All photo credit: Shanna Rogers
Genre(s): Pop punk, post-hardcore, hyper-rock
Location: Raleigh, NC
Links: Apple Music | Spotify | Instagram | Website
Keep up with your local music scene long enough, and you’ll start to notice specific names. ColorMeKrazy! is a textbook example: they play out often, share the musical community with fellow amazing acts, and spent most of 2024 pumping out new music. From early January through mid-September, the band released five singles that culminated in their debut EP, Paint The World, in November.
I saw the band was opening a show at The Pinhook here in Durham and figured I’d reach out. It didn’t take long to hear back from guitarist/in-house band manager Drew Hutchins and book some time for us all to gather. We found a fairly central Starbucks and met on a gross, rainy night. Fortunately, it didn’t overshadow the chat; the band is as sharp in their interview storytelling as they are on stage.
What do you do in the band and what have you been listening to lately?
Zach: I play drums and do audio engineering for our band. Not necessarily producing, but all of our mixing, mastering, and putting stuff together for our live sound. Recently I’ve been listening to Knuckle Puck and The Wonder Years. I pretty much listen to the same bands all the time.
Mia: He’s been listening to Sabrina Carpenter a lot as well.
Zach: My dog likes to listen to Sabrina Carpenter when he’s in the crate. Or Post Malone. Those are his two favorites.
Drew: Zach won’t mention that he’s also sitting on the couch right beside the crate.
Zach: I do like Sabrina Carpenter. I don’t care if that gets on the Internet.
Drew: I do a lot of the band management type stuff. I handle all of our booking and a lot of the bookkeeping type stuff. All the things nobody wants to do.
Mia: And you play guitar.
Drew: I do! And as for what I’ve been listening to, it’s a mix of bands like A Day to Remember, Yellowcard, Paramore, Jimmy Eat World. All my favorites from 20 plus years ago. And then a lot of more North Carolina-focused stuff. Bands like American Theory, , Dovecage. We’re playing with American Theory so I’m really getting up to speed on all their stuff.
Mia: I sing for the band and do a lot of the electronic production, like the beep boops and special effects. And I’ve been really enjoying the new nothing,nowhere. project that just dropped [Cult Classic]. He dropped one in December too that I’ve been listening to, but his newest one is more like a formal release. That’s been really good. I just got my favorite Movements album, Feel Something, on vinyl, so that’s been good too.
Tom: I play lead guitar. Lately, I’ve been getting into a little bit more breakcore type stuff, a little bit less of the traditional guitar, drums, bass, music band type thing. More electronic. I really fuck with Tokyo Pill and Sewerslvt. Machine Girl is a big one for me. Specifically, their first couple of albums are really interesting.
What was the catalyst that got you into music? Was it finding a band you were obsessed with or did it start by playing an instrument?
Zach: I started playing drums when I was three. My dad had a basement band with a bunch of guys that he worked with. They would just play covers on the weekends and I’d sit down there, listen to them, and blow my ears out. When I was 3 or 4, I would start to play drums with the drummer. He would sit me on his lap and I’d play hands while he played feet.
Since then, I’ve been taking lessons, listening to stuff, playing in bands in middle school and high school with neighborhood kids. Eventually I branched into audio engineering and started to learn how to mix and master.
Drew: I was a little bit of a later bloomer. When I was 15, I had a friend who got a bass guitar. I went over to his house and he told me to hold it and pluck one of the strings. Once I felt the rumble of the amplifier, I was like, “Yeah, I gotta have that,” so I went home and within a week I had my first bass guitar.
I did that for about a year and then picked up six string electric and went from there. That all happened around the same time that I found the scene of music that I’ve loved so much all these years. The Starting Line, Allister, and all those Drive-Thru bands; all easy stuff to play on guitar, which is very important to have when you’re starting out.
Tom: I grew up in a musical family. My dad plays any instrument you give him. Until I was about 10, his guitars and drum kit were furniture I had to avoid touching. But eventually I sat down with a guitar and, aside from getting shown some basics by my dad, it was all self-taught from there.
As far as finding a scene goes, I like the music that I listen to; I play the music I listen to. For a while there really was no scene where I was at. There were a lot of cover bands. It’s a vacation town, so not really a whole lot of room for original bands. I kept doing it and people started paying attention. Or not.
Mia: I’m similar to Zach in that my mom likes to always tell people that I’ve been singing since I was 4 years old. I also have a musical family: my great-grandmother, grandfather, and mom were all singers. Even my sister, when we were in school, she sang as well. Often for choir and stuff like that we would often do little bits together. But it really started to click for me that this is what I want to do with my life when I watched American Idol with my mom when I was 6 and I was like, “Whoa, Kelly Clarkson. I want to do that. I want to go on American Idol.”
My mom worked with me and eventually I got to have a bit more formal training with a great choir teacher in high school. That’s been my thing ever since. I want to be a singer.
How did you all go from having these individual moments to coming together as a band?
Mia: I moved here to have more opportunity to do music because I wasn’t doing it where I was at. I got on this website called BandMix – it looks like freaking MySpace; truly ancient as hell – and I contacted Tom at like 3 am when I was having insomnia one night. And to my surprise, within a few minutes, he answered me because he was working a night shift that night.
