Bryan Torres didn’t grow up on punk music. He grew up in a religious household in East Los Angeles where the radio stayed off. But somewhere between his father’s thirty-year wait for immigration papers and ICE knocking on his own front door, he found the one thing that made sense of all of it. With Death Lens’ most personal record yet, he’s determined to make sure the rest of the world hears it too.
Words by Felix Bartlett | April 21, 2026
Bryan Torres is back home in East Los Angeles, and the weather is behaving itself. That’s not something he’s been able to say for a while. The last three weeks have dragged him through a Michigan blizzard, a Texas windstorm, and a quick stop in a hundred-degree California just long enough to unpack and repack a bag. Today, East LA is crisp and bright.
“I haven’t been here in the last three weeks because I’ve been on tour,” he says. “We got stuck in Michigan, three days in a blizzard. That was pretty insane for someone who doesn’t see snow that much. Long windstorms down in Texas. I came home for three days, it was a hundred and something. Then I came back and it was fresh again. That’s just California.”
Asked how the California scene has shaped Death Lens as a band, Torres exhales.
“The California scene has drastically changed since the beginning. Back when I started, garage rock was the thing. As time progresses, you have to evolve with the sound. SoCal punk has come from here. You’ve got great garage rock from velocities, stuff like that. And now you have that whole post-punk hardcore thing happening. It’s a mixture of everything. I call it the bipolar state of music because you don’t know what’s next.”
There is a community there, he says, but it’s one he’s determined not to get trapped inside.
“It’s a bubble. If you’re in that bubble, the locals are always going to come and see you. You’ve got to burst that bubble to be able to expand yourself out of SoCal. It’s cool to be a local hero, but I want more.”
“I love SoCal shows, I do,” he continues. “But if you don’t have that fear of what am I going to do in Salt Lake City, I don’t know who’s going to show up, then you never grow. I try to separate myself from the typical bands out here. I want people on the East Coast to be like, oh yeah, they’re a band. Not just a SoCal band. A band doing all kinds of things.”
That push outward is finally paying off. Next year, Death Lens make their Outbreak Festival debut in Manchester, a moment Torres has been quietly circling for years.
Their music has always carried a particular kind of weight, giving voice to people without one, and with the world in the state it’s in, I ask why that feels more important now than ever.
“Having a platform is the number one thing for us,” Torres says. “It should be the number one thing for a lot of bands, but a lot of bands tend to fear it. The reason why we always said we want to be the voice for those who don’t have one is because we come from minorities. We come from immigrant parents. We see what’s going on here in the United States. If someone doesn’t say something, how are they going to know?”
“It’s rough. I’ve dealt with it here at home. We had ICE come and knock on my door not that long ago. We live through those moments that are happening at this time.”
“Music has emotion that builds more feeling towards certain aspects of life. If we don’t write it and put it out there, who will?”
That sentiment runs right through the new record, particularly on Saints in the Panic Room.
“While things were getting really hot here in Los Angeles, the ICE stuff, no one was saying nothing. We were doing this, we were doing that, but nothing was happening. The best way to put it out there is just to write it. That song is a protest song about being an immigrant kid and watching your parents cry over you leaving the house because they don’t know if you’re going to come back or not.”
“I had to put it out there. There’s a lot of people hitting us up saying, hey, you guys are saying a lot, but I want you to be more personal. So I’ll be as personal as I can. That song makes me really emotional. I feel like I can’t even play it live. I think I’ll cry.”
He talks about his own family’s journey, his mother from Chiapas, his father from San Miguel in El Salvador, both crossing the border in the early eighties. His father was kidnapped at fourteen and forced to fight in the guerrilla warfare before escaping into Mexico, where he met Garza’s mother. Garza himself only got his papers a year ago.
