In Conversation: Ryan Savitski of One Step Closer
On the eve of a major album release, Ryan Savitski looks towards the future of his band with excitement. But he'll also be the first to admit: Excitement can be fear through the lens of courage.
Even after all this time, I still feel like one of the most profound moments in Anti-Matter history is that moment in 1994 when Mike Judge tells me that he’s 27 years old and I say, “Wow, that’s a pretty long time to be doing this thing.” To which he responds, “Yeah, eleven years, man,” with all the resignation of a senior citizen. I was 20 years old at the time. That entire exchange was 30 years ago. Mike and I are still doing the same things we were doing back then, playing in hardcore bands and making a zine. And it no longer feels like forever ago. Time is funny like that.
I thought about that exchange the more my conversation with One Step Closer’s Ryan Savitski developed, and “develop” is really a good word for it: I love the way this talk slowly unfolds into the two of us sharing things about our lives in a way that neither of us had planned. Ryan is 24, and just beginning to survey the potential outcomes of the decision he made to commit himself fully to his band. But much to my surprise, he’s thinking about these things through a long-term lens—a lens that wasn’t accessible to Mike and me when we both considered being 27 years old to be some kind of literal end of the road. One Step Closer, of course, are very much at the beginning of what appears to be a bright future. The kind of future that was much harder for us to realize when hardcore was still a relatively new creation. As Ryan tells me, though, there are still fears associated with pursuing this kind of life. But the idea of a life without struggle? “I don’t think that’s a real thing,” he says.
Pat Flynn wrote an essay to go with the release of your last album, and you once described the last sentence he wrote as something that would be close to a mission statement for the band. I wanted to revisit that sentence now, a couple of years later. Pat wrote, “One Step Closer is a source and force of seeking the freedom to be as you are and dream to be.” Can you take me back to a place when young Ryan was growing up, where you felt like some aspect of yourself was being suppressed in some way?
RYAN: I mean, I felt really disconnected from a lot of the kids I knew growing up. I felt like an outcast. I felt like I couldn’t really express myself to my peers and to the people around me, and it got to the point where I actually stopped going to school. I started doing cyber-school for a year and a half because I hated it there so much. And then finally, I feel like I found my way when I met my friend Sean, who was like two or three years older than me. That’s when I found my group of people. They were into skateboarding, but they were also into hardcore, and they kind of took me by the hand and showed me this amazing world.
Where do you think you fundamentally differed from those other kids?
RYAN: Being super against drugs and alcohol and smoking cigarettes, for one thing. My brother struggled with addiction when I was younger—and he’s doing amazing now—but he struggled, and I saw the way it impacted my family. It was such a serious time period. He had gone to rehab, and I was struggling because I could see how it was negatively affecting everybody. But then I’m back in school saying, “No, I don’t want to do that shit,” and people were making fun of me for that.
Did you grow up in Pringle?
RYAN: Yeah.
I just read that Pringle has a population of 900, and that kind of blew my mind.
RYAN: It’s probably six blocks wide and maybe two or three blocks up. That’s it [laughs]. And it’s mainly older people for the most part.
Did growing up in a town that small feel intrusive?
RYAN: It’s definitely one of those places where everybody knows everyone and you do one bad thing and everybody hears about it. There’s not so much room to mess up, and if you do mess up, you become “the bad kid.” It really is that kind of place. Growing up here and experiencing the small-town thing was great once I found those people who helped me through my teenage years, but the downside of that small-town energy is that there’s just not much happening here. But also, I feel like that’s why there’s such a thriving music scene here. Because there’s really nothing else to do than just learn an instrument and make a band.
When I think about a song like “Pringle Street,” it feels like it’s in the tradition of songs like “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” but then there’s also this sense of resignation to it. It’s like, “But I’m stuck here.”
RYAN: That’s kind of the whole vibe of that entire record. We named it This Place You Know. Everybody writes about their hometown and wanting to escape it and experience other things. But for us, it’s like, this is the place that we know. We knew from the beginning that it was such a small town; we felt trapped even as children, feeling like there isn’t any opportunity here. But at the same time, [we] love this place, you know what I mean?
