guyscrapers set their sights high

When making garage rock in Ridgewood, Queens, the physical lack of a garage has led Guyscrapers to take up basement rock. Just before this interview began, tracking for the next tape was underway below the apartment that a few members share. Guyscrapers’ first two releases, Why?scrapers and This Is Called Practice, have three songs each. Their next tape, Tour de Force, is their longest yet with six.

The band is made up of Leighton Branaugh (lead vocals and guitar), Sean Lawson (guitar), Tyler Phillips (drums), and Joe Restivo (bass). They would follow our chat by closing a gig at a newly opened artist’s space in Bushwick. Upon our meeting, however, it was only 4 pm, and the only priority was having a good chat and finishing case of beer. 

In the year since they’ve made their debut, Guyscrapers have become a staple to the scene, headlining just about every local gig, and with good cause. They’re following the legacy set by decades of garage rock devotees before them with a fresh approach. Both in music and stage presence, they’re fast, loud, and full of passion. These guys aren’t here to show off their technical prowess or pedalboards—they’re here to have fun. Clearly, the crowd responds. With every show the dance circle grows. Give them another year and who knows where they might end up. 

You’re celebrating your first anniversary as a band. How does that feel? 

Leighton: It’s pretty awesome. We played our first real show a year ago.

Sean: Gold Sounds, February 7. It’s weird, I mean, me and Leigton have been writing stuff for longer.

Leighton: It’s probably been like at least two years or something. 

Sean: Yeah, I feel like once we started going in the garage rock direction, it’s been like a year and a half.

How did you all come together as a band? 

Leighton: Me, Tyler, and Sean, grew up together in the Denton area of Texas.

Sean: It first started with me and Leighton. Leighton had moved here from Austin, and we wanted to start a band. We tried a bunch of different things and then eventually started writing garage rock kind of stuff, and we were like, “Yeah, this is a good direction. Let’s go this way.” And it almost wasn’t really a question if Tyler should play drums. 

Leighton: Yeah, well, that’s after our first choice wasn’t able to make it. It was actually me. But I was busy playing guitar, so I couldn't. 

Tyler: And then Joe came along, too. 

Joe: They found me through a flyer. They’d never met an Italian person.

Tyler: We’re very fascinated, us Texans. 

Leighton: Yeah, Sean took a picture of a flyer for a band looking for a drummer, and I responded to it, and it was Joe’s band. 

Joe: We were playing together for a little bit. We did like one or two shows, I honestly don’t even know. And then I guess it was sometime in like summer 2024, Leighton texted me: “Do you wanna join a band?” They sent me these songs, and I could not make them out at all. I had to show up to rehearsal so unprepared, and I remember Sean showing me how to play some of the songs. But I was pretty intimidated ’cause they were really good musicians.

Leighton: But also, the songs were our first demos. Me and Sean would go to our practice space and just write a song, and then we would just record a demo super fast on the four-track. Most of our first recordings sounded so bad.

Sean: But in a fun way. 

Tyler: Even though it was garage rock, wasn’t there also some sort of like Beefheart thing you were doing at the time as well?

Sean: Yeah, I mean, we were still figuring out what we wanted to do, and since then we’ve refined what we’re going for and have a clearer idea of the sound. But I still feel like there’s room for us to grow. There’s places we can take it and explore new things.

Leighton: It’s interesting to me that we write songs in batches. Or like, we won’t write a song for like a month or two, but then we’ll write three in a week. I feel like they all sound like us, but each batch is a little different.

Is that where the tapes of three songs come from? 

Leighton: Yeah. That’s what the first two were. Today we just started recording a tour tape and it’s six songs. We’ve only recorded drums, but they sound really good. It’s the best drum sound in the world.

Tyler: Our drum tech Humberto did well. 

Sean: We’ve always talked about how we wanna have more songs than we need. So I’ve written a bunch of songs, and we’re like, “OK, these are the three best ones. Let’s do like those.” Thin it down to just the really good stuff. 

Leighton: Because we’ve definitely written like a fair share of songs that aren’t that good.

Sean: Yeah, there’s a bunch of songs we used to play that we don’t play anymore ’cause they’re not as good as what we have now. 

Joe: We had this song called “Giant Beat,” which is the name of Leighton’s label now, but I loved it ’cause it was very fun to play and very...I don’t know, would you call it post-punky?

