Philadelphia-based emo band Sweet Pill is returning to Denver for the first time since their much lauded performance at the 2025 Underground Music Showcase for a show at The Oriental Theater on Thursday, September 3rd. Sweet Pill makes music that cuts deep into the skin, etches itself into your bones so that you may always carry it with you for when you need to remember how to find strength within. It’s music for opening your chest wide, exposing your bleeding heart to the sky so that you may let the sun in to thaw the cold that may have accumulated there over the years. Heavy, math-y, it overflows with this desperate kind of hope reminiscent of passing storms, thunder growing distant, darkness giving way to light. Sweet Pill’s music teaches those who hear it how to glow, how to fight through life with light shining from their chest so brightly it scares the dark away. Widely known for their intense, bombastic live performances, Sweet Pill will be coming to The Oriental on September 3rd to share their light with Denver.
Denver Dive recently spoke with Sweet Pill about the band’s origins as a school project, coming up in the South Jersey and Philly punk and emo scenes, finding hope when writing about some of life’s great sorrows and much more.
Before the band formed, each of Sweet Pill’s members grew up in South Jersey’s legendary punk and emo scene, all playing in different projects. While attending Rowan University, Sweet Pill guitarist Jayce Williams was living in a house off-campus. Influenced by his time growing up in the Philadelphia scene, attending house shows, basement shows, Williams had always wanted to book shows of his own. When he finally had the house to do so, he wasted no time, throwing shows as often as he could. This led to him interacting with and booking his future Sweet Pill bandmates’ respective projects and was how he first met Zayna Youssef, Sweet Pill’s powerhouse of a lead singer who also attended Rowan at the time. Williams said, “Zayna had heard about these shows and she came to one and she asked around about who was putting the shows on and she found me. She was like, ‘You want to smoke a joint?’ And I said ‘Yeah’ which eventually led to “So, you want to jam?’ We started hanging out. I had some older friends at the time that were in the music industry program that I was in that were looking to record an album for their senior capstone project. So essentially, Sweet Pill started as a school project.”
Youssef credits her brother with getting her into music in the first place. Ten years older than her, he played in bands in Philly since Youssef could remember. “I just thought [my brother] was the coolest person ever,” she said. “He played basement shows and at our local roller rink all the time. He showed me bands like Circa Survive and Armor for Sleep and Taking Back Sunday. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can’t get cooler than this.’ I’ve spent my life trying to be that cool and he said I was pretty cool recently, so I hope I’ve achieved that.” Her brother is a guitar player and she remembers trying to convince him to let her play his guitar but he’d never let her given that she was ten years younger and he was worried she’d break it. What he did, however, was give her a guitar of her own to learn on when she was “around third grade.” This is where her musical journey truly started, led her to the violin and percussion as well as the choir. “I played in the school bands. I did anything I could but I loved singing the most so I stuck with it until basically through college where I joined the women’s choir.” Though her brother is now in his 40s with a family and kids, he still jams in his band from time to time. Youssef said, “I keep telling him he can play with Sweet Pill sometime so we’ll see what happens.”
Youssef’s dedication to the music was apparent from the earliest days of Sweet Pill. After amassing enough musicians to make a band — including still-current drummer Chris Kearney and some early members who have since left the band —, they knew they needed to start practicing together, jamming, figuring out the sound. “Our first practice was on Zayna’s birthday,” Williams said. “She didn’t even mention it until after. It shows how dedicated she was from the jump.”
After practicing for a while, dialing in what they wanted the band to be, their first opportunity for a show came in 2018. Williams was still booking shows at his house and received an opportunity to book Slaughter Beach Dog, a new project from Jake Ewald, vocalist and guitarist of legendary emo pioneers Modern Baseball. Modern Baseball had just famously broken up so this felt like it could be huge for Sweet Pill. “I was like, ‘Okay, guys, we need to write five songs so we can play a 20-minute set and this will be our first show.’ And sure enough, we made it work and the rest is history,” Williams said.
Despite a strong start, COVID came and “put a dent in [Sweet Pill’s] early success.” However, Williams looks at it as almost a good thing that they were forced to put a pause on their growing momentum. It allowed them to slow down, continue dialing in their sound and, most importantly, finish their first album, Where the Heart Is, which has since come to be regarded as something of a modern emo classic. Williams said, “That extra time that we had, the world being shut down, especially the music industry, actually really, really helped us. It gave us a lot more space and opportunity to make the album what we wanted it to be.”
Sweet Pill now consists of 5 members: Youssef on vocals, Williams on guitar, Chris Kearney on drums, Sean McCall on guitar and backing vocals and Ryan Cullen on bass. Though they are decidedly an emo band, their sound is an amalgamation of much more. Their sound draws from emo legends such as Circa Survive but also feels very math rock at times, post-hardcore at others with an healthy amount of pop-punk thrown in for good measure. Kearney attributes Sweet Pill’s wide-ranging sound to each of the members coming from different musical backgrounds but also sharing the same scene. He said, “We all have quite different influences and we all bring to the table what we like. The end result is Sweet Pill.”
