013: CRAB

Written and Edited by Eve Mikkelson, host of Brooklyn Buzz on WPIR      
Interview on 7/27/2026
[Names linked within text will be colored]

Crab is a New York band fueled by evolution, experimentation, and a firm belief that Magic Is Real. In this interview, Chris, Chuck, and Kasey take us inside the band’s DIY beginnings, their increasingly exhilarating live performances, and the NYC creative community that continues to shape their sound and identity. After unpacking their newest singles (which include Hair / Zephyr, Unlimited, and Twinkle / Shine), they share what’s ahead for Crab as they push the boundaries of music, art, and magic!

Chatting before the interview started, a detail was revealed:

Chris: I kind of unintentionally shaved my head. It was supposed to be a gimmick for a show, and there was no guard so I’m just totally bald now.

Chuck: There WAS a guard but it fell off! We all got to watch Chris process how bald he was in real time.

Chris: So I’m still dealing with my reflection or whenever I’m on camera, I’m a little freaked out. *laughs*


Now, for the real interview:

First of all, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Chris: I’m Chris. Here today we also have Chuck and Kasey, and we are 3/6 of the band Crab.

       

How would you describe your music for people who may not know you already?

Chuck: It’s ever evolving. Is that pretentious? *laughs* We get shoegaze a lot, and rock n’ roll. To me it’s three different song-writers all mashing together.

Chris: Now six! If I were to say one blurb, I would say we are the intersection of art-rock, indie-rock, and a kind of post-rock experimental thing. All of that. The internet age as a band.

Chuck: This is the much better answer. *laughs*

And how did you all meet each other?

Kasey: LOTS of different ways.

Chris: This will be a longer answer. Crab has three guitarists: Me, Paul, and Captain. We went to college together at the Savannah College of Art and Design and we were in local bands playing in different punk groups for a long time. Then Covid happened, and afterward we wanted to do a recording project together for disjointed songs we had written over Covid. In the process of recording that – which ended up becoming our first EP – we decided we wanted to make it a real live-act band but none of us wanted to play bass or drums. So, we recruited Chuck as the first added member of Crab, then we rotated through a lot of different drummers. The one we had for a long time has just left the band to pursue his PhD. Literally yesterday was his last endeavor with us. Our most recent edition is Kasey here! Kasey was the front woman for a cool band for a couple years, Bromine, and we played with them quite a lot. I always thought she was a great singer and we all had the inklings of a friendship back then. Recording the new singles, I asked if she wanted to sing and it just kept happening! Now she is a full member of Crab and plays the keyboard too. I think that is the full chronology, for the Crab wikipedia.

That’s all great! And… I had planned to ask this later but it is at the top of my mind. Your social media and website prominently mentions the phrase “Magic Is Real.” I wanna know all about that; is it a philosophy, a hint of something coming, or what?

Chris: Ooo, I’m curious what Kasey or Chuck think that mantra means.

Chuck: Music is magic. We are making real music, so magic is real. Spending time with these guys in this endeavor has been really special for me. I played music in high school as a band nerd, and then I started in ska bands. Just finding my way back into a music scene has been very magical.

Kasey: That’s lovely. I have never thought about this before. *laughs* To me there is beauty in the every day! Everything is magical and that’s amazing. Magic is real.

Chris: The concept is basically what they said! We have been playing together as a band for a while and I came to the realization that playing music, especially live, is literally like making magic out of thin air. Nothing exists, and then people get in an environment with amplifiers and guitar petals, and you create art out of thin air. I do other kinds of art in my life, but that’s the only kind of art form where literally, as a communal performance, you make magic out of nothing. I believe in magic because I do it all the time with my closest friends.


I completely agree. I’m so honored to be able to speak with bands I think are so cool and magical. I’m trying to keep my cool right now. *laughs*

Chris: *laughs* We are the least cool people.

Chuck: Yeah, band nerd over here.

Kasey: Hey, speak for yourself, man. *laughs*

Well, since you just talked about playing live: I’ve heard your live shows have a bit of a reputation for being intense and unpredictable. Super fun. What can someone expect if they’re going to see you live? Or is it really living in the moment?

Kasey: Can I answer this as a former Crab viewer? I think it’s been so cool to see it evolve. I mean, our shows are always so much fun and you know you’ll get to dance to loud music, and someone will run into the crowd. *laughs* But now, with the direction it is going, I feel like it is more of a performance. There are slower moments, big crazy moments, fun moments, dark and intense moments… It has been fun being in the band now and getting to help craft these performances. It is still just as good as when the show was hype 100% of the time, but it feels more like a full experience now.

