FAIM Calls It Quits, but First: One New Album and Two Colorado Shows

Punk and hardcore music are “for the youth," says FAIM lead singer Kat Lanzillo from her home in Washington state, while her cat scratches at a window behind her. Lanzillo and guitarist Chris Carraway, an attorney who is joining our call from California, where he’s busy working on a trial, are explaining why they are officially bringing the popular Denver-based band to an end in 2023 after six years.

It’s not necessarily breaking news: The announcement first came when word of the band's new record, Your Life and Nothing Else, was shared in January (the album dropped March 3). But Faim, which formed in 2016, when all the bandmembers lived in Denver, had a lengthier lifespan than anyone initially expected.

“When FAIM started, it wasn’t supposed to be what it became. It was supposed to be just an easy hobby where if we didn’t write a song in five minutes, we’d just scrap it and move on to the next thing. It was supposed to be super low-effort, and just get in there and go,” Carraway explains.

But a self-titled EP and 2020’s Hollow Hope built momentum that led to more touring, including a European run. Lanzillo adds that the idea was to finish FAIM after the last record cycle, especially since the band had been spending “all of our time off touring.” The pandemic delayed the retirement timeline — specifically, a final 2021 summer run — and ultimately resulted in the new material. The distance, especially with Lanzillo moving to Tacoma in 2018, hadn't made things any easier, either.

“If we all still lived in Denver, I think we would be fine with being a local band, but we’re not. As soon as we got a little bit of notoriety and touring, we were like, ‘Okay, let’s figure out how long we can sustainably do this,’” she says, adding that the band never wanted to “overstay our welcome.”

“We’ve actually been a band a lot longer than we originally planned," she continues. "It’s just being adults and knowing that we can’t just hop in a van and go on tour. It has to be really planned out, and it’s exhausting. Anybody who does that knows how exhausting it is.”

The band’s final Denver performance, a record-release show at Seventh Circle Music Collective, happens Friday, March 17, with Wide Man, Smear Campaign, Edith Pike and Eyes of Salt providing support. FAIM’s last Colorado show is Saturday, March 18, at Boulder’s Blue House, with Nighdrator, Asbestos, Sewerslide and Sqerm.

As melancholy as it may all sound, FAIM is departing on its own terms. Your Life and Nothing Else, which the group will play in its entirety at Seventh Circle, is sonic proof of that. At just under 23 minutes, the eight songs on the record are a mix of traditional hardcore punk, shoegaze, screamo, post-punk and crust, making it by far the band’s most varied offering to date. The writing process for such a swan song was “freeing,” Carraway says, in that FAIM didn't worry about checking off any genre-specific boxes.

“When we wrote Hollow Hope, I had a very strong conception of what I thought that record should sound like. Then COVID happened, and I forgot how to be in a band; I forgot how to write music,” he says, adding that when he and the band approached the album again, they allowed themselves the freedom to home in on whatever sound they resonated with, rather than what was expected of them. “It was like, ‘This is our last record, this is what we like, this is what feels natural to us, and this is what we’re connecting with.’ We just embraced it.”

The cover art, a painting full of color and adorned with a yellow lily, also reflects FAIM’s contrarian approach to hardcore. “I think this record shows the variety of music we appreciate, like and listen to. We weren’t trying to fit into a specific genre of hardcore, and I don’t think we ever have,” Lanzillo says. “I think we always had a little bit of independence in that. We’re like too hardcore for the punks, and we’re too punk for hardcore. We’re also maybe too alternative for everybody. I think that we just wrote music that we liked and that sonically sounded really good.”

In line with their politically and socially conscious band, the FAIM members have never had any issues with doing or saying what they want.

“We wrote this last record for us and what we wanted it to be,” Lanzillo adds. “We’re very aware that we don’t fit into the popular scene right now, and the music and image that’s part of that. That’s just not who we are or ever have been, so why not just go in the complete opposite direction?”

The two musicians aren’t really thinking much about post-FAIM plans. Carraway jokes that he just hopes he makes it back for the Seventh Circle show this weekend.

“The intention is that I want to be completely tapped when we hang it up this year,” he says.

FAIM, 6 p.m. Friday, March 17, Seventh Circle Music Collective, 2935 West Seventh Avenue. Tickets are $12, plus $5 membership, at the door; Saturday, March 18, Blue House, Boulder, instagram.co/thebluehouse.