Collier Lyn-Hillman, 25, has been a part of the Kalamazoo music scene since 2018. He has played in the bands Supertan, Basement Window, Angel Boy Disaster Cult and Domain Master. 

 

Angel Boy Disaster Cult is his own project. 

 

Angel Boy Disaster cult is pretty much my baby, like of course I want my band members to do their own stuff in the band or whatever in the band, but in terms of the songs or whatever I kind of want the final say of what I want in the songs. It basically started as just a me project that turned into a band. 

 

I always wanted to do my own music for a very long time, but after a failed attempt in 2018 I joined a band and we did a lot of stuff then we broke up in 2020. Then I went through a really bad breakup during that time too so I started writing my own music, putting it on Soundcloud and then I was like, you know what I should actually start doing this, and my roommate produced a song for me and I put it in Spotify then I started getting the band together in summer of 2021 and that’s how it started.  

 

The first release for Angel Boy was Hard to Bare. 

 

It was supposed to be put on Soundcloud as a whatever song but since my roommate at the time it was right up his alley in terms of music styling, he was like I’ll produce for you and you can put it out there on Spotify and make it your first single and I was like okay. I put it out there, it was supposed to be a therapy song. I still like it, it’s definitely not anything that I’m writing right now

 

A therapy song to Collier is…

 

It's just stuff like when I’m feeling really bad like I can’t think about anything else and I need to get something out there or I need to work on something that will take my mind off of it. I’ll put some Soundcloud stuff on, I’ll get my keyboard or an acoustic guitar or whatever and  like put my iPhone mic on the speaker and just record drums and every instrument on that and I’ll basically just produce it myself in like a night or two nights just to get something out there because I’m sad and I want validation. 

 

I feel like that’s a powerful thing is to be able to turn your pain into something constructive

 

Oh absolutely it’s probably one of the best things you could do with pain that you have, because if you’re not putting your mind into something creative or doing something else you’re basically just sitting there and moping which is not fun, so I just put my energy into that so I’m not sad. 

 

Under Angel Boy I have basically just four singles and I want to get more out there. I want to start recording sometime soon, the bands started going at it again but we’re definitely not there yet. 

 

While playing shows is really important I really want to get some stuff out there because I’m really tired of the singles I have out there on Spotify right now, and I really some new stuff that reflects how I am as a songwriter now. The last song is almost a year old in December so it’s time for new stuff.

 

You can’t go anywhere, you can’t do much with just doing shows, you need to put stuff out there because if you’re just staying in Michigan while doing shows people in California aren’t going to hear you, they won’t be listening to you. You got to put stuff out there as much as you can to stay relevant pretty much. 

 

He expressed a desire to be a bigger act. 

 

My biggest dream for this band and for anything really is to tour, you know, be a bigger act. I don’t feel comfortable where I’m at. I want to get more out there. I want to get to more people. I want to start playing more. 

 

He describes his genre as…

 

Hear Alternative, rock, you know I take a lot of inspiration from Muse, Queens of Stone Age, Deftones, all those. It’s like heavy, very disgusting heavy distorted guitars but with a very clean vocal on it because I like to sing. 

 

Collier started singing when he was young.

 

My mom was a singer, she was in a show choir in high school so I’ve always been around that stuff, and my dad played drums and my dad also sang too so me and my brother both picked up singing

 

My dad bought a drum set in 2004, and I looked up to my dad a lot. I’d go down on his Kit all the time and play really poorly but you know I was having fun, I’d listen to songs on my iPod and play along. Then, bass I started playing in seventh grade because I was in a band with my dad and my uncle or whatever. 

 

Collier plays bass and lead vocals in the band though he played nearly every instrument on the recorded versions of the project. 

 

On It Had to End was my old guitar player. He played guitar on that but everything else, every other song and every instrument on that song even was all me. 

 

He explained his process for creating that song 

 

I like to fuck around on my bass all the time, I just play around with different chords or notes or whatever and I started playing that riff and I really liked it. I just kind of started piecing it together and I brought it to the band at the time. The lyrics didn’t come til the day I had to record it. I am terrible at coming up with lyrics, when I do it, I think they are for the most part good but it’s really hard for me to come up with stuff. Out of any instrument or anything in terms of music I am most self conscious with my lyric writing . Vocal melodies always come first. That song the day of recording it I had no lyrics written. I’d even played a show without lyrics written and basically just made up everything on the spot. It was like ten minutes before I got picked up by my guitar player to go to Battle Creek to record it and I just wrote it right down, I was like this is actually the best song I’ve written thus far in terms of lyrics.

 

It all worked out in the end. I'm really proud of it. 