Chuck: To Kasey’s point, she has helped us in that dimension in big ways. We naturally now have more range as a band because she is in it.

Chris: On top of her being an incredible artist and vocalist, having someone like Kasey has helped us go into what we originally set out to do with Crab. I and the other founders all come from a punk scene, even though Crab isn’t really punk music. When I was in school going to shows, it was the unpredictable, anything-can-happen feeling. I always appreciated the courage that the performers had to go to a certain place within themselves. For example, at Crab shows, a dude can shave his head.

Chuck: Yeah, the DIY ethos of it all. We just came off of our single-release for Hair and it was completely put on by us and our friends, Hands First. We sourced a soundguy we knew from NYU, Kasey knew a tattoo artist, and they made a killing that night.

Chris: I always felt like in New York, people are a little too cool. As someone who is from New York, I see it as this sort of gatekept thing, but I’ve always felt like New York is a place of community, creativity, and fun if you’re looking for it. I guess I’m just trying to put on the shows that I would want to see, where people don’t feel like they have to be a certain level of cool to be a part of it and join the community. I love it when people dance.



On that note, I solely focus on NYC bands. Being based in NYC, do you think the city has influenced your music or shaped the band’s identity beyond your live shows?

Chris: I will say, if you want to have a longer career in the local scene, you learn a lot really quickly. How people go about doing things, or how shows work. I think that’s very unique to NYC.

Chuck: It’s very crowded, so you have to navigate through that. Everyone is SUPER good too. It makes you feel like you want to be better.

Kasey: It is also an endless well of information. You can always meet someone new and hear a different, new song. It’s so cool, because you can’t get sick of anything.

Chris: Compared to other scenes I’ve seen, I would say I love the tight-knit vibes of other cities too, but being in NYC definitely influences our sound. My experiences are a part of NY and I’m sure that’s true for these two as well. We aren’t the Ramones or something, trying to preach New York. But our everyday lives become a part of the music.

Chuck: Our immediate community too. It’s becoming more of an art collective than just the band. All of our partners are involved in art with Crab too. Chris’s partner is a director and she just did our music video for Hair. My wife is really talented, she did the art design on it and makes piñatas for us and stuff.

Chris: Kasey is a really talented fashion designer and makes our merch for us. New York is community and that makes our music even better!

That reminds me, I wanted to point out that I love all your album art!

Kasey: Chris makes the designs, I just print them.

Chris: I’m a bit of an illustrator at times. I think I’ve drawn all the different art. I used to want to be an animator and love drawing, so I try to keep that alive. Anything I think is neat, I whip it on a Crab thing.

Let’s get deeper into your music. You’ve been releasing a lot of singles recently. Both Unlimited and Twinkle / Shine were created in collaboration with Stephen from Vitruvian Sound. How did that partnership come about?

Chris: We used to practice at a place called Red Note in Ridgewood, and he happens to operate in that same building. I think he heard us on Bandcamp and just cold emailed us. A lot of the time, you don’t respond to those kinds of things *laughs* but I saw he was in the same building as us and we hit it off quickly. We showed him Unlimited, which was recorded over a year ago now, but we liked the process of doing Unlimited with him and we wanted to keep these three singles aesthetically the same before we moved onto a new project. It’s been a great partnership, shout out to Stephen. Gear Daddy is what he likes to call himself. *laughs* He was very encouraging about the different explorations between the singles which was good for us. I think it informed what we are going to do next with those singles.


I was so excited to see you release some songs just a few days ago! Could you talk about those and how they fit into what you’re working on now?

Chris: Hair is the final single for awhile. I’d say it is my personal favorite of the three. Unlimited tends to be everybody’s favorite but Hair has a special place in my heart. Especially now with Kasey, I think it is one of the first songs where we achieved this sort of flowstate between vocalists and guitar layers, putting it together as a cohesive song. It is definitely our happiest song. I don’t know if we will stay that happy going forward. *laughs* It’s about struggle, strife, and problems in interpersonal relationships.

Chuck: So happy!

Chris: *laughs* Right, lyrically down but very up musically. The next song after, Zephyr, is a creative interlude because I always like it when bands have an intense song and then a moment to process what you just went through. It creates a whole experience and offers that to the listeners.

Chuck: To expand on Hair a bit; I think it was the easiest song to write. The writing process and recording process had our performance carry through easily.

Would everyone agree that Hair is their favorite?

Chuck: It’s my favorite too!