I think I used touring as a sense of escape for a long time, to just kind of feel alive in a way, because I do think that some days here, it’s hard to get yourself motivated. But touring has also made me appreciate Pringle more. We just did this tour with Anxious and Koyo, and I’m going to these places that I’ve been to a bunch of times, but nothing quite gives me the same vibe as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There hasn’t been a town or a city that I’ve gone through that really replicates what this place gives me. I’m super grateful that I’ve been able to tour the world, but it’s also really made me think, “Oh, you know, being home sounds nice right now.”
I think a lot of people think the history of Wilkes-Barre hardcore started with Title Fight, or maybe Posi Numbers Fest, but I remember playing there in the early ‘90s with Shelter. It’s always had a really healthy hardcore scene. Obviously, we come from different generations… You’re 24, right?
RYAN: Yeah.
Were you really conscious of that long history?
RYAN: At first I wasn’t. I was introduced to Title Fight when I was like ten years old from a friend’s older brother who was pretty active in the hardcore scene. That was in 2009. Two or three years later, once I met all the people I grew up skating with, they started showing me Cold World, Frostbite, and War Hungry, and all these legendary bands from our area. Before that, the only thing I really knew about the Wilkes-Barre or Scranton area in terms of music was, like, Breaking Benjamin and Motionless in White. But I went to my first show when I was twelve. I remember my parents were so mad because they had no idea where I was. And they’re calling me like, “You gotta come home now. We’re coming to pick you up” [laughs].
Who played?
RYAN: It was Title Fight, Bad Seed, and Cold World. It was a memorial show for a local photographer that they were friends with who passed away. Title Fight were on Warped Tour so they had to play under an alias—a fake name like Western Haikus or something like that. It was the best show I could have possibly gone to for my first one.
You spoke about your brother’s experience with addiction earlier, so I’m curious about how you perceived straight-edge at that young an age. It feels like younger straight-edge bands often express it as a binary choice: You’re either straight-edge or you’re one drink away from the gutter and you must be destroyed [laughs]. There’s no in-between. I imagine you had records like that in your collection.
RYAN: There’s definitely bands that I can think of where I’m like, they’re so straight-edge that it’s cool. No Tolerance, to me, is one of those bands. But it’s a personal connection thing, the way I connect to straight-edge. I don’t care what other people do. It doesn’t bother me if other people have a drink.
So how would you describe Last Straw? That was basically everyone in Anxious, right?
RYAN: Yes, it’s literally Anxious.
It’s really difficult for me to read into it in 2024 because I can’t imagine Grady [Allen, singer of Anxious] coming in and being like, “I got this song called ‘You Booze, You Lose!” It feels like there’s a wink in there somewhere. Or was it more, “We’re nineteen years old and we’re having fun”?
RYAN: I think it was just that Anxious was leaning far more into being adjacent to hardcore than being a straightforward hardcore band, which is awesome, but we just wanted to do a fast hardcore band that we could have fun with and maybe scratch that itch of what we’d been missing because we weren’t really writing those kinds of songs with Anxious anymore.
You have been very committed to repeatedly describing One Step Closer as “a straight-edge band from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” and yet if you have any songs that are actually about straight-edge, I haven’t been able to find one.
RYAN: The last song on This Place You Know, “As The City Sleeps,” was about addiction in general, but it’s not so much a straight-edge song. It’s more about people that we’ve seen who have either lost their lives to addiction or who just dove into that life to where we’re not so close anymore because of it. Our area has a really serious opioid problem.
But I’ve always tried to write based on what’s happening at that time in my life. I use writing lyrics as a mental escape, you know. It really helps me feel like I’m expressing myself freely without feeling judged. Straight-edge is such a big part of who I am, but it’s just my thing. I don’t feel like I have to constantly talk about it to be straight-edge, and I don’t feel like I have to bring it up in a song for us to still be a straight-edge band. So I just never wrote a straight-edge song. And I think it’s gotten to the point where I’m just never going to write one because, right now, I’m just so into writing about what’s going on in my life and how I’m feeling about different things that that’s just what I’m going to continue to do. I don’t think I have the same angst about [drugs and alcohol] that I had when I was a child. I’m not the type of person who would say “fuck you” if you’re drinking and doing drugs. So I don’t feel like I could genuinely make a song like that and feel like it represents the band because I don’t think anyone in the band feels that way. It would be disingenuous.