“It took me thirty years to get a paper. I see people saying, oh, go through the proper channels. That’s not the way it works here. My dad got heckled recently going through that process itself. I protest as much as I can. Those songs are our 1960s protest songs. What they had for Vietnam, those songs played a major factor in that era. I feel like we’re trying to do the same thing in our time.”
“It’s about uniting. It’s for those who don’t have a voice to feel comforted that they’re not the only ones. That the people they listen to go through the same problems.”
He has no patience for bands who stay quiet.
“We have a lot of bands out here in Los Angeles who I thought were part of the cause, and then it turns out there’s a lot of ulterior motives. A lot of people say it’s necessary evil not to say stuff. No, that is evil, period. There’s no necessary evil to not say something just because you don’t want to lose fans. You have to put yourself out there. You have to be true to yourself, true to your friends, true to your word.”
That honesty runs through the new record, and it’s arriving after a genuinely turbulent period for the band, with two members leaving since the last album. I ask how hard it was to get this one together.
“As far as difficulty goes, surprisingly, it was the opposite,” Torres says. “My first guitarist left. No disrespect to him, he was a great friend, but sometimes you grow out of people. I felt like he wasn’t getting better at guitar, and I started to do his job for him. That gave me two jobs, writing songs and writing lyrics. I have ADHD. When you put me to two tasks, I focus on one and not the other. That became a giant problem.”
The break came on a 2024 tour when the original guitarist couldn’t make it and a substitute stepped in.
“That sub was murdering it every night. Drunk or not, he was killing it. In my mind I kept saying, it’s like a breakup. You want to do it but you don’t know how. I got home, called him, two hour conversation, and I let him go. It got sour quick. He blocked me on everything. I had no phone for four shows.”
His bass player left separately, on his own terms, dealing with personal stuff. The replacements changed the whole dynamic.
“Ernie is the Mozart of guitar. I had to tell him to bring it down. I’d be like, dude, you’re doing too much. It’s a good problem to have.”
“It made it so much easier for me to have somebody like that. I could just be like, hey, give me something like this, and, boom, boom, boom. It meant I could focus solely on lyrics. I feel more connected to this album lyrically than I did with Cold World, because Cold World I didn’t give my hundred percent. I was trying to focus on multiple things.”
On this record, he says, he finally had the space to just write.
“I was writing, writing, writing. I found old notebooks from 2018, stuff I’d forgotten. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen chicken scratch writing, but that’s what mine looks like. I was trying to decipher it like, what the fuck is this? Two of the songs came out of those notebooks. The slow one, Am I a Drug, is an old breakup song I wrote a long time ago. I think that one is a pivotal piece for Death Lens because it’s our first ballad. It sounds kind of 90s esque. It gives this emotion to the band.”
He breaks down how the new lineup slots together.
“Tony, the new drummer, brought the hardcore stuff. I brought the poppy stuff. My guitarist brought more of the alternative stuff. My other guitarist brought that indie sleaze feel. The bass was Zach Tuch, our producer, because we didn’t have a bass player when the other one left. He brought the funk. For the first time I felt like this was the easiest one to write. We wrote it in four months. Cold World took a year.”
“No Luck was a shitty album we did for three grand, we had no money. Cold World had the production. No Luck had the lyrics and the fun. This new record found the middle ground. It’s my favourite.”
The album opens with Torres singing in Spanish on Monolith. I ask about that decision and what it says about how his heritage shapes Death Lens.
“What it says at the beginning is, all my strength wins me nothing,” he explains. “The reason I said that is because you feel like you’re giving it your all and sometimes you’re not getting anything from it. My dad was asking, what’s a good homage to us being us, the stuff we remember growing up. Me and Ernie, we grew up where we live, it’s nothing but Spanish culture. Spanish was my first language.”
He describes going to swap meets as a kid, flea markets where only Spanish people would come in, music playing that reminded him of his family.