Leighton: I feel like that was a Beefheart song.

Sean: That’s probably our most Beefheart. 

Joe: Yeah and I loved it. Sean and I, as a joke now, always play it. I wanted to play it all the time, but then I was always voted out. But then I realized we’re trying to be like something else. And once I realized what we were trying to, be I was like, OK, I get it now. 

Tyler: No beef at all. 

Do you have any other muses? 

Sean: Me and Leighton both love rock music, but we listen to different stuff and I think that comes together in the writing in a cool way. We both have a lot of input and a lot of creative ideas that go into it. And then also bringing it to the band, I think that’s where it really gets special.

Leighton: To me, I feel like it’s the Ramones and Weezer and Gizmos and the Beatles.

Joe: I feel like we have like a bunch of influences. If you go to our rehearsal it’s like 25%, like us playing our own songs. And the other 75% is just playing Led Zeppelin songs. 

Leighton: It’s just like random riffs.

Joe: We get very little done. They’re all School of Rock guys. They know all these fucking songs.

Leighton: At our first show, our soundcheck was...

Tyler: We all played different Led Zeppelin songs. I played “Good Times, Bad Times.” Leighton played “Black Dog.” Sean played “Whole Lotta Love,” and Joe played like “Dazed and Confused” or something.

Joe: And then people thought it was a song, 

Leighton: That’s what that fucking song “Giant Beat” sounds like. Some fucking bullshit. They’re just playing some random bullshit. 

Sean: We’ve done some good covers. We’ve done Weezer, we did Tom Petty. 

Leighton: We had to stop playing Weezer because people were being annoying about it. We would end a set, and they were like, “Play Weezer. Play ‘Surf Wax America.’”

Tyler: In Toronto, we played the first five seconds of “Tom Sawyer” to just kind of give the people of Toronto what they love. 

Sean: When we played in Ann Arbor, we played “Search and Destroy” like four times. 

Leighton: Ann Arbor was so funny ‘cause our whole set, we kept getting technical difficulties, and then each time we would just play “Search and Destroy.”

Sean: I remember I broke a string, and I was searching for a guitar to use. And then you guys played “Search and Destroy,” and Max [Bottner from National Photo Committee] went up to sing it.

Joe: I remember Max after that too, asking if we could find a place to stay. Max was just like, if anyone fucks with me, I would love to stay at your place. And I just remember radio silence after that. No one said anything. They were very nice people. 

What do you think about being a band in New York City? What’s been your take on the scene as people who moved here? 

Leighton: The scene here is just so spread out. In other cities, especially in the Midwest, every band is good, and it’s so put together and bands are actually playing with each other a lot. I feel like bands aren’t friends here like they are in other places.

Sean: There’s just like a million different scenes all in New York together, and there’s some overlap, but it’s not very defined.

Leighton: I just think that whenever you live in a place where there’s so many artists, there’s bound to be a lot of bad bands. 

Joe: Yeah, it’s very oversaturated here. But it’s OK. 

Leighton: But there’s a lot of great bands also. And there’s a lot of bands that I really love.

Joe: There’s as many great bands here as in any other city. But I think people want to come to New York City and play music, and that just invites a lot of shit. Turn New York on its side and all its loose pieces fall out. 

Tyler: It does seem like a Brooklyn and Queens thing, though. I feel like I don't know much from Manhattan. And I feel like the bands from Manhattan are the ones that are trying to relive Meet Me in the Bathroom or trying to be the Strokes.

Sean: The more we play, the more bands we meet and the more friends we make with other bands and I like it. We’re going somewhere. Especially like with us only being like a year old, it feels like we’ve come the furthest out of pretty much any band I’m in.

Tyler: It feels like people like us, so that’s nice.

Every time I go to one of your shows, the crowd gets bigger and everyone dances and there’s a really positive energy. Do you feel that on stage? 

Sean: Yeah, definitely. I keep waiting for the show where we play to two people and it hasn’t really happened yet. I mean there’s been like a couple where it’s been not as many people compared to bands I’ve been in in the past where I’ve literally played to the sound person and that’s it.

Tyler: Me and Sean were in a band once where it actually was that, and it was at Gold Sounds. We played to only the sound person and I think during the last song, two people showed up who were our bass player’s friends. 

