The Mysterious Multiverse of Boulder Band No Signal

Riley Schmelzer admits to receiving some type of signals while making music. But he’s not totally sure where they’re coming from.

The 21-year-old Boulder vocalist, keys player and guitarist played his first notes at age seven, but didn’t get serious about it until he was a teenager. Then, at fourteen, he was struck with a bolt of out-of-nowhere inspiration that would lay the foundation for what would eventually become his band, No Signal.

“I started getting really, really in touch with my creative self,” he explains of that time. “It was then that all of the ideas came to me. Literally, in one night, everything came to me all at once.

“It was incredibly overwhelming,” Schmelzer continues from his home studio. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is weird. All right, this is what I’m doing. This is what I have to do. I want to.’”

The name No Signal is a bit ironic in that way, he admits, but the moniker appeared to him during a walkabout along Pearl Street and just made sense.

“I was walking on Pearl Street, and I saw one of these display signs and it was broken, and it just said ‘No Signal’ on it,” he explains. “I ended up going with that because it fits with the concepts and the ideas so well.”

No Signal speaks more to Schmelzer’s perspective on what’s happening around him and how “a lot of people seem disconnected from things, the world itself, from themselves, from their spiritual selves,” he adds.
With the vision and name in place, Schmelzer officially began releasing music in 2018 and eventually brought on bassist Jake DeMarco, 22, and drummer Nic Kubes, 22, to round out the trio. From singles to EPs to albums, No Signal alternates writing between two universes — the albums in one and the EPs in another. It’s all part of the vision Schmelzer had seven years ago.

“It was on that day when I was fourteen that I wrote the concept of every single album that I plan on releasing and the music videos and what’s going to happen in between them,” he says.

A steady mix of alternative and indie rock, No Signal released the record Distorted Reality last year, and it's the group’s longest offering to date. Again, it’s a piece of No Signal’s greater plan.

“Distorted Reality is another one of the concepts that I came up with that one night everything just showed up — even the name, the number of tracks and the length,” Schmelzer shares.

The sixteen tracks are all about the world’s “darkness,” he adds, and how he believes “human reality seems distorted beyond repair.”

“It’s a reflection on all of our egos and the layers that surround us and keep us from a more pure existence,” Schmelzer explains. “You can think about it loosely, the darkness that’s so akin to human existence, what we’re doing on Earth. It’s pollution, war, the negative things going on with the government, self-darkness.”

Somber songs “P S D” and “Euclidean Sunrise” speak directly to those themes, while previously released single “Jane” is a heavier tome featuring Schmelzer’s screams that hits like an angry love song.

No Signal will perform Distorted Reality on Friday, July 19, at the Mercury Cafe. Elektric Animals and Vatican Vamps are also on the bill.

As merely a messenger for the muse, Schmelzer is being genuinely honest when he says he’s not quite sure how to break down the process behind the creation.

“I feel less like an artist and more like a messenger. I don’t know where it’s coming from,” Schmelzer admits. “No Signal is the entity, and we’re the spokespeople for it.”

“It’s not like I sat down and brainstormed it. It just showed up. That makes me sound kind of like a freak, but I’m okay with that,” he continues. “I think now it’s just a matter of getting out what had come into my head at that time.”

The closest thing he can relate it to is the “mind of a Daoist” and finding a space in “the middle of my logic and intuition at all times so I can get both perspectives.”

But it is still Schmelzer, DeMarco and Kubes who are tasked with bringing these ideas to life through their amps, and there couldn’t be a more “ideal bond” between the three, as Schmelzer sees it.

“We didn’t know it would be like that, but it worked,” he says.

He laughs at how he connected with DeMarco in 2021 after seeing him perform at a local School of Rock showcase.

“I handed him my card, which was just my information on a napkin. I didn’t say a word. I just handed it to him,” Schmelzer recalls, adding that the two eventually messaged through Instagram and met up before DeMarco joined him and Kubes in the studio while they recorded “Jane.”

With new music coming out later this year, now the trio is firmly part of the No Signal multiverse and wherever that may take them moving forward.

“I’m just along for the ride,” Schmelzer concludes. “No Signal feels like something that’s out of my power.”

No Signal, 7 p.m. Friday, July 19, Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street. Tickets are $15-$20.