Music as Emotional Architecture: A Q&A with Crochet

The Las Vegas skramz band Crochet has stayed consistent in their unique identity despite multiple changes in their rotation since they began. Now, over four years later, the band—made up of Abigail Villaruz (23), Zian Lin (25), Jake Adelmund (23), Gavin Skougard (23), and Zach Tarzi (21)—is rooted in pain and emotion. With two albums out, Crochet is now taking the time to book gigs and continue to rock out.

Crochet spoke with Isabella Appell about their transition from Las Vegas to New York, the evolution of skramz music, and how they integrate multiple voices into their music.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Take us back to the beginning—how did the four of you meet, and when did it click that you wanted to form Crochet together?

Crochet was already a band–it used to be Zach and three other people. I [Villaruz] joined first and then Jake in the summer of 2022.

There was an awkward middle period that had to collapse where Adelmund was on bass, someone else was on second vocals, and Gavin was the drummer. It was just awkward and didn’t really click completely. We worked out of our friend Roman’s house; he built a vocal booth by putting up two mattresses.

Eventually, I [Adelmund] went in for an example vocal and it sounded completely right. Lin joined the band when we moved to New York at the start of this year and became our actual bass player. Up until then, it was a rotating cast.

How has being a Las Vegas–based band shaped your sound, your approach, and the community around your music?

I [Adelmund] came to New York for the first time towards the end of 2023 and it was the first place where I didn’t have an overbearing, existential sense of being alone. New York has a way of democratizing belonging. You go outside in Vegas and it’s just like a suburban ghost town. You feel so deeply alone. I felt that sense of aloneness until New York. It only took me a year and a half to get there.

I consider the music to basically be about Vegas in a lot of ways. There’s a very specific Las Vegas sense of grief and dread and synonyms for Emo. It’s a really interesting place to try to make beautiful, meaningful, sincere music because it’s a place that’s fundamentally built on a skewing of vulnerability while also on a place of manipulation. Greed would be too generic of a word but it feels defiant to try to do something beautiful in Vegas. It feels fundamentally anti-beauty so making music within that ecosystem was really a special experience.

What genre do you consider your music to be? How has it evolved over the last few years?

It definitely is skrams, of all things that it can be categorized as. Eventually, the term “screamo” was distorted into representing things that were metal-centric and they kind of lost what this music had been about, by using it to describe music with an extremely macho heart. The term Skramz came along to denote music with screaming that had a soft, more “feminine” center to it.

Logistically, Vegas really rode for us in a massive way. Back then in the origin days of Crochet, like 2021/2022, it was small and contained and didn’t really mean much as far as mainstream or widespread interest.

Do you draw inspiration collectively, or do your individual experiences and perspectives each feed into Crochet’s sound in different ways?

We listen to so many different things and all feed into the music. We all align on the bands Nayru, OLTH, Hella, and Sun Kil Moon, though. We’ve worked really hard to not let our creative differences tear us apart. We’re at a point where we’re very kind to each other. The fact that Crochet still exists and has survived the process of making the Cherish album is pretty impressive.

What does a typical writing session look like—who usually sparks the initial idea, and how does it evolve collaboratively?

We never make music all in the same room. The way that Cherish happened was Zach spent not even a week on a total of 20 songs, then he went to Gavin, who quickly pulled together drum parts for the song structures that Zach’s guitar laid out. It was all so fast, and we recorded the instrumentals at Tyler Gutleben’s home studio only a few weeks later. Jake and I [Villaruz] did vocals over a slow, long period of time after. 

Zach’s intention initially was to have the whole process go by really fast–the writing, the recording, the release. He had this image of the record as something that would capture a very specific moment. Zach sent Skougard the songs in a Google Drive. We recorded the whole record in eight hours and he just grinded it out. We didn’t release it though for another year and a half because of so many personal and artistic unfoldings behind the scenes that made it such a slow process.

There’s a really distinct difference between our two records. The birth piece EP was an incredibly long gestation—it was over a year, like 1000 hours of mix, ridiculously planned and put together. Cherish was the polar opposite. Quoting Zach, every album should be a new band. You should really burn down as much of what was there before and have the spirit of your release be completely new.

Nobody got to see the approximately 1000 hours of work Tarzi put into producing and mixing the first record. The songs grew very organically because we started out in a garage like people should do. People these days, they start playing in studios and shit like that, it’s not good for you. Musically, it was much more plotted out.