SACRAMENTO — Orange County metalcore quartet Dayseeker didn’t plan to make a Halloween record; it just turned out that way. The band walked into a studio last year and it took this long to make Creature in the Black Night, its sixth album. After completing a handful of initial songs, guitarist Gino Sgambelluri, bassist Ramone Valerio, drummer Zac Mayfield and vocalist Rory Rodriguez regathered earlier this year and noticed a pattern developing.
“They definitely had this kind of spooky, eerie leaning kind of sound,” Rodriguez said recent at Aftershock Festival in Sacramento. “[We realized] we had to commit to this theme and this weird creepy talking voice effect; … the reaper figure on the front cover.”
While it’s not a concept album, there’s a cohesion that makes the album feel like more than a collection of songs.
The band’s breakout 2022 album, Dark Sun, was heavily influenced by the passing of Rodriguez’s father during the writing process.
“I think I used to assume that everyone had the best intentions in wanting to get to know me or the guys. You have to be careful because there’s a lot of weird people out there,” Rodriguez said. “Dark Sun was very on the nose being about my dad passing away and these songs are all written in more of a metaphorical sense. It’s not as spelled out for the listener.”
Heavy track “Bloodlust” takes on those with unsavory intentions with imagery of leeches and snakes. The list of song titles reveals a common thread with songs like “Crawl Back to My Coffin,” “Cemetery Blues” and “Nocturnal Remedy.” The horror-inspired theme helping to bring all the elements together.
“You let a lot of people in who want to get close and then you just have to be a little more guarded when your band starts hitting certain points in your career,” he said.
While the band is riding high now, Rodriguez points out that Dayseeker’s success was very much a slow burn. Touring heavily for more than a decade, Rodriguez thinks about past gigs with nearly empty rooms—all part of the band’s hard fought success. It’s finally paying dividends.
“Our rise was not meteoric [or] overnight,” he said. “It feels like we’ve slowly pulled our way out of the trenches.”
The band’s sound has also evolved over time; pushing heavier with thick guitar playing and guttural screams on one hand, and sleek grooves with infectious melodies not traditionally associated with hard rock on the other. Dayseeker is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down with traditional genre labels.
“That’s hopefully why our music feels accessible,” Rodriguez said. “It is rock and metal leaning, but at its core, all of these are songs that could be pop songs on the radio if you strip them down.”
Rodriguez’s voice versatile. From his aggressive screams to his textured melodies and bright falsetto, he’s taking on more and more. He points to Underoath, Thrice and Linkin Park as bands that helped to shape his vocal presence—as well as Vallejo’s H.E.R. and others from the pop and soul music world. The band’s recent cover of Evanescence ballad “My Immortal” has racked up millions of streams.
“You grow up and you’re just a cocktail of all the bands you listened to as a teenager,” he said.
Dayseeker is planning to spend much of its 2026 on the road, including a tour of the U.K. and Europe into early spring. Rodriguez promised a spring headlining run for fans in the United States. For him, his journey feels like it’s come full circle when he hears from fans that his music is affecting them the same way it changed him growing up.
“I had a rough time growing up in my household and all I really had was music,” he said. “All this emotional, melancholy music felt really comforting to me because I really identified with what [the artists] were saying.”