Joe: I’ve been in bands, where we had to borderline beg people to come to the show. You have to do all the Instagram bullshit and stuff. 

Leighton: But now it’s just one post of the flyer, one story post. 

Joe: It’s beautiful.  

Sean: I don’t even know the login for the Instagram and I refuse to log in. 

Tyler: It’s nice because every show we’ve played, we’re usually playing with other bands who also have good attendance. And also this is the first band I’ve played in where most of our shows, there’s other things going on at the show, like people selling zines. There’s always like another thing happening within the show that makes it more communal, which I think is quite nice.  

And what about your connection to the scene outside of New York through friends in Chicago and Texas?

Leighton: It’s pretty beautiful just being in the circle of bands around the country because they come here, they ask you to book a show and then when you go there, they book a show.

Tyler: I mean, we’ve only toured mostly in the Midwest and Canada and a little bit on the East Coast. We’ve just found very lovely people in every city. 

Leighton: The Midwest is the best. I like that we’ve connected with a lot of Midwest bands. We’re good friends with Jack [Abbott from Answering Machines] so we’ve met a lot of Chicago bands through him.

Sean: It’s also pretty awesome that we’ve gotten to take part in something like Bread and Roses. That was a really awesome community of New York bands and bands that weren’t from New York just like coming together. I feel super lucky.

Leighton: That was definitely one of the best weekends of all time.

Joe: It was wild. I hadn’t met a lot of people in those bands up until that point, and seeing everyone interact and stuff, you would’ve thought everyone was from one city. It just made you realize how small the world is, and tour did the same thing for me too. These are bands that are actually kind of part of the whole scene and it’s not just by city. Very like-minded people.

Leighton: Seeing the poster for the North Carolina pop festival [the Big Pop Show] that we’re playing, it is funny, like, oh, it’s just all our friends. It’s gonna be so great. And that’s the last stop on our tour too. 

Tyler: Very excited to go to North Carolina. I’m very big on geography and when we go into certain states I like listening to bands from the state right when we enter the border. You know, playing maybe somebody like Common when you enter Chicago, Illinois? 

Joe: That’s not who we listened to when we got into Illinois.

Leighton: Who did we listen to?

Joe: Sufjan Stevens.

Tyler: What were we listening to in Montreal?

Sean: Oh, we listened to Leonard Cohen. 

Joe: My cousin, when we were in Montreal, was just like, do you guys know Mac DeMarco? Do you guys know Preoccupations? Do you know this other Montreal band? 

Leighton: Cindy Lee came to our show in Montreal, and we’re lucky that we didn't know that Cindy Lee was there. We saw the back of Cindy Lee’s head.

Sean: Someone was like, oh, that person that just walked away was Cindy Lee. 

Tyler: We geeked out. 

Leighton: I was geeking. And someone said they liked our show. 

Tyler: The hardest thing was driving in Montreal ’cause the switching of the language on the signs.

Leighton: Sean’s a horrible driver. He accelerates on the exits, like on the 20 mph loop exits, this guy fucking speeds up. My Italian friend here gets really stressed out.

Tyler: Joe gets very angry.

Joe: Well, they’re from Texas, so they don’t know how to drive. 

Tyler: There were times where one of us was driving and there would be some sort of issue in the traffic, and Joe, if he was sitting in the passenger seat, would reach over and put his hand on the steering wheel.

Joe: I would honk for you because you don’t know when to honk. The horn is there for a reason. 

Tyler: But yeah, touring is beautiful. And we’re going to see cities we haven’t been to. 

Leighton: I’m just excited that it’s gonna be a few days longer. Our last tour was awesome because it was our first tour and we toured with Answering Machines. So I’m excited now because it was like training wheels for everyone. There’s a few different bands that we’re playing with and it's longer and we’re going to Texas. We’re doing South By which is gonna be crazy ’cause we’re just going and we’re playing. The goal is like two shows a day. 

What’s next? I guess putting together the rest of this tape? 

Leighton: Yeah, recording and tour. 

Joe: It feels like we’re going in a good direction, with shows and tour and writing and recording. I just wanna keep doing that. 

Leighton: At the end of last year, it felt like it was really picking up and then it felt a little slow to me for a few months. But now the tour is coming up and we’re doing this tape. I just really want to get the tape out.

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