A Touch of Screaming

By Julien C Levy
Photo by Matt Akana

“Before the internet, how did we all hear the rumor that [Marilyn] Manson removed a rib to suck his own dick?” wonders Ash Costello, frontwoman of SoCal rock band New Years Day. Since the age of Myspace and Friendster, NYD have been putting themselves out there, wading into the social media swamp to promote their brand of hooky, thrashy, goth rock. But Costello and lead guitarist Nikki Misery agree: There’s just something… timeless about that particular vulgar nugget of rock legend. “How incredible is that?” Costello marvels. “I wish I had a rumor like that!”

New Years Day was born in Southern Transylvania in 1666 A.D. when Lady Gaga and Marilyn Manson had a baby on Halloween. And the godparents were KISS and No Doubt. And the delivery doctor was actually Korn’s Jonathan Davis in a Pogo the Clown costume.

At least, that’s what I heard.

“Anything fucking people say, believe it,” says Misery. “It’s all true. In fact, it’s 10 times worse.”

For as unapologetically ghoulish a group as NYD is, it does seem easy to make assumptions about them. And with singles like “Do Your Worst,” “Defame Me” and “Come for Me,” it’s clear people have.

But the real, honest truth is that, after 17 years of near-constant touring, lineup changes, a shifting social media landscape, misogyny, gossip and several collective lifetimes of feeling like (lowercase “m”) misfits, New Years Day know exactly who they are: delightfully ooky and endearingly spooky weirdos who sincerely need to rock the fuck out.

As a child, Misery remembers his parents taking him to CVS and letting him leaf through the wall-mounted catalog of posters. He picked out one with the album cover of Marilyn Manson’s “Smells Like Children,” a garish green-and-pink affair he still proudly displays alongside posters advertising arthouse horror films. “[Manson’s band] was attitude, a middle finger… and everybody hated you for liking them,” he says. “They thought you were a weirdo. You felt like an outcast because you were.” Costello gives an emphatic chef’s kiss in unanimity, telling me she rejected the teen pop of the day. “I was always drawn toward the more substream, underground, cult-like darker music.”

Publicly, New Years Day cut a fearsome appearance. Donning corpse makeup, leather, and skeleton print, they’re part punk, part metal and all sinister. “I’ve always liked the rock stars who were like, ‘I’m serious mysterious!’” Misery says, taking responsibility for ramping up the festive ghoulishness of NYD’s collective persona. “We wanted to be, in a sense, the ugly while Ash was the pretty. Really have that whole light and dark aspect to it.” Which, Costello insists, was really part of the process of the band manifesting their own authentic identity. “That’s who [New Years Day is] inside,” she says. “We stopped doing the makeup thing for a little bit on our last record and it really didn’t feel like us.”

Ozzy, Bowie, Elvis—every artist who transcended truth to become legend has first been the subject of a rumor neither wholly owned nor denied. Despite her own already-robust social media presence, Costello says the suits in her life have encouraged her to close the gap between public and private. But the blurred line, she and Misery both lament, leaves virtually no room for that all-important rock ‘n’ roll intrigue. Citing heroes Davey Havok of AFI and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, Costello speculates, “Am I gonna be stoked that they have a TikTok where they’re performing little skits and things like that? No. I don’t need to see [it], I don’t want to see it.” Misery, who views Costello as his social media guru, agrees. “What happened to being a badass, you know? Snort tequila off your own dick or something… do something rad.”

Despite NYD’s enthusiasm for allowing a mythos to build all on its own, the internet is still the internet, for better or worse. Costello has to actively ignore plenty of bad-faith trash talk, calling it like it is: shitty and misogynistic. She identifies tenacious No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani as another hero for, among other things, transcending a similarly sexist raft of bullshit. The truth is Costello must endure much that her bandmates don’t. Viewed in this context, songs she’s written with titles like “Kill or Be Killed” or lyrics like “I’ll be your biggest fucking mistake,” feel less like plain edginess and more like articles of woman-fronted rock dogma. “I think it’s deep-down the attitude I want to have,” she says. “If I put it out there I feel like I get to play that part.” But she’s quick to add that anyone who knows her would attest: It’s not all entirely wishful. “I won’t start a fight, but I’ll finish it.”

Newly married, Costello has recently relocated from the West Coast to a Missouri property girdled by thick forest. “I’m a California girl, a lot of this is really new to me,” she says, gesturing out the window to the treeline below an Edward Gorey sky. Compared to her sun-smothered former stomping ground, the relative ease of being gothy as fuck in her new environs was a major selling point for the move. “I want kids to explore the woods and be like, ‘Oh my god, we found a witch hut!… I pop out, like, ‘Hey guys!’” she says cheerily.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of New Years Day’s lane: the tension between light and dark, horror and glee, bubblegum and broken glass.

“What I love about New Years Day—and always have—” Costello says, “is our heaviness without being too excruciatingly heavy. And I love that there’s a touch of screaming but not too much.” But what she loves most is the pop kernel at the center of it all. “With New Years Day songs, you can always bang your head and shake your hips at the same time,” Misery agrees.

Their tattoos tell that same tale. Misery, inked from head to toe, shows me meticulous portraits of Elvis and Mariachi singer-songwriter Vincente Fernández, both with an eerie undead quality. He displays “Stay Away” printed on his fingers, then tilts his hands to reveal “Born to Cry” across his knuckles, flashing a wolfish smile and saying, “We did a very illegal two letters on one finger.”

Costello’s thigh is devoted to horror movie icons with portraits of Patrick Bateman, Jack Torrence, both versions of Pennywise and more. “They’re like rock stars to me,” she says, offering an exhaustive list of the other film villains, many of them clowns, that she plans on memorializing on her lower half. “So when my husband’s… y’know… with me in the bedroom,” she says, almost demure, “he has to look at Freddy Krueger’s face.”

“One on each cheek, right?” Misery says, only half-joking. “Happy Freddy and sad Freddy.”

“I just want to look like I’m wearing pants all the time is my goal,” she says. “Then I’m done. I want a permanent pair of pants.”

So what’s on the horizon for New Years Day? “Trying to take over the world!” Costello says, laughing. She’s just returned home from a songwriting session for their next album, and after a long post-COVID gestation period, is gearing up to get back on the road. Both reflect on playing arenas and meeting fans, with the realization they’re living something exceedingly close to their childhood fantasies. “It’s shaping up to be a really exciting dream-come-true kind of year,” Costello says.

“My seatbelt’s buckled, I’m ready for full force,” Misery says. “Get in, losers, we’re going touring.”

“Please hug a touring musician if you see one,” Costello adds. “It’s tough out there right now, there’s a transportation shortage, so it’s very hard to rent a bus.” They’ve had a tough go of it before, which is why I’ve heard they’ve foregone a bus altogether. I hear they’re hitting the road in a two-story-tall, 45-foot-long, fire-spewing hearse. And it runs on virgin blood. And anyone who lays eyes on it will be cursed. And the driver is the ghost of Lon Chaney Jr.

But that’s just what I heard.