Recording Gives Fans Something to Hold on To
FI chats with NC college rocker Tom Cascone of Banff about years of live shows before finally hitting the studio
For years, Banff have played their brand of proggy shoegaze around the burgeoning North Carolina Triangle indie rock scene. But it was only recently that they recorded and released their first EP. Until then, there was, as lead singer and guitarist Tom Cascone puts it, nothing to hold on to, aside from a T-shirt or sticker.
By day, Tom studies electrical engineering at North Carolina State, possibly with intent to design his own guitar pedals. By night, Tom and his childhood friends John Fleischer, James Colone, and Xander Schnegelberger form the band named Banff. Summoning their shared childhood love for classic prog rock acts like Rush, Yes, and King Crimson, the Cascone-Colone-Fleischer-Schnegelberger outfit has a particular talent for catchy and moody rock songs that echo the lush sounds, driving rhythms, and whipping, bendy riffs of a more innocent and optimistic but still paradoxically goth-as-fuck early 1990s. The 5-song EP Flood, engineered by Max Gowan at Found After Dark in Raleigh, NC, and released May 2026, finally crystallizes the band’s live set into something anyone in the world can grab.
Indeed, among the deluge of worthy music released every day, Flood is a handle you can grab onto. But as a debut DIY EP by an unknown college band, it would be easy to let it go too quickly. Read my full review.
Credited for the electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizer, piano, handclaps, voice, lyrics, co-arrangement, and additional production on the Flood EP, Tom is clearly a driving force in this band, and seemed like a good guy to chat with.
First of all, sorry for dissing your lyrics in my first writeup.
[laughs] I’m open to criticism. So I’m really glad you gave an honest review instead of just glowing all the way.
Why the name Banff?
I’ve tried to come up with a story that’s funny and cooler, but it’s really just a dumb thing that we thought was funny. Banff is a national park in Canada, as you know. Well, our first gig was in James’s backyard for his mom’s birthday. We just loaded up Microsoft Flight Simulator, and John was like, what’s the most remote airport we can fly out of? And James was like, we can go to Banff. I’m like, I don’t know where that is, I don’t know that word, that’s a cool word. What if we called the band Banff?
It got to the point where we’d been using the name for a few months and it was just wrong to try to call it anything different. And then once we made our first batch of shirts, I’m like, alright, now we can’t change it. Like most things with us, it’s a joke that went a little bit too far.
And that humor and sense of fun made it into the EP?
We just like kind of being silly. The handclaps in Doll started as a joke to surprise the other guys since it was just me and John in the studio at 2 AM, but they ended up sticking because everyone liked it.
Is that usually how the songs come together?
More often than not I’ve got a riff, or a section, or a couple things that I’ve just shoved together and it sounds good. John, our drummer, is also a great guitar player, so him and I will hash something out. We go to different schools, so we’re always just sending random stuff back and forth.
Then James, our bassist, comes in. The dude can just come up with the best possible bass line and completely flip what we thought the song was on its head. And then Xander, our other guitar player, usually comes in last and puts his little sprinkles on top.
Everybody’s kind of throwing their hats into the ring, and sometimes the hat you throw in isn’t the one you get back after the fact.
[S]ometimes the hat you throw in isn’t the one you get back after the fact.
Are you writing with live performance in mind?
This is our first thing we’ve ever done in a studio, so all of these songs are just the five best songs that we had over the past two years. All of these songs were written with the intent of playing live. I couldn’t really, at least right now, imagine writing a song with the intention of playing, like, seven guitar parts that are all different and impossible to replicate. That just doesn’t sound fun to me.
Once we got into the studio, we did figure out there were certain things we wanted that weren’t really possible live. But all of the songs had been cycled through the set a ton of times before we recorded. I really like that — it makes the song owed to all of us, instead of just everyone recording their part and then I record fifty more things on top. We were reasonable.
Was the bass pedal keyboard always in the mix?
I like when people point that out. It’s kind of hard to see from the crowd sometimes.
That kind of spawned as just a funny gimmick, and then it snowballed into something I started taking seriously. It’s a cool tool to have. In Stay, the synth line is really sparse because I’m playing it with my right foot! So it breeds some wacky things. But it also makes way for more expansive sounds; at the end of Flood I throw in a synth bass that augments James’s fuzz bass and just makes everything grow.
Homage to Geddy Lee?
Yeah. We all did the School of Rock program and did a full season of Rush music. For Christmas one year I was just like, I want this thing. I already had a synth to work it with — it’s just a MIDI controller. I started bringing it to band rehearsals and it was just like, alright, this is a part of the band now.
How long were you involved with School of Rock?
It was just me, John, and Xander, all there for various periods, starting around middle school. We were all playing there together from probably 2019 to 2022, but by that point we’d already decided we wanted to do our own thing. That’s when we really started writing, around late 2022.