Tom: It was my lunch break or something. Just the perfect timing, really.
Mia: I was like, who is this freak answering me at this hour? We started talking, I liked the stuff Tom put online, and then he sent me a song and said to “write a vocal part over this and we’ll see how it goes.” So I did and he was like, “All right, you’re in,” and we started writing together. We connected with Drew the same way, he knew Zach, and the rest is history.
Zach: For a brief 6 month to a year period, Drew and I played in this super heavy metal band together with some mutual friends. He knew that Mia and Tom were looking for a drummer for their new project and I was interested. We all got together, started writing our first song, and it sort of clicked.
Drew: You’re not just a drummer though. I specifically came to you because of all the production knowledge you have. I knew what was going to have to go into a live show with this band and that you had all the experience with in-ears and the equipment that we were going to need to be able to pull off this production.
Mia: That’s why Drew’s so smart. That’s why he’s the brain!
Zach: I do dabble in a lot of gear knowledge just because I suffer from GAS (gear acquisition syndrome). I’m always spending my free time doing things that I don’t need. I’ve probably built like 40 different guitar pedal boards and I don’t even play guitar. I just build them, play with it for like three hours, and then sell it to somebody.
Our live sound is a bit complicated, so I basically built all of that from scratch for our sound and stuff.
Mia: We have this whole thing he set up that takes in all of our instruments, our vocals, everything. He’s able to pre-program how he wants the mix to sound when it comes out, plus sending our backtracks to the front and the rest of it to our in-ears. And he knows how it all works!
Zach: It’s a pretty standard in-ear monitoring rig, this stuff just takes time. Even bands and tours typically have somebody who does that for them, puts it together, and says plug this into this. I had to figure it all out for us. We don’t have a tech or anybody to do that, so I do that role for us and I enjoy it.
What was the timeframe from Mia connecting with Tom to bringing on Drew and Zach?
Mia: We started talking at the end of August and I think by the end of September we had a full band.
Zach: It wasn’t like they wrote songs for months before Drew and I showed up. If that was the case we’d be so far behind trying to catch up with releasing music.
Mia: For all the songs we put out in 2024, we were finishing them, having them mixed and mastered, then releasing and promoting them. And then doing it all over again for our entire first year as a band. We didn’t have finished products before we sent them out. We were just doing it as we went along and saying, “OK, I think this one’s a banger. Let’s finish this one.”
Zach: We were basically on an 8-week cycle of “mix, produce, release, repeat” for a while.
Mia: It was exhausting but it was awesome.
Some bands will do the “form, write in seclusion for a year, then unveil themselves” approach and others will go for the “consistently put out singles every 6-8 weeks or so” method. What was the latter experience like for each of you?
Mia: I just want to say that I think the reason why we worked at that breakneck speed is because 1) everybody was really excited to get started and 2) I’m impulsive and I was really like “This is the plan, let’s just do it! Let’s go!” I might have pushed a little bit but I think it was worth it.
Zach: We also wanted to play live shows but didn’t want to be that band without anything to show people. It’s all the lead up to the 30 minutes you spend on stage. Releasing music or doing promo and all the jobs isn’t necessarily always the most fun part but if you don’t have it it’s really hard to build momentum because all that is important for the full picture. It’s really hard to retain listeners or people that want to come to your shows if you play the same five songs and don’t have anywhere to go listen to it.
That was a big thing for us because we didn’t even play our first show until we had released our third song. We ended up playing almost a dozen shows last year. It was good for the people who saw us to have music to listen to, but it also helped get us shows.
What was the process of developing this sound? Did each of you bring in your own influences or was it taking I guess based on the foundation that Tom had and then adding on to that?
Tom: What I can tell you about the first song is that Mia and one of the previous members were having a conversation about how much they like the artist Brakence. I didn’t know who that was, so I looked him up and I’m like “I could probably write something like this.” That’s how “Losing My Head” came about; it was essentially just a Brakence rip-off. That started the snowball of “oh we can take this electronic stuff and mix it in with what is very natural for me to write and it makes sense.”
Mia: When I was learning to produce and make beats, I was learning from the emo rap community at first. I was making Lil Peep-type beats and stuff like that and then eventually that led me down into the hyper-pop route and I started making hyper-pop beats. The very first thing I learned to produce was future bass, which I feel leads itself into hyper-pop very well. I’ve always liked that almost bubble gummy electronic sound.
When I started working with Tom I was like “I know you want this to be a post-hardcore band but let me show you these cute little beats that I make.” Eventually he was like “Wait a second I kind of like this,” and then we started just mushing things together. He usually handles like the general structure of a song but it may start from a composition he’s made or if I’ve made a cool beat that he likes.
Recently we’ve started incorporating a lot of Drew’s ideas as well because he likes to write stuff and brings a different dimension than Tom. Tom likes to write fast things that are like punch you in the face type of thing but Drew’s a little more feelsy with it. I’ve been looking to him for more of those emotionally charged, slower jams or something that’s a little more subdued. It’s been fun to experiment with that.