Kearney also attributes his bandmates’ different play styles to helping build the sound. He said, “I think it’s a cool blend of things. You got the cool, jangly guitar stuff. I come from a prog drumming influence. I don’t do lot of prog drumming in Sweet Pill but I’m definitely inspired by a lot of that stuff. Ryan’s on the bass and he brings a force that is unmatched. He’s a guitar player first and he plays the bass like a guitar.” Williams referred to their sound as “nostalgia-core,” saying that while he very much believes Sweet Pill to be fresh and new, he acknowledges that a lot of their sound wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for bands that have come before. He said, “The biggest compliment I think we get is when we play to an older crowd and we get compared to a lot of older emo bands, which is what we all collectively have in common.”
As mentioned above, each member of Sweet Pill came up in either the Philadelphia and South Jersey punk scenes, legendary for producing bands like The Wonder Years, Circa Survive, Algernon Cadwallader, Mannequin Pussy, Man Overboard and so many more. Williams believes these scenes influenced the ethos of the band, the sense of community the band emanates. He spoke about DIY spots such as the First Unitarian Church showing him what was possible, what people in a scene can build with their very own hands.
Both McCall and Cullen, who attended high school together, grew up in the Philly DIY scene, playing shows since they were kids. Cullen was three years younger than McCall, hung out with McCall’s younger brother. It wasn’t “until the end of high school” that they really began hanging out and they haven’t stopped since, marveling at how life turns out. Cullen said “We grew up seeing [McCall’s] band in like third grade and now we tour the goddamn world together.” The two joined the band mid-COVID “about halfway through the writing of Where the Heart Is” and clicked immediately. They had known all the members of the band due to how inclusive the Philly and Jersey scenes are and joined seamlessly.
Where the Heart Is skyrocketed the band in an almost unprecedented way. Released in 2022, it brought the band to national attention almost overnight. However, they feel that, as much as they love the album, they have grown out of where they were when they recorded it. Due to the fact that it was recorded during COVID, they recorded most of the songs before they had ever been performed, something Williams described as being completely out of the realm of how they actually prefer to do things. They’ve taken what they learned from that recording experience and applied it to their latest release, Still There’s a Glow, which released in March of this year. While the album maintains many themes found on Sweet Pill’s earlier effort, it feels more mature, polished, like life well lived. It delves deep into the low moments, the hopeless moments, the times when the darkness seems impenetrable. Despite that, as is the case with the best emo music, it absolutely shines with hope, recognition, the knowledge that no one is alone, that there is always someone out there who understands.
Youssef said she wrote most of the songs while in the studio with the guys. They were trying out riffs and beats while she sat and figured out the songs’ structures, what she wants them to say. She described the process as quite difficult, saying, “I put so much pressure on [herself] lyrically. The melodies came easier but I was really struggling to be real with myself about what I wanted to write about.” She said that she usually comes with more fully formed songs before she gets to the studio but, that since she was having trouble, having the guys around really helped. “We all heard the songs come together for the first time as it was happening.”
Youssef did eventually find what she wanted to write about. She said, “A lot of it is about hitting a low and not knowing how to get out of it without being so destructive. There’s a lot of therapy, a lot of reflection and a lot of admitting that you did something wrong. That’s pretty much what I ended up wanting to sing about.” Despite the heavy themes, Youssef is able to imbue her writing and her voice with so much power and hope, this unavoidable sense that even if everything is going to hell, you will one day be able to drag yourself back up to the realm of the living to live glowingly. She said, “I feel like there’s so much self-deprecating emo out there. For me, when I hear something positive I actually feel it and think it. I could sit there and say ‘Woe is me’ this whole album but what’s the point if there’s not a glow at the end of the tunnel.”
Sweet Pill has been touring extensively since the end of COVID, so much that they felt compelled to postpone the tour they’re currently on in order to “tour more sustainably” and make sure they were ready to tour Still There’s a Glow. Over the years, they’ve been able to tour with legends of the emo and pop-punk world. Their first major tour was in support of The Wonder Years. They spent 2022 on the road with La Dispute. But now, after opening up for Joyce Manor in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, they are finally headlining their own tour and they’ll be bringing along Deux Visages and Bike Routes, who are also from Philly and South Jersey, respectively, showing how the band is paying forward the good will they were afforded when they were younger.
Sweet Pill will be stopping by The Oriental Theater on Thursday, September 3rd and the band promises a hell of a show. Kearney said to expect new things if you’ve seen them before, different intros and outros, “little nuggets of new sprinkled here and there.” If you haven’t seen em, buckle up. Their shows are intense, heartfelt and such a good time. Williams said that they’ve been perfecting “this kiss,” a moment where he and McCall kiss each other along to the beat. He promises they’ve upgraded it so I won’t spoil anything here.
Sweet Pill is truly one of the best bands out there in any genre, the kind of band that you are happy to exist at the same time as. Go hit the show and let them teach you how to glow.
Get tickets to Sweet Pill’s September 3rd show at The Oriental here!
All photography pulled from Sweet Pill’s social media accounts. Follow them on Instagram @sweetpill.
