T!lt.
“Castes,” the lead single from the New Haven-based T!lt’s new album, Death Do Us Part, starts with guitars weaving around each other, while drums and bass drop in to give the song a steady pulse. Mike Scialla’s plaintive vocal unspools a gentle song about heartbreak. “Was it something stuck inside my head?” he sings. “Was it something left unsaid?” Slide guitars swoop above and below like seagulls. It’s heartfelt and country-inflected, without entirely landing straight into country music.
It’s of a piece with Death Do Us Part, an album that starts from mainstream Americana and adds a restless sonic energy usually found in other genres. And it’s very different from T!lt’s previous album, Luminol, which is, in turn, different from everything that came before it. What unites it all is a sense of musical exploration and camaraderie. It’s the sound of four musicians figuring it out, and taking their audience along with them.
“We kind of do whatever we want,” said Scialla, who on vocals and guitar makes up T!lt alongside Luca Costantini on vocals and guitar, Hayden Carter on bass, and Connor Simpson on drums. By doing just that, T!lt has been packing shows and making a name for itself in New Haven and, more recently, beyond.
Scialla and Carter have been in bands together since high school in Guilford, but “the bands that we’d been in previously were just old-school rock bands,” Scialla said. Costantini was also a high-school acquaintance, and when Scialla got a hold of the music program Logic, he and Costantini started figuring out how to make music on it.
“Then COVID hit,” Scialla said. “We didn’t have a lot of live things to do, so we started doing electronic-style things.” That led to the group’s first album, Blacklit, an album full of samples, synths, and layered vocals, possessed of a certain restless spirit; the group was already brimming with musical ideas.
In 2021, as the shutdown began to be lifted and shows started to get organized again, “we realized what a hassle it is to play house shows with a rack” of electronic equipment, Scialla said. The band switched to playing the same songs, plus new material they were writing, on guitar, bass, and drums because it was easier.
But on a more fundamental level, “the idea of floating around different genres has been part of the T!lt experience,” Costantini said. The sounds of Blacklit, and the guitar-centric Luminol that followed in 2022, were following “what we were feeling at the time.”
“We get bored,” Scialla said.
“It only makes sense for us to continue moving through sounds,” Costantini said.
T!lt’s sonic diversity so far has been one of the band’s strengths, ensuring that the band’s growing number of fans don’t quite see the same show twice, that they hear a band evolving in front of them. At the same time, Carter pointed out, the move from recording to recording is “not so different that people can’t be into it. It’s still close enough to home that it has our flair to it.” Besides, he added, “a development of a sound is more of a writing style than an actual sound. You can put your sound on any genre and it will still sound like you.”
To Scialla, it says something about T!lt’s fans, too: “We’re lucky that the fan base we have respects us as artists first,” he said. “Some bands don’t.”
“Every time we’ve gone and started working on a project, we have an intention with it, we can predict what it’s gong to sound like, but every single time, it just kind of happens and we‘ve grown from that experience,” Costantini said.
On Blacklit, the songs were written and recorded, then performed when venues reopened. For Luminol, the band wrote the songs together, then played them at a slew of shows, some for as long as two years, before recording them. Death Do Us Part developed in its own way as well.
“We lived together when we wrote this record,” Scialla said; he and Costantini shared a room. “We just had acoustic guitars,” and they wrote everything on those two instruments. At the same time, they happened to be listening to a lot of bluegrass and acoustic Americana. It dovetailed with “the feeling of living on our own. We saved all of those songs, put out Luminol,” and “after that, we had all these songs left over that we really liked.” With the rest of the band, “we added the flesh after the skeleton.”
T!lt has just finished its latest regional tour, which closed out at Space Ballroom in Hamden; having finished, the band is heading straight into writing new material for the next recording project. In short, T!lt is going for it, trying to make it.
“We’ve been in that mindset for a while,” Costantini said. “The cement is rising around us and we just have to keep doing what we’re doing.” But the band is also “seeing a lot of growth and progress,” Carter said, as it makes connections with “people from other states and venues. That time that we’ve put into it is showing.” Scialla talked about the pleasantly freaky experience of seeing people he doesn’t know wearing T!lt t‑shirts. “We’re kind of beyond the point of no return,” he said.
At the same time, the band is staying true to its initial inspirations. The band’s name “is basically like a call to action for people who are in between the underground subculture and pop culture,” Scialla said. He described himself in high school as someone who was neither popular nor bullied. “I slipped under the cracks and was forgotten about,” Scialla said. “That came out in what I was making” when it came time to make music.
“It’s just a little off,” Costantini said.
But the band also feels a part of the young New Haven music scene from which it sprang. “I think New Haven is something to watch out for right now,” Scialla said. “It’s about damn time that New England has a period like Seattle and other places. People have a lot to say. There’s a lot going on.”
“Everyone wants to just be really good,” Carter said. “everyone takes inspiration from each other.”
“It’s a great place for experimentation,” Simpson agreed. But most of all, Costantini said, “it values authenticity.”
Learn more about T!lt through the band’s website and Instagram page.
