and fiercely metallic breakdowns — Rodriguez’s vocals confidently flipping between a passionate falsetto, pop-world-massive chorus melodies and air-pushing screams that’ll strip you down to your skeleton. The millions of streams behinds singles like “Pale Moonlight” and “Crawl Back to My Coffin” mean people are paying attention en masse. So did playing to the “sea of people” in the 10,000-cap Alexandra Palace, Rodriguez confirming that they received a hell of a reception this second time around. And while Dayseeker’s fandom has clocked significant growth overseas, things are expanding back at home, too.
A couple days ahead of this interview, Rodriguez and his partner announced the upcoming birth of a daughter over Instagram, the pair ecstatic that their five-year-old girl will become a big sister this summer. Planning ahead, Rodriguez tells Revolver that he’s on his way to a few house tours. Leaving their long-time two-bedroom will give his growing family more space to move around, and could likewise lead to a more comfortable songwriting set-up for Rodriguez when inspiration strikes next.
“A lot of times I have a piano in my living room, and I’m just recording really crappy voice notes into my iPhone,” he says, confessing this was how much of Creature in Black Night was written. “It’d be nice to have a dedicated space to record rough demos, so I feel like I need an office.”
While he’s looking to the future, Rodriguez is asked to reflect on how his own siblings helped put him on the path towards fronting Dayseeker, the act he founded in 2012. He begins by discussing the impact of his father, a veteran singer and performer around California — the latter’s passing, following a battle with cancer, informed much of Dayseeker’s 2022 release, Dark Sun. But growing up, one of Rodriguez’s sisters also filled his ears with the chaotically screamed sounds of Aughts-era post-hardcore, a move that changed the way Rodriguez considered using his own developing voice.
“I was really into pop punk — Yellowcard was a big favorite of mine when I was younger — but my middle sister was actually the one who showed me They’re Only Chasing Safety by Underoath. That was one of the first screamy kind of post-hardcore bands I had heard, [and] that was my gateway into bands like the Used and harder music.”
He continues: “I’m not sure I would be the same person or the same kind of musician without my sister showing me stuff like that. And it was just great to have somebody to look up to.”
As Dayseeker prepare to launch their upcoming North American “Pale Moonlight” tour — and team with Revolver for a limited-edition 12″ vinyl pressing of the single, featuring an etched B-side and die-cut jacket — Rodriguez speaks on family connections, Creature’s gravest allusions, how he feels about AI bands brazenly lifting Dayseeker’s sound, and his kid’s perfect pitch.
It’s been almost a year since “Pale Moonlight” came out. How do you think the song was a difference-maker for Dayseeker?
Rory Rodriguez Our album before this one, Dark Sun, was very synth-pop-forward. I didn’t do a lot of screaming on that, and I think it was [because of] where I was at that time in my life. My dad had passed away after a long battle from cancer, and it was hard to go into the recording process when we were making that record and feel motivated to make high-energy, upbeat rock music. I’m very proud of it, but it felt like slow alt-rock after we’d finished it.
I’ve had some time to process what had happened with my father. “Pale Moonlight” was actually the first song that we started working on for the record, and we went into it [thinking] we should try something darker, [and] maybe not feel too scared to lean into the metal roots that we have as a band.
I think it’s cool seeing our peers in bands like Sleep Token, Bad Omens and Spiritbox [doing] a lot of cool genre-blending, and I feel like people are receptive to mixing different things, because “Pale Moonlight” is very eerie trap beat and weird whispered vocals, and then it hits into the chorus and builds from there. It felt like a strong single, a catchy song to start things off with. It’s the song we open our set with now, and it seems to go over really, really well.
We had this song called “Sleeptalk,” and it was the song for our band for a very long time, but I feel like “Pale Moonlight” has overtaken that song.
You mentioned the sonic blend, but the lyrics in the chorus — “Dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight” — might be mixing in a reference to something Jack Nicholson’s Joker says in Batman ’89. What’s the connection, there, if any?
I definitely watched that movie when I was a kid, but, no, they’re not related at all. I also read a bunch of comments, [and] because in the music video I wear this funny-looking mask, this guy was like, “It’s Bane from Batman, it’s all connected!” And I was like, “No, it’s coincidental.”