Kasey: Mine’s Unlimited. I always love a song that feels like a scene in a movie and I think Unlimited does that really well. Especially the breakdown at the end of the song is so emotional and intense. I love Paul’s guitar part there. It’s a cool, kind of heavy rock song, but it is still so pretty. I love it. It’s got one hell of a drop!

Chris: If I was thinking “What does Crab sound like?” I would probably pick that song. Hair just has a soft spot for me because I always wanted to write a late 2000s/early 2010s indie rock song and that captures that era for me. A Scott Pilgrim kind of song.

Kasey: I also feel like Unlimited was the first song where I was really adding something to the mix, so it holds a soft spot for me because of that.

Just to give Twinkle a little bit of love too, I love the music video that goes with it.

Chris: That was a crazy day.

Chuck: Filmed just in the other room in this apartment!

Chris: Shout out to Clay who was our model. He is very handsome and muscular. Twinkle is literally pure auditory anxiety, and I wanted to see if we could capture that in a music video. We got a bunch of security cameras and Chuck’s wife helped design this insane H.R. Giger kind of mask. It was a body horror thing, and I kind of like those movies. We should give Twinkle some more love! *laughs* It was the only one we didn’t do a big release show for because we thought three in a year is overkill, so we did a winter and a summer one. Twinkle was a quiet release with a small tour to Jersey and Boston. Sometimes it is forgotten by us because we had big releases for the others.

Chuck: We got Kasey to scream on that one which I’m always proud of.

Kasey: I had a megaphone! *laughs*



As we are winding down a bit: I’m so curious! What inspired your name?

Chris: Ohoho! I have the lamest answer so I’ll give you a couple answers. The first one is: Maybe it is an acronym for something. But, the real answer is: the founders of the band, if you’ve met us before, we are all very stubborn.

Chuck & Kasey: *laughs*

Chris: After we recorded All Swans Look Alike on our first EP we sat outside and were trying to come up with a band name. We wanted to make this project something totally new from what our college band was.

Kasey: What was your college band?

Chris: It was called Bruck Jonkson. I’m glad we didn’t stick with it. *laughs* We sat out back for literal hours and had to all come to an agreement. Immediately post-Covid, people’s mental states still weren’t as fortified as they are now, so we kept listing names. I’ll give you some… One was Tequila Sunrise, one was The The but I think that’s already a band, and another that was a leader was Music. I’m very glad we didn’t do that, it would have been hard to find us. *laughs*

Chuck: It’s giving Fun! vibes.

Chris: There was Yeah with a couple exclamation points… you can see how when we finally arrived at Crab we said “That one’s not so bad!”

*laughs*

Chris: I wanted it to be one word. If I were to name the band now, I might name it Magic Is Real, but I think Crab is easy to remember. There are probably other bands out there with that name, but we are the coolest. *laughs* And it can be an acronym! Can’t Read A Book.

*laughs*

Chris: Create Reality and Beauty. It can be anything you want.

Kasey: Woah!

Chris: Charmed and Really Badass.

Kasey: That’s Carb. *laughs*

Chris: Oh shit! Charmed Really and Badass.

Chuck: I feel like there was even talk about changing it early on and you were like “NO!”

Chris: We also have the best handle (@crab.www). And there’s no good sign of confidence in a band that changes their name a bunch. We made one EP, and said “We are Crab, and we are going to be Crab until this crashes and burns.” *laughs*

Kasey: I like the evolutionary concept that everything turns into crabs eventually.

Chris: That should probably be our real answer.

Kasey: The Rolling Stones answer.

Chuck: Once we are media trained.

Chris: We clearly are! Can’t you tell? That’ll be our real answer now.

To finish off, do you have any shows coming up in the future or anything people should be looking forward to?

Chuck: The train keeps moving! We have a pretty busy August and September.

Chris: We will be taking a couple weeks to let my hair grow out a little bit. *laughs* Then we will be hitting the road for Washington DC, August 22nd, where we will be playing at The Pocket. And that’s DC proper! Then the next day we will be in Philadelphia on the 23rd at Little Big Planet. Then, we are playing Rubulad [in NYC] on September 10th – that’s my birthday. We are playing with Hands First and Roshambo, and all three of our bands have a member born on September 10th, so we are throwing a birthday show! Other than that, there are some things on the horizon that haven’t been announced yet. And shout out if there are any drummers out there who think they can handle this! Hit us up! Right now we have some friends doing it but we are open to any application.

Chuck: Yes, we are looking for a full timer! Someone who really loves it and wants to make magic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.