The title of DRAIN’s third album has been a mantra for the Santa Cruz hardcore band ever since they played a certain festival a few years ago. “They made this backdrop for the whole show that said, ‘California Is Your Enemy,’ so all the bands had go up there and play in front of it,” vocalist Sammy Ciaramitaro tells Apple Music. “But I was like, ‘DRAIN is the opposite. DRAIN is your friend.’” The sentiment fits perfectly with DRAIN’s infectious enthusiasm and feel-good California vibes, both of which seem to ooze from Ciaramitaro’s every pore. “When we play, it feels like I’m kind of hanging out and having a little party with people,” he says. “Maybe I don’t know them, but we’ve got enough common ground. And even now, as our band has been able to accomplish so many things, we still hold on to the fact that we’re friends that are in a band. We’re not that far apart from your friends that are just playing down the street.” After the success of their 2023 album LIVING PROOF, DRAIN made the leap to full-time band. On …IS YOUR FRIEND, they incorporate even more of guitarist Cody Chavez’s heavy metal influences while Ciaramitaro holds it down on bass and Tim Flegal handles drums. “Cody lives and breathes Dokken, thrash metal, and hair metal,” the singer says. “At one point, Tim and I didn’t want to go too far in that direction, but on this album, we really thought about ‘how can we throw all of our stuff in a blender and have it not get lost?’ But we realize there’s a fine line. Hopefully the hardcore kids that know us will enjoy this, and we can bring in some of the metal guys, too.” Below, he comments on each track. “Stealing Happiness from Tomorrow” “We felt this would make a great opener because it starts with one instrument at a time, and when those guitars come in, dude, it’s just these huge chords with the whammy, and I love it. It’s got some New York hardcore in it, with a big mosh outro. Lyrically, I got married between this record and the last one, and I wrote these lyrics shortly after the wedding. I love in hip-hop songs when they’ll take half a line from another song as like a nod or paying homage. On this song, I took a couple lyrics from the Daniel Johnston song ‘True Love Will Find You in the End,’ which was our first dance at the wedding, and reworked them a bit.” “Living in a Memory” “I wrote this one about how I’ll run into people I knew from way back, people I used to party with. I think sometimes they’ll look back fondly at that part of life for themselves, but when I look back at that part of my life, they’re not my proudest or happiest moments. I’ve written about being straight edge before, but this isn’t really a straight edge song because you can apply it to just about anything. I can acknowledge fun times and fun memories, but I never wish I was back there still doing that.” “Scared of Everything and Nothing” “I wrote this one on my honeymoon in Jamaica. We just got off this huge tour, the biggest we had ever done, and a month later I got married. I was thinking about how I have everything I’ve ever wanted in life, so what’s next? Where do you go when you finally have everything you want? It’s really cool, but it’s also kind of a scary thing. In a movie, there’s the problem and they beat it and then the movie’s over. But what happens next? You make these goals and you check them off, and then you’re just done? Is it over? No, you make another goal, and you keep chasing it.” “Nothing but Love” “We’re very fortunate—we don’t really have many haters. But that saying ‘more money, more problems’ is a real thing, dude. The better you’re doing, the more people there are out there who don’t like it, and it’s not even because they necessarily dislike you. But they take success personally or something. It’s a jealousy thing, and it sucks. But instead of ‘fuck you if you don’t like me,’ it’s ‘I love you, man. There’s room for all of us to succeed and excel.’” “Can’t Be Bothered” “We all play a lot of instruments, so our drummer, Tim, came up with this song on guitar. I heard one of our British homies say, ‘I can’t be bothered today.’ Like when it’s a really nice day, I can’t be bothered to do some of the shit I’m supposed to do, like emails or phone calls or any kind of paperwork. I don’t want to do anything except what I want to do, and most of the time that involves me being outside. I absolutely love where I live in Santa Cruz, and in the song, I name-drop a lot of the places I like to hang out, kinda like what Sublime did on ‘Paddle Out.’” “Loudest in the Room” “The beginning starts with these wild animals, but it’s actually just all of our little dogs. We recorded them barking and kind of fucked their voices up to make them sound crazy. Guitar-wise, the opening riff is one of my favorites on the whole record. We don’t ever get political, really, but the lyrics are my commentary on some aspects of the world. I feel like sometimes the loudest people, the ones who preach this or that, end up being the worst people. The person that’s the first to jump on anybody and bring them to the witch trial, they’re always the loudest. They’re overcompensating for having a lack of rational thought.” “Nights Like These” “It’s got a nasty East Coast kind of groove on top of fucking pulverizing guitar riffing. I wrote a good amount of the lyrics while we were on tour and feeling lucky that we get to do what we do. I get to spend time with some of my closest friends, and we get to play music and spread our wings a bit. And we get to share that feeling with new people and watch them have fun every night. It’s really fulfilling.” “Who’s Having Fun?” “I think that everybody thought that this was what the whole record was going to sound like. I love this song, but we only wrote one because that’s all we wanted to do. The guitar gets to open up and kind of tap into some heavy metal shred moments with a fuck-ton of pinches on this one. I feel like we dipped our toe into this world when we did the Descendents cover on the last record, and while some people maybe thought we were going to ditch our sound for this, we feel like we just unlocked a new door.” “Darkest Days” “This is one of the first songs where I needed help trying to figure out cadences and stuff. When the music was done, it was just me and the producer in the studio, and he was laying on the floor, and we were just kind of freestyling and trying to figure out a cool little flow. We just kind of let it happen, and I ended up writing about the yin and yang of life. If you’ve never experienced really dark and tough moments in life, you might not appreciate the other end of it. People who come from a more fortunate background sometimes don’t appreciate what they have because they’ve never experienced the other side.” “Until Next Time...” “This started off as a guitar riff that was really heavy-metal-sounding, and I wasn’t sure how to make it work. But then we wrote this dope, kind of groovy Madball-type chorus and it got really fun. I didn’t have lyrics for it until we got into the studio, and it became kind of like breaking the fourth wall. I was thinking of the end of an old TV show, where it’s like, ‘OK, signing off here. Until next time!’ It’s almost kind of like parting advice, so we all contributed. In one verse, we paid homage to ‘We’re Coming Back’ by Cock Sparrer, which has a lyric that goes, ‘Remember, you’ve got a friend. You’ll never walk alone again.’ That’s a song I’d want playing if I was going into battle.”