Sicayda: Heavy gaze

Kevin Tipan is all out of faith. Crying through gasps and grit teeth over a wall of woozy guitar tremolo and drum bursts, his words say as much in the early lines of “K-Y-E.” 

“Felt cold and lonely,” the Sicayda guitarist lashes out. “Realizing this only goes as deep / As the skins perceived by you.”

In a description accompanying the track, the Brampton group — which also includes guitarist Marcos Villar and bassist Zachary Clarke — dedicates the song to fakes, pretenders, back stabbers, and shapeshifter snakes “that sell you out to those they worship to get ahead.” What’s even worse, the band goes on, those people are only seeking petty advances with their transgressions.

“They sell their soul to men, no gods.”

An abbreviation for “Kill Your Ego,” the hyperbolic slogan-ready conviction of the song’s title will be familiar to anyone who’s had a run in with underground music culture for the past half-century, while its content simultaneously challenges the legacy of the scene’s often professed ethics of horizontalism and mutual support.

For Tipan, that representation is routinely undermined by a culture of bootlicking dues enthusiasts and gatekeepers.

“You give divine devotion to these people that you perceive will give you things,” Tipan tells Long Winter over the phone on a lunch break. “[And conventional wisdom is] as long as you sacrifice the people below you, you’ll be in their favour.”

Pulling from influences as wide-ranging as My Bloody Valentine, Deftones, and Title Fight, Sicayda defines its sound as “heavy gaze,” but the phrase could just as well apply to the subject matter of its recent output. 

Working in a genre once derisively labeled for its players’ tendencies to glue their eyes to the disposable income on its pedalboards, the band’s early EP was indisputably immersed in the myopia of suburban teen angst (“It was a little bit one-dimensional,“ Tipan admits), but with successive releases, Sicayda’s recordings have become markedly concept-driven undertakings, reckoning with a larger world. 

Tipan’s learned a lot from looking around the room, and he doesn’t always like what he sees.

“I’m the most visible person of colour in the band,” Tipan says (he and Villar are Latino), so everyone else is treated a certain way, but for me it was always kind of strange.”

Gesturing toward a culture of tokenism and white supremacy, together with the 2022 companion track “K-Y-G” (“Kill Your God”), “K-Y-E” was written with the goal of addressing music industry racism. 

Understandably reticent to further alienate himself in the scene (“I don’t want to be pointing people out or naming people or situations directly”), Tipan avoids spelling out the problem too literally in his lyrics, instead encrypting his messaging in vocabularies of worship and defiance to put the onus for change and systemic decoding back on a scene that approaches that language with plenty of baggage.

That sly, confrontational leaning has also precipitated the band’s exploration of a heavier sound. “K-Y-E” and “K-Y-G” were early steps toward a concept album, but Tipan says the group scrapped the plan when it fell in with Brampton hardcore bands like Dear-God, DoFlame, and Mile End.

“We got heavily involved in the hardcore scene in the Greater Toronto Area,” Tipan explains. Sicayda even ventured out to Montreal and Ottawa, finding audiences in the hardcore scene in those scenes. “It’s been a huge influence on us. It’s probably the first time we’ve felt welcomed and actually a part of something.” 

Since then, he says, the band’s begun working toward a new album. 

“[‘K-Y-E’ and ‘K-Y-G’ will] probably be the last two songs that sound like that.”

The shoegaze influence is still there, Tipan maintains, but the band is leaning hard into the heavier influences.

“We really show our roots in metal and hardcore, going around, dancing and stuff like that” Tipan explains. “We like to be active onstage and it’s a lot more high powered than it seems even recording-wise. I think the recordings capture the essence, but our performances are a lot more high energy.”

“We play with shoegaze bands and everyone’s vibing, and then we come on and blast shit out with heavy riffs and huge sound, and everyone’s dancing, moshing and stuff. So sometimes we bring a lot of energy to a show that’s usually lowkey and vibing. I really like that a lot.”

Sicayda plays Long Winter on Friday, December 9, 2022 at the Parkdale Hall (1605 Queen St. W, Toronto). Tickets here.