There can often be this dual quality to hardcore where it can be both the keys to freeing yourself and the potential to be another cage.
RYAN: Not long after we put out the first EP, we announced we were doing a small tour with Knuckle Punk, and some of our friends were like, “Do you really want to tour with a pop-punk band and not do hardcore shows? Are you sure you want to do that?” And it almost made me second guess everything because I started to wonder if other people were going to be thinking the exact same way, or thinking that we were ditching hardcore or that we didn’t give a shit about our scene. But I’m just trying to play music. That’s all I want to do. Especially at that point, all I wanted to do was play shows and travel and have fun with my friends. I felt really conflicted, but also restricted. I just thought, Are we going to be a hardcore band that has all these opportunities but doesn’t take them because we’re afraid of what people are going to say to us?
Eventually, as we started writing more, I always had that in the back of my head. I was always like, “Hardcore kids aren’t going to fuck with this. This is too much. We’ve got to tone it down. We’ve got to put a mosh part in here. We can’t be too melodic because it’s going to steer people away.” Or whatever. But after we put out the last LP, I was like, “I want to sing more”—and that was just it. I made the decision. I want to sing more. I want to yell a little less and just start diving into that. I want to try and not be restricted. I want to put all our influences on the table and just be a band and be 100 percent ourselves.
Which is basically what hardcore is to me.
RYAN: That is literally why this subculture exists. Because people like me got made fun of by other kids for the things that you like, and then you find your place—whether it’s the Wilkes-Barre hardcore scene or the New Jersey hardcore scene or the Boston scene or whatever—and you feel like you can really express yourself there. So why does it matter when bands sonically change? They’re just expressing themselves the way they want to. I mean, it’s not like we’re not hardcore kids. Even bands in the ‘90s were doing the same thing, exploring their sound and really changing up what they were originally doing.
We started this band because I wanted to do a more melodic band, something that was closer to Turning Point and Have Heart and stuff like that. Doing these other tours outside of hardcore, it just kind of makes sense now because we have elements that these other genres of music also have. And it’s also been really cool to meet these kids who have never heard us before come back to see us a year later, and they’re wearing a Pain of Truth shirt or something, because our band was a gateway into hardcore for them. Hopefully they’ll start bands and be the next generation of what this has been for so long.
I wanted to talk about this expansion a little bit more, but I wanted to preface this with a personal story: At some point in the 2000s, I started being approached by managers and publishers—and I don’t know where this came from—but I was being asked repeatedly whether or not I’d be interested in either writing for or with other artists. And at that time, it felt completely wrong to me. I thought it “wasn’t hardcore” because there was this sense that your band was your own sacred space, that there was some sort of purity to that. So that’s one way to think about it. But this was before “feature culture,” and the way we seem to really value collaboration a lot more so many years later. I’d see it more that way now—as a tool of growth and expanding your own vision of self. So when I started to read about your new record, and how you did writing sessions with Mat [Kerekes] from Citizen and Isaac [Hale] from Knocked Loose, I thought that was really interesting because I couldn’t think of another hardcore record that came out so openly with that story. Where did that idea come from?
RYAN: Well, first we heard that Mat was trying to get involved in doing some writing stuff. And at the time, we already had so many songs written for the record; it wasn’t like we really needed them to come in and write songs. But I was like, this could be interesting. It could be a good experience. We could learn a lot from him. He’s an incredible songwriter, he has so many projects, and he puts out so much music. He knows how to write a song. So we took three songs to him that were demoed out already, where we already had a good idea of how we wanted them to turn out. And we kind of gave him a little bit of everything just to see. We gave him a fast song, we gave him a more midtempo song, and we gave him a slow song. It was like, OK. Let’s see where takes these and what he excels at and just see how we work together. And honestly, it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. I feel like I’ve taken away so much from the way he approaches music and the way he thinks about music.