I have a side project called Hurtwave, and we have this song called “Bleach” where I have a lyric [based on] this phrase that I had found about dancing in the pale moonlight. In my head, it’s like you’re on the edge of a building and you’re dancing along it. It’s a very dimly-lit night. The moonlight is not super bright. At its core, I think the metaphor shows a lack of consideration for yourself, and you’re just gonna dance with the devil on an edge of the building. You might fall off. You could die.
Metaphorically speaking, you [can] find yourself intertwined in [a] toxic relationship. That’s what the song was about, at the end of the day. It can be applied to any kind of vice you have — alcoholism, drugs, gambling, sex — where you might feel like there’s a toxicity [in] your life, [yet] the draw to continue to engage in it is too strong. You can’t really resist it…
I liked that line, but I was definitely concerned that a lot of people would connect that to Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman. I’m not sure if that was implanted in my brain because I saw that movie when I was 6.
How does “Pale Moonlight” connect to the themes of darkness and nocturnality used throughout Creature in the Black Night?
It was a cool accident, in a weird way, because when me and our producer Dan Braunstein were trying to figure out the song… we added this creepy filter over my voice. We ended up leaning into that and reusing that vocal effect on several songs on the record.
Then we had artwork made for “Pale Moonlight,” and it was the Reaper figure that’s on the album cover, as well. The Reaper is a focal point on the record. Sonically, that character is embedded in the songs whenever you hear a weird, distorted, demonic-sounding talking voice going through the music… it felt like it had just kind of taken on its own life in this eerie and horror-themed sort of universe.
What interests you about the idea of the Reaper ?
My dad’s passing was my first real encounter with death that hit me in a very, very big way. Like, holy shit… this was a life-altering event. I don’t know if it just peaked through naturally in that way, but it did feel like there were a lot of metaphors and elements of death surrounding the entire record.
[But] a lot of the songs don’t actually have anything to do with death in a literal sense — “The Living Dead” is a good example. That’s about a numbness I had to emotions, and how I did therapy after my dad passed and realized that if something should be hitting me at a 9 out of a 10 on an emotional scale, it was hitting me at a three. I was intentionally pushing off really intense feelings, because I didn’t want to sit with my emotions.
So, it was about feeling like, “Yeah, I’m a person, and I’m walking and talking and living my life, but on the inside, I feel emotionally inept.” When we were writing that song, it was like, “Oh, cool, a zombie metaphor!”
Death is used as a metaphor a lot on the record — it’s all hidden meanings and symbolism for real-life relationships and the things I’ve gone through in the last couple years.
You recently polled fans about what their favorite lyric is on the new record. Did you get a clear sense of their consensus?
I think that’s the beauty of music, that I can write a song about something very specific to me… like, “Crawl Back to My Coffin” is about how I was single for a long time. You’re content in your isolation, and then you meet somebody who excites you, so you let your walls down. You let somebody in, and then something might go wrong between the two of you, and then you go back to being alone. That was another song where I liked the metaphor — I was dead in the grave in a coffin, and then this person brought me back to life, only to kill me again.
[With] lyrics like “Gave me roses when I died/Just to kill me one more time,” I’ve seen people be like, “This song, to me, speaks about drug addiction, and something I went through.” People can interpret things so differently. That’s not what I wrote the song about at all, but if you hear it in your own cool way, and it helps you, then that’s a beautiful thing.
The AI band Bleeding Verse has been imbibing Dayseeker’s music, reinterpreting and incorporating your vibe into their generated music. Is it weird to hear yourselves transmogrified into something that alien?
Yeah, 100%. It’s tough, because AI is not a direct copycat, but it was definitely shocking to hear that project for the first time.
Lucas Woodland from Holding Absence actually hit me up to tell me about it, because he said that the biography for that band specifically cited us and Holding Absence as their inspiration, or reference.
Where my head goes is that you literally go to an AI song generator and say, “Hey, spit me out a song with these lyrics, and make it sound as if Holding Absence and Dayseeker had a baby together.” And sure enough, I listened to it, and I was like, “Yeah, this is pretty close.”
I don’t know if it’s true, but I swear that somebody told me that this one guy behind Bleeding Verse is also behind seven or eight other AI bands. They just use other bands as a reference and find success off of it.
If I’m really thinking about our career, when we did Warped Tour in 2018, we had 80,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. It took us forever to build [a following]. Then we hit a million, and we were like, “Amazing!” Bleeding Verse grew to around a million monthly listeners in a fraction of the time [that it took Dayseeker]. It felt very insulting, and kind of discouraging.