How has your approach to writing songs as a band changed?
Tom: I think we’re pretty well in the groove. The biggest change is looking at Drew for ideas because for so long it was, “Hey guys, here’s this song.” And Mia would come in and she throws glitter on it, as I like to call it. That’s her electronic elements.
Drew: It’s the Mia Sparkle.
Mia: We finish the instrumental first, then I listen to it and try to come up with a melody, and then boom. Melody happens, the vocals happen. Sometimes I’ll add a couple other elements to accentuate what the vocal line is doing.
What has been your strategy for playing shows?
Drew: Our first show was at Kings in Raleigh on April 23, 2024. Right after we put out the EP [Paint The World] in November, we did a short run to Richmond and D.C. over a long weekend. Other than that it’s all been within North Carolina.
How have y’all translated the in-studio process to the live environment?
Zach: It’s worked pretty well. We’re not one of those bands that wants to backtrack everything, but we’re able to do it for a lot of elements that are important that none of us can play live. We just don’t have enough arms to play all the synths.
We take a lot of pride in there being no silence in our set. There are interludes, intro tracks, everything in between. When they’re tuning, Mia’s talking. Every night, our set is consistent and we hit the notes we set out to hit. A lot of people may say, “That sounds boring,” but it makes a big difference. When we’re able to practice that way, then it’s all muscle memory for us when we get on stage. We can focus on entertaining versus being so focused on playing it right.
Mia: That’s how you get those spontaneous moments. At Bond Brothers Eastside, we were done with the last song. They were telling us to get off the stage because it was the end. But the crowd was calling for an encore and we didn’t have another song to play. So I just got on the mic and started singing the Pokemon theme song.
I was able to do that because I wasn’t worried about everything else. I felt comfortable. I give Zach so much credit for why we feel comfortable. He’s been very adamant about how together our live show should be.
Do each of you have a favorite song to perform live?
Zach: My favorite song is always the newest. I can’t tell you what it is because it’s always different and unreleased.
Drew: I like “In My Arms”; it’s the most recent one we put out from the EP and is really powerful to play live. Like Mia said, I’m the feelsy one. I like that more emo stuff.
Tom: I’m with Zach on this one. I’m always hungry for the next thing. Not that I don’t enjoy playing the songs we’ve written so far. But nothing matches the excitement of getting to play a new song for the first time.
Mia: My favorite right now is one we’re still working on. There’s a lot of stuff we’re working on that are pure crowd pleasers. They’re big songs. But if I had to pick one from the EP, it would be “Ex-Friend”.
How do you put your setlists together?
Zach: Last year our set was mostly the same, but this year I’m hoping to move songs around the setlist more. We’re starting to get to the point where we have enough material that certain songs stick out. Maybe one is a great opener or closer, while another is better in the middle of the set. We do like to play songs that people can easily listen to on the internet as our closer. That’s the last thing people are going to remember so it’s nice for them to find it on their own after.
We also want to tailor some of our setlists towards the city we’re in and the bands we’re playing with as well, which is something we weren’t really able to do. We’re prepping for this show in Charlotte where we’re playing with a lot of heavier bands. A lot of our newer songs are a little bit heavier, so we’re going to play more of the unreleased stuff than we normally would.
Since you have these unreleased songs, are you planning to work towards another EP/album in the near future?
Drew: Our goal is singles right now.
Tom: Probably not as many as we did last year, since that was us establishing the band and giving people music to listen to.
Mia: We want to keep telling people about the EP and show them some solid singles that supplement that.
Zach: It’s simpler for people to think in bite-sized pieces. I feel like in our music culture today, albums don’t do as well. It’s hard to put together an album and then be bummed out that half the songs on it don’t really get the spotlight they deserve. Most of the time people don’t have the attention span to go listen to it all in full.
For us, it’s easier to do good promo when you’re focused on one song as opposed to trying to do that ten times simultaneously. We do all our production in-house and have full-time jobs. We’ll tinker with a mix until the last minute sometimes.
Mia: I’ve been adamant about the fact that I want to keep making music videos. I create the storyboards and concepts for them, we figure out where we’re going to film it, [my partner] films it, and I edit it together based on what I thought I wanted to make. That is a whole process in and of itself, even just trying to figure out when everyone has time to shoot. Part of showing the world what these songs mean to all of us is creating that visual component that you can associate with it so that it stays with you.
Drew: Even though we’re not putting out a new EP, we do have the entire year mapped out. We’re planning five singles and three music videos.
Who are your favorite local or North Carolina-specific bands?
Drew: American Theory is my favorite. We’re opening for them next week and I’m really excited about it. We played with Lowborn recently and they’re next-level good.
Tom: Rosary’s new EP [ROSARY IS THE NEXT BIG THING] is amazing.
Drew: Shoutout to Dovecage from Charlotte and Weymouth out of Sanford. I also love FoundiT, Social Insecurity, blankstate., and Leaving for Arizona.
Mia: Moving Boxes and Fifth Floor deserve so much love.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Leave a Reply