Don Broco in the Age of Fearless
After more than a decade of shapeshifting through post-hardcore, pop hooks, and tongue-in-cheek bravado, Don Broco are entering a new chapter. The Bedford four-piece have unleashed Cellophane and Hype Man: two singles that push them into heavier, stranger territory, between nu-metal revivalism and anthemic vulnerability. We spoke with frontman Rob Damiani about fragility, friendship, and finding freedom in contradiction.
Interview Bryson Edward Howe Photography Christian Trippe Styling Matt King
Rob wears black 1960’s waterproof PVC fisherman coat, vintage pinstripe suit trousers by YSL, black leather square toe boot by Eytys; all from Disorder Archive. White tank top stylist’s own.
Don Broco’s lead single from their upcoming album announces itself with the shock-and-awe of distortion. Cellophane opens like something half-remembered from the height of nu-metal, all acoustic shimmer and a beat that moves forward with quiet insistence, before a sudden shift that pushes back into heaviness. This is the part of the Don Broco DNA that refuses to stay dormant. This is the structure the band know best: a suffocating intimacy and the urge to break it apart; to keep both poles alive at once.
“For us, it’s always about finding that balance where the song can be heavy but also tender. You want the sentiment to be clear, even if the lyrics aren’t literal – that feeling is the most important part,” lead singer Rob Damiani told me. “We’ve never purposely put humour in, but by nature of how we write it comes through. And sometimes that’s the only way you can deal with darker subject matter – letting something unexpected sit alongside it.” The line lands true because Don Broco’s music has always wrestled with strength: the physicality of riffs, the sweat-soaked exuberance of their live shows, the masculine bravado post-hardcore once promised and poisoned in equal measure. Here, the toughness buckles. The posture collapses inward.
Rob wears vintage black leather vest by Diesel, white tank top by Helmut Lang, black leather square toe boot by Eytys; all from Disorder Archive. Black suit trousers stylist’s own.
“For us, it’s always about finding that balance where the song can be heavy but also tender. You want the sentiment to be clear, even if the lyrics aren’t literal – that feeling is the most important part.”
Rob Damiani
Rob wears vintage pinstripe suit by YSL, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive. White tank top, white button up shirt stylist’s own.
The chorus itself is direct: Head in the clouds while I suffocate // Give me a reason to not inhale // Don't want the science poking around my brain // It's heavyweight// Breathing through cellophane. That image – breathing through plastic, trapped but still performing the act of living – says more than genre labels ever could. When we talked about how it sits in their catalogue, Rob leaned on the same contradictions: “We’ve never really fitted into a scene. We’ve always dipped our toes in various scenes, ever since we started as a band. We were always the odd band out.”
Don Broco’s return is also a shift in context: Cellophane is their first release with Fearless Records, produced by Dan Lancaster (whose credits include Blink-182 and Bring Me the Horizon). You can hear the lineage in the production: clear, forceful, nothing left muddy. But the song resists easy categorisation. Too sleek for grunge, too vulnerable for macho nu-metal revivalism, too heavy for pure pop.
“We’ve always tried to evolve from album to album. Honestly, we don’t really know what Don Broco is ourselves,” confesses Rob. “We’re constantly exploring that. Sometimes that means you get put in strange categories, but for us it’s about finding what feels true.”
Heaviness today is not what it was in 2000, when nu-metal’s cartoonish hybrids ruled: rapping clowns, suburban despair, lyrics that doubled as punchlines. For a time, it seemed like no one making the music was actually enjoying it. Don Broco have inherited the aftershocks of that period, but they don’t sound burdened by them. What they’ve taken is the willingness to collide extremes - soft and brutal, confessional and chest-thumping - without shame.
Rob wears black vintage wool beret, white distressed vintage t-shirt, black bib and brace motorcycle leathers, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive.
“It’s harder for press or radio when you can’t pigeonhole a band. But from a creative place, that’s what keeps us alive.”
Rob Damiani
Rob wears grey vintage mohair jumper, vintage pinstripe suit trousers by YSL, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive.
Rob wears black leather blazer by Ciro Citterio, black leather and metal hardware harness, vintage pinstripe suit trousers by YSL, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive. Black button up shirt stylist’s own.