It’s a weird future if we accept AI-generated bands as the norm… They’re piggybacking off of all the hard work that we’ve done. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of AI bands.
One thing to branch off from on that point, though, is that you’re connecting with people in-person on tour. Fans are gaining a real relationship with Dayseeker in a concert setting. You never know about the future, but an AI band can’t do things like that yet.
That point has come up with the guys in my band and people in our camp. Like, “They can’t do a concert.” But I don’t know… it freaks me out.
It would have to be some weird, dystopian future, [where] in 10 years Bleeding Verse is doing a show, and it’s all holographic people onstage. Like, what if AI concerts become a normalized thing? I would argue, though, that the voice in these AI bands is not real. It’d be a challenge for them to find success in the same way we do in a live setting.
It’s scary, though. I wouldn’t have ever guessed that AI bands would become a thing. I’m gonna cross my fingers that that’s never a real thing.
You guys are real-deal people, and you’ve got lives onstage and offstage. Your bassist, Ramone Valerio, had to bow out of your European tour with Motionless in White because he wanted to spend some time at home with his newborn child. You’ve got another baby on the way. You’ve made posts in the past about missing your family while you’re out on the road. How do you best maintain the balance between being in Dayseeker and being part of a family.
It’s tough. Ramone and I try and FaceTime and do phone calls as much as we can. And my daughter’s been to a lot of shows — she unironically likes our new record. “Crawl Back to My Coffin” is her favorite song, so she was freaking out when we were playing it.
I feel like she’s getting a little more aware of the space and time spent apart. It gets more challenging, for sure, the longer we do it. The “Pale Moonlight” tour is in May, and then we’re on a break for five months after that, so that’ll be nice, because I’ll be here for the birth of my daughter.
I know it’s a struggle. We’ve definitely joked around that we might get a bus for me, Ramone, our kids and our partners. I think we’re also stoked at the fact that we get to show our kids that you can find a career in something that is off the beaten path. You don’t need to settle into a 9-to-5 desk job.
Have you heard your daughter singing her favorite song — maybe continuing the musical lineage from your father through to you and now onto her?
She’s about five now, but even when she was two or three, I would hear her singing, and I’d be like, “Damn, you have pitch! You understand how to hit notes.”
My dad was a great singer, and if I’m lucky enough to have any shred of musical talent, I feel like it’s because of him. I’ve heard my sisters sing in passing — in a jokey way — and even they have a sense of pitch and tone. They just didn’t pursue it in the way that I did.
My dad never really shoved it down my throat that I had to pursue the exact same path as him. I found guitar and singing by myself in high school, and he was super excited when he realized I was [on] a similar path. I always appreciated that he let me do my own thing, and I feel like I’m the same way with my daughter. If she wants to sing, I’m happy to help her and try and teach her as much as I can. But if she wants to do something else, that’s totally fine.
So, I definitely hear her sing sometimes, and I’m like, “You’re pretty good for a five-year-old!” But we’ll see what it’s like in a couple years.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.
Dayseeker tour dates 2026:
5/1 Huntington, NY – The Paramount ^
5/2 Wallingford, CT – The Dome @ Oakdale ^
5/3 Sayreville, NJ – Starland Ballroom ^
5/5 Allentown, PA – Archer Music Hall ^
5/6 Buffalo, NY – Buffalo Riverworks ^
5/7 Grand Rapids, MI – 20 Monroe Live ^
5/9 Green Bay, WI – Epic Event Center ^
5/10 Des Moines, IA – Val Air Ballroom ^
5/12 Oklahoma City, OK – Diamond Ballroom ^
5/15 St. Louis, MO – The Pageant ^
5/16 Kansas City, MO – Grinders ^
5/19 Winnipeg, MB – Burton Cummings Theatre ^
5/20 Saskatoon, SK – Coors Event Theatre ^
5/22 Edmonton, AB – Midway Music Hall ^
5/23 Calgary, AB – MacEwan Hall ^
5/25 Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom ^
5/26 Spokane, WA – Knitting Factory ^
5/28 Wheatland, CA – Hard Rock Live ^
5/29 Pomona, CA – Fox Theater ^
5/30 San Diego, CA – SOMA ^
^ with Northlane, Wind Walkers, sace6