I worked there until last year, teaching a lot of the little kids — Rock 101, the band program for the little ones. A test of patience, for sure.
What did School of Rock not prepare you for?
I didn’t know how to book a show. I’d played the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill once or twice, but I had no idea what went into setting that up — getting the backline sorted, all that boring shit. You send out 100 emails and you get one response and it’s a no.
Musically, you don’t really write music in School of Rock unless you decide you want to. But that’s not a weakness of the program. It’s kind of as advertised: you play covers with a lot of young musicians, you play in cool places, you go on little tours. I wouldn’t say there’s a huge weakness in what they do.
“You send out 100 emails and you get one response and it’s a no.”
Is that also where you connected with Max Gowan?
We played a show at this venue called Kings in Raleigh. Yvonne and Travis — they’re in this band called Truth Club — they work at Kings. When we’d played there for the first time, Yvonne asked me, have you guys recorded anything? I said no. She said, “Well, you should talk to our friend Max. He owns a studio with Travis in Raleigh. He would definitely be down to record you guys.”
It took me about a year to actually hit him up because that show was the last one we played before we went to college. Maybe last August we were like, okay, we should probably get serious about making a recording. We hit up Max and he was just like, yeah, just come by the studio.
We had three big sessions: drums and bass, then all the guitars, then vocals and everything else. His studio is DIY enough to be comfortable but professional enough to sound really good. We know virtually nothing about recording and mixing and mastering and everything that isn’t playing, so he was a Gandalf figure. The guidance he gave us throughout recording and mixing was really great. He’s just a great friend too.
How do you feel about the EP’s reception so far?
It’s been a pretty positive reception. It hasn’t been doing crazy numbers because it’s our first thing, but it’s been really nice to just have something out. We’d had a few singles before, but it wasn’t anything we considered real or worth listening to. This is our first kind of big thing that we’re really proud of, a good representation of us.
How have you been promoting the EP?
We haven’t been doing maybe as much as we could to promote it. We’re depending a lot on word of mouth, trying to get it into the hands of people who want to hear it. I kind of manage everything with publicity and booking, and I don’t really know how to reach out to press, so I’m just playing it by ear and doing interviews here and there with local folks and people who want to know what’s up.
How did your New York show go?
Playing in New York was a different beast. We were staying with a family friend in Hoboken and we’re like, okay, how the hell are we gonna get to Brooklyn with all of our shit? We ended up taking the Metro, which was awesome, but tough, carrying all our guitars, pedals, the synth. Thankfully the other bands backlined the drums and amps.
I’m a pretty neurotic person. I get kind of stressed out when things don’t go according to plan. But I think going to New York and playing that gig taught me that random stuff’s gonna pop up and you just gotta take it in stride. The other guys are much better at that than me.
Are you drawn to a bigger city?
I know a non-zero number of bands that have kind of flocked from North Carolina. It’s either New York or Chicago, none going to LA, because I think LA’s kind of whack now for some reason.
I’ve always kind of liked the idea of living in New York City, but I honestly don’t know. We’re in school for another couple of years, so for the foreseeable future it’s kind of just sticking around the state, doing short tours when we can.
NC seems to be having a moment. What’s going on there?
North Carolina in the past few years has just skyrocketed in music. Out of Asheville and the mountain towns you have Wednesday and MJ Lenderman and Tombstone Poetry, bands that are getting a lot of notoriety. Wednesday has been on late night TV a ton. That’s awesome, just seeing a band from North Carolina, because growing up I’m like, what musicians are from North Carolina? And it’s like, oh, John Coltrane, kinda, but that’s it.
The Triangle — Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh — it’s not really recognized as a huge music hub nationally, but it should be. There’s Truth Club, who just did a five-week tour with Pool Kids. There’s Charlie Paso, who we played our release show with. They just put a new record out, wonderful shoegaze. verity den from Carrboro, Motocrossed from Charlotte. Just a lot of bands making music that’s weird and new. I need everybody to see these bands.
With the Flood EP done, what’s next for Banff?
A triple-album. [laughs]
“They just have the thought of you, and that’s not gonna stick as much as an album or an EP does.”
Now that we have something out, we have something to talk about. Our problem for a not insignificant amount of time was that we’d play a show with a really good turnout, but these people have nothing to hold on to. They just have the thought of you, and that’s not gonna stick as much as an album or an EP does.
We put it out as a homemade cassette and home-burned CD just because it was cost effective and fun, and they’ve been selling pretty well. I think people like the fact that we made it ourselves. We’ve been selling those, stickers, and shirts.
The idea is just to play more shows, play with bands that we want to ingratiate ourselves with, and get our thing in front of as many people as possible. Max has been a really great resource for that. It’s kind of a grassroots campaign. You gotta see it to believe it.