After we did it with [Mat], I just thought, you know, I think Isaac would be really, really good at this. I know he primarily writes heavy music, but he is one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and he’s someone we’ve known since 2018. And it was kind of the same vibe. We literally went and stayed at his house, we took a couple of songs and we wrote two songs on the spot with him, and it was just a really great experience. I feel like if we didn’t do that, the record would still be just as good as it is now. But because we did that, I think it made it even better.
Do you think you could work with someone in that capacity who didn’t have a background in hardcore?
RYAN: To be honest, I don’t know. I think it really helped having people that are from hardcore and who grew up going to hardcore shows because they know exactly who this band is. They know exactly what we’re trying to do. And I think it just helps you vibe with the person, you know what I mean? It just helps bridge the gap to really make something that you’re both connected to.
It feels like change is a recurring theme for One Step Closer.
RYAN: Yes.
You sort of prefaced this new record by saying you don’t feel like a kid anymore. What do you feel has thrust you into adulthood in a way that feels so marked for you now?
RYAN: I think everyone in the band is in the years of our lives where things are just constantly changing, new things are constantly happening. You know, I feel way different and more grown up as a person than I did even when I was 21, which was only three years ago. But this is such a building part of your life, and I can just really see how that does a number on people—how much it either grows people up or it makes people second guess their lives.
But I think what’s really put me into that adult mindset has really been touring so much. It’s like, I’ve got to take care of myself every day. I have to do everything myself and make sure that I’m on top of my schedule. Even though I’m surrounded by my friends, it’s really up to me to get all my own shit done. Touring made me feel very independent.
And yet, choosing the band life is also choosing a life of instability. There is a sort of “adult” instinct to move towards something more stable, but there’s nothing stable about this and I’ve been doing it forever [laughs].
RYAN: Yeah, I know. I’m saying it all the time: When am I going to have some stability in my life? When is everything going to be super normal? When won’t I have to worry about money? But I don’t think that’s a real thing. You’re always going to face some kind of issue that you have to deal with. This is part of that feeling that I’m not a kid anymore, because sometimes I really do want that stability. Sometimes I want, you know, an income and a normal life. But there’s this life that I’m living that I just love so much and that I can’t see myself giving up anytime soon. I’m sacrificing that stability for this.
I remember being your age and having those same questions about my own life, which happens at the moment you realize that you’re putting all your marbles into this one basket. Like, you quit Anxious because it was too much to do both bands. You put college on hold. You’re going out on this relentless tour schedule and putting all of your focus into this one thing. And that’s exciting stuff. But I also say that excitement is basically fear through the lens of courage, right?
RYAN: That’s a great way to put it.
So what are your fears about going this hard?
RYAN: When I quit Anxious, and when I put all my eggs in this basket, it was definitely empowering, but also very scary. At the time, our band was very, very much not together. That’s when members started to be like, “I think I want to leave.” We were very much all over the place, and it sucked. It felt like Anxious were so sound and so together, and I was putting everything into this band that I’m so passionate about because it’s my baby, so I had to make sure that I fucking whipped this shit into shape [laughs]. I just really want to see this through. I want to tour full-time. I want to write music all the time. And I want this to be my job if I can get there. The band isn’t quite living off this. We’re making the bare minimum to survive, really. I just want the stability of being able to come home from tour and feel comfortable enough to where I don’t feel like I’m penny-pinching. Or where I can take my girlfriend out to dinner and not worry about money. Just little things.
I’ve actually thought about how I don’t have any kind of retirement and how I want to start doing something to put money aside for that kind of thing—like, a 401(k) or a Roth IRA or something. But I don’t have anything like that. All I have is the money I make on tour. It’s scary because the older you get… How can I say this? There’s this pressure to be doing your “adulthood” job. My family is super supportive, but even now, I feel like they’re like, “OK, but when are you going to go on to the next step and be successful?” I don’t know! I have no idea! [laughs] Hopefully it happens, but maybe it never will. But at the end of the day, I know that if I never made this commitment, I would really regret it.
