Fresh off a run of Asia dates and about to play against their own bassist’s day job, Car Underwater frontman Max Epstein sat down with us backstage at All Points East presents Outbreak Fest to talk emo’s second coming, the friendship group that built the band, and why the follow-up to breakout EP Dagger Breaks Window isn’t about to chase a different sound…
Words by Felix Bartlett | August 26, 2026
Car Underwater have just landed back in the UK off the back of a week in Asia, and within days the frontman is standing in Victoria Park at All Points East presents Outbreak Fest, on the same day as Deftones, Basement, Mannequin Pussy, Wisp and Show Me The Body, with a Wisp collaboration on the cards later on. He can’t tell if he’s jet lagged or just running on adrenaline. Either way, he’s not complaining.
“We play so many shows, it’s kind of like another one,” he says of the day ahead. “But we love being in London, so this is cool.” A lot of his friends are on the bill too, not least Wisp, whose crowd Car Underwater have been steadily converting to their cause all year. “I do want to get over to Show Me The Body when they play,” he adds, already halfway out the door in his head.
“It’s just always been the sound I’m drawn to”
Car Underwater arrived at exactly the moment a certain strain of mid-2000s emo and post-hardcore started sounding essential again to a generation who weren’t there the first time. For Max, though, there’s nothing calculated about the timing.
“Sonically, this is the kind of music I’ve just always been drawn to, like since I was a little kid. This is my truly first love of music,” he explains. “It’s kind of come through in all of the projects we’ve done, collectively, the people in the band. But this is the first time where we sat down and were like, hey, let’s do a proper emo band.”
He’s careful not to overstate his own foresight. “I don’t know if it was a timing thing, it just happened. I think culturally there’s something happening, because it’s been a long time since this sound has been around, and I think kids in general are just ready for it.”
He points to Car Underwater’s own crowd as proof the appetite crosses scenes. “It’s the same with the Wisp crowd. It maybe isn’t hip to emo or post-hardcore, but they’re the same kids, you know? We did a Wisp show and they were moshing, they were jumping off the stage, and you could tell it was the first time some of them had seen something like that. It’s cool. All kids are all kids, we’re all the same. You put it in front of them and they’re like, oh yeah, this is cool. And they’re discovering bands we were inspired by too.”
Car Underwater’s lineup reads like a who’s who of the current LA scene’s overlapping friendship circles. Alongside Max, who also fronts dream-pop project Photographic Memory, the band is rounded out by drummer Zach Capitti-Fenton, bassist Nolan Nunes (also of Ghostemane), and Australian producer and keyboardist Darcy Baylis. Three of them already play together in Photographic Memory.
“Everyone in the band, we’ve all played with each other in different projects over the years,” Max says. “My other project, Photographic Memory, three of the guys in the band play with me there too. I was showing them these ideas, like, hey, I’ve got these songs that are maybe not Photographic Memory, maybe something else. We should just do another band.”
Nunes’s arrival came via a tour van conversation. “Me and Nolan, the bass player, he was here today too, he’s a stage manager for Wisp. Him and I played in a band together for years, going back to around 2018, and we were just on a Wisp tour talking about it, and I was like, oh, you should definitely play bass. He plays in Ghostemane.”
Baylis, meanwhile, slotted in through shared musical instinct rather than shared history. “Darcy, we just think the same musically. It just made perfect sense, and he’s such an amazing producer. It just clicked.” Max is quick to wave off any suggestion of a masterplan. “It was just like, oh, these are my friends, we hang out all the time, we make music together all the time. It just made sense that we’d do this band.”
“Everyone’s got their own thing going on”
The biggest surprise since Dagger Breaks Window landed, Max says, hasn’t been the size of the crowds but who’s been paying attention. “Honestly, some of our heroes, people who pioneered this scene, responding to it, either sending us a message or just giving it a nod. That kind of stuff has been really cool. We’re fans first of all of this.”
He’s equally buzzed about the wider scene taking shape alongside Car Underwater, name-checking bands including I Promise The World and Concealer among the pack pushing the revival forward. “Everyone’s got their own thing, and it’s really reminiscent of when this scene was happening years back, where everyone had their own thing going on. Hawthorne Heights sounded like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein sounded like themselves, they had their own thing. I think that’s happening right now, and it’s really cool. I wasn’t thinking about a scene when we were writing these songs. It just happened at the same time. I think that’s just collective consciousness, firing on all cylinders.”
This isn’t Car Underwater’s first UK visit, having played a sold-out debut at Camden’s Barfly and support slots on Bring Me The Horizon’s recent Manchester arena shows. Max went in with low expectations, drawn from years in bands that have played to empty rooms as often as packed ones.
