Check out Castillo Bravo’s story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Castillo Bravo (Nick & Tommy)

Hi Nick & Tommy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Nick and I met first day of college at Metro State, bonding over a Rolling Stone mag with Bob Dylan on the cover.
We lived across the hall from one another in our 20s in a small but raucous apartment building and would often hang out. This grew into to us playing covers late(often to our neighbor’s chagrin) into the night and eventually experimenting with writing our own songs.
Once we found our sound, Jeremy and Steve brought us to life and provided the backbone of our music as our rhythm section.
Steve with his connections in the scene(he has been playing around Denver in rock and jazz groups for 20 years) stated booking us and we have been building momentum and regular gigging anywhere and everywhere around town since then!

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
With any band it takes awhile to develop your sound and our music is always in a state of constant evolution. We are always tinkering and trying to get better to tighten up and improve our songs. Blending many different genres makes it hard to categorize us. We don’t fit neatly into one particular scene which has made it difficult to figure out what bands to play with.

We do feel like we are finally building momentum after 4 years of playing anywhere and everywhere around Metro Denver! We feel supported and seen by lots of local bands of very diverse genres. One month we might play a punk show, the next might be more of an indie rock bill and we also play often with emo bands because there are pieces of all these genres in our sound. We are a little late to the game on social media but we are putting in the work to build our presence there!

This whole time though the music has been the focus. We feel like we have a unique sound with a strong message of liberation and speaking truth to power in our lyrics. We want to make people groove but we also want them to question the world around them.

We’ve recently released two new singles available on all streamers, The Last Card and Hello Rider that we’re very proud of and hope your readers will check out!

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Our sound is an absolute amalgamation of the last 60 years of Rock an’ Roll. We mix punk aggression and attitude with intricate psychedelic rhythms and patterns. There is definitely a love for roots music and Americana thrown into the mix as well. Nick is a history teacher and his lyrics critique systems of power and control, as well as the illusory nature of the modern world. We love, and are influenced by a diverse group of bands such as Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Clash, Against Me!, Thee Oh Sees and Bob Dylan. Our live shows are energetic, passionate and provide you plenty of danceable grooves. We have never been great at defining our genre because we are unafraid of any and all influences. It’s all about making meaningful music that we love ourselves and our proud to share with the community.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
For us success is just having an audience to share our music with. We are ecstatic to see more and more people coming out to our shows. We are thrilled by what is going on in the Denver scene and we are just proud to be part of what’s going on. There are so many amazing punk, psych, garage rock and emo bands in this city. It is our privilege to rock along with them and grow with that community. We just want to build our scene and audience organically. Music has always been one of the most important parts of my life and identity, having the honor to play to a crowd and feeding off that reciprocal energy is what it’s all about!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/castillobravoband
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/castillobravoband
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@castillobravoband
• Soundcloud: SoundCloud @castillobravoband

Image Credits
Matthew Monczka Photography