“So we asked, what’s a better homage to our area than putting it at the beginning of the song and at the end of the album too? That’s Ernie doing the Spanish guitar. It was his first time ever. When he was a kid, his family forced him to learn Spanish guitar. There’s no better way to put it in there than him playing what he remembers.”
From there, he says, Monolith grew into a statement.
“It talks about coming into this world with nothing and trying to work your way up. It’s how it is in low income Latino culture. You don’t really have much. It’s one of those things where you’re born into your own destiny, but it doesn’t mean it’s your destiny and your fate forever. You can find your way out.”
“We’re kind of in this white dominant music genre. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I’d like to be one of those bands people remember as one of the few who made it out and clicked with this genre that doesn’t really see much of us.”
With the record landing at the end of the month, I ask which track he’s most excited for people to hear.
“Waiting to Know, which comes out on the 20th,” he says, without hesitation. “We have Ian from Militarie Gun featured on it. That one has the feeling of the whole record. A mixture of jumping ass, but also nostalgia, with just a dash of where Death Lens is now. It’s one of those songs where you hear yourself and you’re like, damn, I’ve come a long way.”
The lyrics hit close to home.
“The song is called Waiting to Know on purpose because I’m afraid of time. I really am. I’m afraid of getting older. I don’t want to be a casualty to society. One of my biggest fears has always been being one of those guys who says, and before you know it, you know, you’re retiring. Fuck no. I want to remember what I did. I want to know I did everything I wanted to do.”
He has a second pick too. Off the Edge.
“That one sounds very Sum 41 ish, but the message is cool. It talks about being in your head, trying to figure out what life is all about, and then you realise, who gives a fuck? The chorus is, move back, just leave it alone, I’m good on my own. Just watch me slide. By the time I’ve said it, I’ve already forgotten what I was stressing about.”
Then there’s Outbreak. How does it feel to have been booked for a festival that size?
“Doing it was my number one, I was like, holy shit,” he says. “Here’s a little history. I don’t come from a hardcore background. I don’t come from a punk background. I come from a religious household that didn’t let me listen to anything. The first song I ever heard was Alone Together by The Strokes. That blew my mind. From there I went everywhere. Now, when I think about playing Outbreak, I’m like, how the fuck did I end up here?”
“Everyone’s always telling us, you guys are a hardcore band. I’m not a hardcore band. I just happen to have a raspy voice when I sing and it sounds like I’m screaming, but I’m not. I’m actually a huge fan of post-punk and Brit rock.”
“I love IDLES. I love Fontaines DC. A lot of my lyrics sound like I’m preaching. I got that from British rock. The boys bring that American sound and kind of mesh it. Maybe that’s why Outbreak took us.”
The gravity of it hasn’t landed yet.
“It’s not going to hit me until I’m up there. I’m ecstatic, I’m honoured. We always said it would be sick to play Outbreak. But I always feel it more when I’m up there. I get emotional. I do with any little thing I put my mind to that happens. To me it’s like, I did it. I never wanted to be in a band. It’s a happy accident and I’m excited. The boys are losing their minds because our drummer and bass player are hardcore heads.”
Before we wrap, he gets reflective. He’s been open throughout about the things he’s been through. Jail, more than once. A jumping in 2018 by nine guys that left his arm broken in half and dangling at his side.
“I’ve been through a lot. If it wasn’t for music kind of letting me release and do what I’ve got to do, I don’t know where I’d be. This is my therapy. It’s my way of being mad on stage. Everyone’s always thinking, this guy’s a fucking asshole, he’s probably mean. Then I get off stage and I’m like, hey, let’s get a drink.”
“We don’t have that way to release. Some of us don’t know how to do it. Music has played a major factor in me finding ways to relax.”
Out on the fringes of East Los Angeles, Bryan Torres has a video to shoot, a show to prepare for, and a record to drop on an increasingly complicated world. He doesn’t have time to sit still. And really, that has always been the point.
Death Len’s Whatโs Left Now? releases on April 24 via Epitaph.
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