‘Hype Man’ doubles down on that tension, but flips it outward. Where Cellophane collapses inward on fragility, Hype Man finds its release in chaos – a nu-metal rush of rapped cadences, screams, and choruses designed to shake walls loose. Rob put it simply: “It’s harder for press or radio when you can’t pigeonhole a band. But from a creative place, that’s what keeps us alive. We’d have broken up years ago if we had to just repeat the same thing.” In a song about burnout, there is a brotherhood that becomes its ballast, the thing that lets the band throw themselves fully into noise without it curdling. It’s an anthem for exhaustion, for being pulled back from the brink not by triumph but by someone standing next to you when you can’t stand yourself.
You can see the parallel in how Deftones were reappraised: no longer nu-metal also-rans, but architects of a kind of romantic heaviness that critics now treat with reverence. Don Broco aren’t aiming for that same mythos, but they operate in the same gap, where prettiness and violence crossfade into one another. They’re not parodying nu-metal’s macho spasm, nor are they disowning it. Instead, they sit in the contradiction: the fact that heaviness can be both ridiculous and necessary, a pose and a genuine cry for help. The dream becomes suffocation; the suffocation becomes a dream.
That willingness to lean on nu-metal feels like more than a stylistic throwback. For years, Don Broco played the part of the cheeky post-hardcore lads, taking the piss out of heaviness as much as they embodied it. Now, with Cellophane and Hype Man, they’ve stepped into a genre that once collapsed under its own weight, and they’re asking what might be salvageable in 2025. The answer, for them, isn’t irony – it’s directness. Nu-metal today doesn’t carry the same baggage it did at the turn of the millennium; instead, it opens a space where heaviness can be productive, where contradictions are not just tolerated but made central. For a band like Don Broco, who’ve always thrived on those contradictions, that shift feels less like reinvention than homecoming.
“We’ve got such a broad palette in what we listen to, but when it comes to what we play, there’s always that instinct to push things louder, heavier, and more physical. That’s just what feels best to us as performers, and it’s what our crowd loves too.”
“If you don’t take music too seriously, they’re one of the best live bands in the country.”
Fan on Reddit
It’s worth remembering that Don Broco are, if nothing else, a live band. “If you don’t take music too seriously,” as one fan on Reddit once put it, “they’re one of the best live bands in the country.” That looseness matters. Because even when a track like Cellophane is loaded with dread and self-doubt, it’s also carried by the band’s platinum-pop instincts – the sense that this song is meant to be sung back, shouted into air, shared.
The contradiction doesn’t resolve. That’s the point.
They don’t choose. Instead, they breathe through the plastic, press against it, and make the suffocation sing – riffs and chants ricocheting across a crowd that knows every pivot before it lands. They exhaust themselves, but the exhaustion is its core: sex, death, humdrum lives, all funnelled into a spectacle. A Broco gig can feel like being dragged through glitter and sweat, knocked back onto a couch with a “fuck” slipping out under your breath, and still finding yourself humming the hook on the way home. And that energy is now set to travel further afield. With a new album on the horizon and an Australian tour kicking off this week, the band are thinking less about reinvention than about scale. “We've always just unleashed how we feel on stage. You can't really practice that. We're very physical performers. I think I've definitely always reacted to artists that go nuts on stage, and especially rock bands and artists who are just putting out heavy, energetic music. I want to see people go wild. Because if I am in the crowd, and I'm losing my mind, you react to seeing the performer on stage doing that as well. It creates this kind of synergy between the audience and the performer, which is one of the coolest things about live music.”
Rob wears grey vintage mohair jumper, vintage pinstripe suit trousers by YSL, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive.
“I want to see people go wild.”
Rob Damiani
On Cellophane, Don Broco sound like a band caught between strength and fragility, between genre inheritance and pop ambition. On Hype Man, that push and pull detonates into something looser, funnier, more desperate. Taken together, these singles sketch a band no longer content to skate irony or posture – instead, Don Broco sound like they’re testing how far their self-sustaining energy itself can be pushed before it breaks – proof that the same contradictions can break outward as easily as they collapse inward.
Rob wears black leather blazer by Ciro Citterio, black leather and metal hardware harness, vintage pinstripe suit trousers by YSL, black leather military boots by Altercore; all from Disorder Archive. Black button up shirt stylist’s own.
Rob wears vintage black leather vest by Diesel, white tank top by Helmut Lang, black leather square toe boot by Eytys; all from Disorder Archive. Black suit trousers stylist’s own.
Listen to the new song Hype Man below or check it out on Spotify
Team credits
Interview: Bryson Edward Howe
Photography: Christian Trippe
Styling: Matt King
Hair/Grooming: Louis Byrne
Photo assistant: Ezra Evans
Styling assistant: Fraser Kenneth
PR: Satellite 414
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