What’s funny is that I’m sure there will be people who read this and think, “What the hell is this kid talking about with a 401(k) or a Roth IRA? You’re 24 years old!” But I will tell you: I am 50 years old, and I never did that, and all I have for retirement is whatever I have in the bank. Most of the people I know in bands from my generation are in the same predicament. We all wish we had the foresight to do that. Because this life is the sort of thing where very few of us ever get to that place of going, “OK, I’m set.” You do have to start thinking about these things earlier, even if it sounds ridiculous. We have to start taking care of ourselves—and each other—at an earlier age.
RYAN: I’m just trying to learn from mistakes that maybe my parents made when they were younger. Like, my dad has had a 401(k) for a long time, but he didn’t start a Roth until a couple of years ago, you know? I see that and I don’t have a 401(k), and that’s like the easiest thing I could do, so why not start that now if I’m really going to go full-fledged into this? Either way, even if this doesn’t work out or if the band breaks up in three years, then I still have that and I can still continue with it, and in my later life, I will be happy that I did that.
I think it’s important to think about the future when you’re doing something like this. It’s like, you want to pursue your passion? Well, how can you make it last as long as possible? And how can you do this comfortably forever, hopefully? That’s what I’m trying to do. How can I do music for my entire life, or at least until I’m in my sixties, and be comfortable and still be able to support myself? Those thoughts do come through my head sometimes.
OK, I’m going to get a little weird here at the end.
RYAN: OK!
There’s a Zen story that I really love, and it goes something like this: A university professor comes to see a Zen master for some guidance. The teacher invites him in and offers the professor a cup of tea. The Zen master then puts the cup in front of the professor and takes the kettle and begins pouring the tea. And as he pours the tea, he just stares at the professor and lets the tea start to overflow. The professor objects, and he’s like, “What the hell! Stop!” [laughs]. And the Zen master says, “A mind that is already full cannot take in anything new.” The idea here is that your cup is already overflowing with opinions and preconceptions that keep you from learning anything new, so the only way through is by emptying your cup. The question, then, is this: What would you say is the hardest thing for you to empty from your cup in order to get to where you want to be? What is keeping you stuck?
RYAN: That’s a good question [laughs]. I’m trying to narrow it down a bit because there are multiple things I’d like to empty, for sure. But I think the thing that’s always held me back in life and in general is self-doubt. Not having the confidence to portray myself the way that I want to. I struggle with this especially with the band stuff because I don’t know how to gauge how people perceive the things I make. I can’t tell if people like it, I can’t tell if people hate it, I can’t tell if people love it. And the thing that’s in my head is that it’s just never going to be good enough. I’m never going to be good enough to be a musician or as good at my passion as other people. I struggle with comparing myself to other people and seeing how successful they are and being like, “Why can’t I be there? Why can’t I do that thing? And why can’t I get over this constant looming self-doubt that makes me feel like I’m not good enough to become that?” That’s definitely the one thing that I feel is really holding me back. And it’s gotten me to points where I get so down about the things that I do and the things that I create that I almost need to take time away from the band or take time away from other projects because I know that if I continue down this rabbit-hole of thought, I’m just going to throw it all in the gutter and be done.
At the same time, it takes a certain level of audacity to be able to walk on a stage and say, “Hey. Look at me.”
RYAN: Yeah. And I think that’s why some people say that I do carry myself confidently. But I feel like the only way I can continue to do my thing is if I get up on that stage and I put everything to the side, if I can escape my mind for a while and just be as confident as I could possibly be. Because this is the thing I love at the end of the day. I need to just do what I need to do. And it took a long time to get to this point. When we first started doing the band, I wouldn’t even face the crowd, really. I would have my back to the crowd, and then turn a little bit, and then turn to the side [laughs]. I was way too afraid to look out because I was afraid that people were going to judge me for what I was doing. If I could get rid of anything, it would be that. I would throw it away and never look back.
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I caught OSC in Detroit a while back and they're the real deal. Wish Ryan and the band all the success they deserve. ♥️
Interesting to see the behind the scenes of being in a hardcore band