Cave In emerged from the Merrimack Valley north of Boston in the mid-1990s to become a prominent presence in New England’s D.I.Y. music scene, their blistering and emotive hardcore-inspired approach to metal finding a natural home at local shows in warehouses, basements, and community centers. They quickly went on to become a juggernaut on stages across the country and around the world. With their maturation, Cave In pushed boundaries to integrate a spacier, almost psychedelic, experimentation to their sound on Jupiter (Hydra Head Records, 2000), an album recently re-released by Relapse Records as a special 25th-anniversary edition. In the stream of commerce, the band stayed afloat as mainstays on Hydra Head Records, with a brief foray into major-label territory with Antenna (RCA, 2003) and a swing back to the anchor found in classic Metallica and Iron Maiden riffs on their seventh, and most recent, full-length Heavy Pendulum (Relapse Records, 2022). Over a six-month period in late 2024 and early 2025, vocalist and guitarist Stephen Brodsky, dedicated regular time to an artist residency at Myrtle designed to inspire new work. During this time, Brodsky shared acoustic covers of influential bands like 108, Lifetime, Snapcase (with whom Cave In played at Lupo’s in Providence in 2000), Still Life, and Unbroken — and the folk music of Leo Kottke for good measure — while also playing a monthly show.
In the lead-up to Cave In’s March 27 concert with Glacier at Myrtle, Motif’s Sean Carlson interviewed Brodsky, traversing the band’s history, influences, and other musical projects across three decades.
Sean Carlson (Motif): The intensity and technicality and emotion of Cave In’s early metal has stayed with you and yet evolved dramatically over the past 30 years. How do you see the arc of the band?
Stephen Brodsky: When we started in the mid-’90s, we were just young teenagers excited to fully immerse ourselves in the most thriving music scene happening around us. It wasn’t enough to simply go to the shows. We wanted to play an active role, and our vehicle became Cave In. I think we realized eventually that being in a band wasn’t necessarily about the sound of the music, but rather the intent of it. And I’d like to think we’ve carried that same feeling with us from one chapter to the next.
SC: One of the shows that must still cause fans’ mouths to water was when in 1998; you played with Coalesce, Converge, Dillinger Escape Plan, Neurosis, and Unsane at St. John’s Gym in Clinton, Mass. Festivals today would collapse over themselves to secure such a line-up, but this was a local show held in the gymnasium of a Catholic church. What, to you, made those years and relationships so special?
SB: Neurosis was still this untouchable entity at that time. Certainly no one in Cave In had ever spoken to those guys before, but they were the band that we all wanted to be. There was just nothing like it at the time, and the whole thing just felt legitimately scary. I used to get that feeling as a young kid walking into the horror section of a movie rental store. To my memory, everyone else on the bill felt like we had just won the lottery playing that show, and that was such a cool feeling to share. But a show like that didn’t just appear out of the blue. There were a good five years or so of everyone involved playing and setting up shows of various sizes, putting out records and zines, just making things happen. It’s fair to say the Neurosis show was a culmination of all that groundwork being laid by lots of driven individuals.
SC: You seem to have a voracious musical appetite and are certainly no stranger to experimentation, whether playing solo, or with Cave In, or with other projects like Kid Kilowatt, Mutoid Man, New Idea Society, and Old Man Gloom. How have you found yourself to be gravitating in these different directions?
SB: Music is something to be shared with friends, so these other bands and projects are usually just born out of various friendships and wanting to see what may come of them in a musical sense. As far as my solo work, that stuff keeps me connected to the earliest time of my musical life – being just 12 or 13 years old, alone in my room with a guitar, trying to figure out how to hear myself through it.
SC: What other forms of art have you seen as influences on your lyrics and songwriting?
SB: There’s always been a connection to visual art with music. When I was younger, I used to just lose myself with pens or colored pencils and scraps of paper, zoning out to cassettes or records spinning on the turntable. Poetry is a big one for writing lyrics. If I’m working on something and get hung up on a spot that’s feeling bland or lacking depth, I can usually count on Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath to get me seeing things in a new way. Maybe it’s something to do with them also having a New England connection. Some modern writing inspirations would be Melissa Brodeur, Sadie Dupuis, B.R. Yeager, and Sam Pink.
SC: Before your recent Myrtle residency, what memories stand out from playing Rhode Island?
SB: One of Cave In’s first shows outside of Massachusetts was in Rhode Island. I seem to remember the show being in a garage. This would’ve been 1996. That same year, I think, we played the Living Room in Providence with Grade, who came down from Canada. They had just put out their album And Such Is Progress, and we were way into it. One of our few Kid Kilowatt shows was in a Rhode Island basement opening for Regulator Watts, who were a huge influence, as were Hoover, the band they descended from.
SC: Tell us about your residency as a solo artist at Myrtle? How did it come together?
SB: Shortly after I’d released my first solo record in 1999, I got a package in the mail from a fan who felt inspired to share their home recordings, some cool 4-track stuff on a cassette with “Tommy Alien” handwritten on the label. Years later, that same Tommy played in Drug Rug, a band that got some attention around Boston. This is also the same Tommy who reached out about having me and Adam McGrath, who also does vocals and guitars in Cave In, play as a duo at his new venue. I’d heard that other artists were doing residencies at Myrtle, so I brought it up with Tommy, and he very generously offered me one. Pretty cool. And I probably still have that Tommy Alien tape kicking around somewhere.
SC: How have you found your music helpful in confronting or coping with life’s difficulties?
SB: The role of independent music is the same as always. The moment you write a piece of music, you’re an independent musician. It doesn’t matter who else hears it. It doesn’t matter if it gets recorded. Devices are optional. You don’t even need an instrument. You can make a beat on your lap with bare hands. You can write a lyric that means the world to you, or that makes no sense at all. Maybe it’s just random sounds coming out of your mouth. And you certainly don’t need a microphone to sing. So much sorrow in this life comes from feeling like we are not in control. Independent means you are in control. Independent music can happen anywhere, at any time, and it belongs to you. It’s really that simple. •
Cave In will be joined by Glacier at Myrtle, 134 Waterman Ave., East Providence on Thur, March 27. 7pm. 21+. $28.
(Cave In’s albums (top L to R): Beyond Hypothermia (Hydra Head Records, 1998), Until Your Heart Stops (Hydra Head Records, 1998), Jupiter (Hydra Head Records, 2000), Antenna (RCA, 2003), Perfect Pitch Black (Hydra Head Records, 2005), White Silence (Hydra Head Records, 2011), Final Transmission (Hydra Head Records, 2019), Heavy Pendulum (Relapse Records, 2022).)
