daysormay

When I sat down with daysormay, I did not want to start with the usual band origin story.

The beginning matters, of course. Aidan Andrews, Carson Bassett, and Nolan Bassett have known each other since they were kids. They first crossed paths through cross-country skiing, and music entered their lives around the same time. Instruments, friendship, and curiosity all arrived close together.

But what interested me most was what happens after that.

What happens when a band grows up with you? When the time is no longer wide open, when adulthood changes the rhythm of everyday life, and when making music together becomes something that needs more care and intention?

That idea kept surfacing throughout our conversation.

daysormay talked about how different the band feels now compared to when they were younger. There is less spare time. Writing, rehearsing, and staying creative have to be carved out more deliberately. The connection is still there, but the space around it has changed.

That shift also shows up in the music.

The more we talked, the more I heard a band trying to find clarity. Not by making the songs smaller, but by understanding what really needs to stay.

They spoke about moving away from getting lost in production and sound design, and toward a more concise version of themselves. Ableton has become part of their language as a band — a place to build ideas, warp sounds, and move between the computer and the instruments. But with that freedom comes the temptation to keep adding.

One of my favourite moments in the interview was when they talked about muting things, looking at what actually needs to be there, and stripping the song back.

That felt like the centre of this episode.

Underneath the production, daysormay keep returning to the core pieces: drums, bass, guitar, and voice. The live show has sharpened that instinct too. What once needed tracks to carry the sounds from the DAW has slowly become more physical — heavier, more direct, and more connected to the band playing together in the room.

Part of that heavier direction came from something they could actually hold: aluminum guitar and bass.

They talked about how those instruments changed the way they approached guitar and bass parts. Even clean, the pickups had a dirty, loud, aggressive character. Songs like “STREETFIGHT” and “DELETER” may not have happened the same way without them.

At one point, they described the current daysormay sound as “heavy pop music.”

Then came the line that stayed with me:

A band that knows how to use the computer.

I like that because it leaves the door open. It does not place them neatly in one lane. It suggests a band working between things — pop structure and distortion, software and live instruments, precision and noise.

But underneath the sound, this is also a conversation about trust.

When the three of them disagree, they do not describe it as fighting. They try ideas musically. They let the song reveal what works. That kind of trust is not something you can rush. It comes from years of shared rooms, unfinished ideas, and the quiet understanding that everyone is still listening.

Near the end, they talked about songs that still carry strong memories. “Ego” came up as something strange, exciting, and very much like them. “UV” brought back a more physical image: a hot house with no air conditioning, a dark room, and everyone sweating while writing in the summer.

That image stayed with me.

Because with daysormay, the story is not only about a band changing its sound. It is about a band learning how to recognize itself through each change.

The computer, the instruments, the room, the people in it.

And underneath it all: what actually needs to be there?

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