“I had no expectations, because we’ve all played in bands for so long, we’ve been in the ones where no one shows up, and we’ve been in the ones where we play big festivals. So with this being a new band, we expected low turnouts. We were blown away. People pulled up and were singing along, and that was really cool.”
As for whether the UK scene feels different to home, Max reckons distance has stopped mattering. “The world’s really shrunk with how much we go everywhere all the time, that everyone is so similar and like-minded, especially in this alt space. I met some people at that Barfly show hanging out by the merch, and to me it’s no different than someone at an LA show. The response is the same, everyone’s jumping up and down, everyone’s welcoming.”
Some of those same faces followed the band from the UK club dates through to the Bring Me The Horizon arena shows. “That was really cool, I recognised people who’d say, oh, we’re coming to the Bring Me show too. And sure enough, they were up front singing along again. I’m excited for all of us to come back and have familiar faces waiting.”
Going from a room the size of Barfly to arenas full of Bring Me The Horizon fans could easily have rattled a band this new. It didn’t. “I feel like everyone in the band is really, really comfortable playing big shows, just because we do it with all of these other bands. So as far as another day doing the thing, it felt really natural,” Max says. “But it felt really cool to do it with this band. We put so much effort into this band that it just felt good to show up and actually pull it off and get the response we got. Both days were epic.” Still riding the high a few weeks on, he doesn’t need much prompting to admit it. “Yeah, it was so cool.”
“Fashion is different, but the ethos is the same”
For Max, the pull of this corner of alternative music has always been less about genre and more about who it makes room for. “If you’re drawn to this, emo or punk or hardcore music, you’ve got something going on in your head, you know what I mean? You’re a little bit different. Everyone being a little bit different is really cool. It’s a safe space to go and be comfortable being different. It’s not mainstream, at least the people showing up to those underground shows.”
That sense of familiarity extends across the Atlantic without much translation needed. “Maybe people have different shoes on, different coloured hair, but fashion is different, the ethos is the same.”
“We’re not abandoning the raw sound”
Car Underwater’s debut full-length is finished, though Max isn’t pinning down a release date yet. Written alongside the songs that became Dagger Breaks Window, it picks up deliberately where the EP left off rather than lurching somewhere new.
“We just wrapped up a full length. I’m not sure when it’s coming out, but soon. It’s an extension of the EP, because when we started writing the EP songs, we also started writing the album songs, and we prioritised which ones felt best together. That ended up being the EP, and the rest kept going towards the record. We spent this whole year working on it, we produced it ourselves. I think the songwriting is a little more elevated, a little more time and effort went into really crafting these songs.”
The intention to stay the course was a conscious one. “It was intentional, to be like, hey, let’s pick up where we left off from the EP, that way we don’t abandon the sound people are liking right now. A lot of bands will pop off on something and instantly switch it up, then years later come back to form.” When Bring Me The Horizon come up as the classic counter-example, a band who’ve made constant reinvention their whole identity, Max doesn’t disagree. “They’re amazing because they evolve every record, that’s just part of their thing. But we talked about this as a band, let’s run this sound right now. There’s a bit of an elevation in the production because of the care put into it, but we’re not abandoning the raw sound, not trying to be super pro-core right off the bat. Maybe album two will have a bit of something else. But this one’s an extension of the EP, with what I think is stronger songwriting.”
Asked whether he can picture the record becoming a generational touchstone the way the bands Car Underwater grew up on did, Max doesn’t pretend the thought hasn’t crossed his mind. “I’m so proud of it that if I was thirteen hearing it the way I heard [an early-2000s scene staple], an Underoath record, or Thursday, records I still listen to now, if anyone felt that way about this record, I’d be so hyped.”
“We’re just going to make an album and care about the album as a whole”
Max sees the record as part of a wider shift back towards album-as-statement thinking, pushing back against a singles-and-content pace he’s not interested in matching. “Culturally there’s a conversation happening around coming back to form, caring about an entire body of work and not just how quickly you get singles and content out. Instead of complaining about it, we’re just like, well, let’s make an album and care about the album as a whole, which I know a lot of artists do. That’s the fun part of being an artist, making a body of work. There’s a big focus on the whole thing, not just a particular track.”
With the album locked and a US tour alongside Static Dress and I Promise The World on the horizon, Max is already looking past the day’s set. “Those shows are going to be crazy, every single band’s going to set it off. We just played a show with one of the other bands on the bill recently and it was awesome, we’re labelmates now, which is cool. I love I Promise The World, love Static Dress. It’s just going to be seeing your friends’ bands, seeing bands you like every night. Judging by the reaction to the tour getting announced, I think it’s going to draw some attention in the mainstream too. I think big artists are going to be like, what’s happening over in this space.”
Car Underwater’s debut EP Dagger Breaks Window is out now.
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