 

The set he free-styled on was the first Angel Boy Disaster Cult show at Back Forty Fest in 2021. He reminisced on some other performance memories.

 

I haven’t been playing much with angel boy yet, I will say the last show we had was so much fun because I got to play with one of my favorite bands, Lung, and their like a drum and cello duo and I’ve been following them since 2018 and I was asked to play a show with them at Papa Petes, and I jumped at the chance, I was so excited. We were first and we played a set, and it was a really good set, I wish more people were there for it. 

 

Though Angel Boy Disaster Cult hasn’t played a ton of sets yet, Collier has a lot of experience performing with his other projects. 

 

I’ve played so many sets it’s hard to say how many because I have my other band Basement window, and my old band Supertan I have a lot of memorable sets from that that I will never forget. 

 

He says he felt motivated to create a project of his own because…

 

I always wanted to do my own music I had a little thing I wanted to do before I joined Supertan which went on for years and at that point every song I was making just wasn’t it they were all bad, I was not good at writing at the time, then I joined Supertan which I was like, you know what I just want to join another band it will get my foot in the door, it will be good for me to do that for now. Once Supertan broke up and my relationship at the time ended, and I wasn’t seeing a lot of my friends at the time because Covid was getting really bad again so I just cooped up in my house like everyday and I was just going through like a lot. Like it was really bad so I just kind of had to put my energy into music and writing songs because I didn’t know what else to do. All I was doing was lying in my bed watching the slow passage of time. 

 

It’s very therapeutic but right now it’s been really hard to write. 

 

He says his negative life experiences help to inspire his songs.

 

If it weren’t for that breakup It Had To End wouldn’t have happened. I wrote that song a year after the breakup happened and it was basically about how this had to end for me to realize who I am and what I had to fix and it gave me inspiration. It’s kind of bad for an artist to admit this but when bad stuff happens it’s like aw man, there’s a song right there. Going through that really dark time really lended itself well to the sound that I was going for and my anxiety at the time was really bad, I mean it’s bad a lot but at that point it was like sending me over the edge or whatever. 

 

Though his favorite piece of solo work isn’t even released as an Angel boy song yet. 

 

My favorite song is called Eye to Eye I wrote back in December. I was just fucking around on my keyboard and found these notes I really liked and I basically wrote that song in like two days. It turned out so well for being recorded on an iPhone mic, I got the levels perfectly.I really like the lyrics, the guitar solo I’m very proud of. Every part of that song I am just in love with and its like not an angel boy sounding sound, its very poppy. 

 

My old roommate was like you should make music like that and I was like, that’s not my kind of music but I appreciate that kind of music and its definitely stuff that I will be looking at in the future. 

 

He says sometimes he finds himself creating entire songs in his head. 

 

There’s songs that I’ve completely made up in my own head that I made all the parts for and just started playing. There’s definitely songs that I want to piece together that I haven’t even played a note of or riff of yet that I just think about in my head and I feel like the best songs that I have ever came up with have been right here that I sing when Im super fucking high in my bathroom or whatever. 

 

He says the songs hes writing now have a similar theme. 

 

A lot of the songs that I want to write coming up are about loss, about losing things, losing people. Losing a lot, because people come and go throughout your life, you’re always gonna have that. 

 

Since the pandemic happened a lot of negative stuff has been happening in my life since then so it will be nice to put it out there, put it in a song and be as poetic as I can be about it. 

 

Collier expressed a love for sad music. 

 

Depressing music is great. I love it. I like some happy jams here and there, but for the most part I am really into heavy and dark music that makes you cry. I love crying to music. It's so much fun. That’s what I want, I want to make people cry.I wanna cry. We can all cry together. I want to be up on stage and just sob into the microphone and have people be like damn this is art. 

 

Listening to depressing music while you’re depressed is great because you have someone who maybe didn’t go through the exact thing you went through but if you’re depressed depressing music is probably the best thing to do because if you’re listening to a happy song while you’re going through it, you’re like god I hate this person man, I hate that they’re happy I want to be happy. 

 

Even when I’m not depressed I enjoy that stuff, I just really like seeing people put a lot of emotion into their music and I’m just very into people being vulnerable. But when you’re writing from those sorts of places, like from a place of sadness, complete utter loss or depression whatever, that is very vulnerable. 

 

I feel like it is easier for me a little bit because I am a more open book but I feel like for a lot of people singing about  their depression or singing about their traumas its very emotional for them and I love to see people being vulnerable. I love to see people push themselves like that, and I don’t know it’s just really nice. I love to hear that. 

 

His goals for the project have stayed relatively the same since it started.

 

My goals have pretty much stayed the same since I decided that music was my thing. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life, I quit college to pursue it. Ever since that point my goals have pretty much been get as far as I can. 

 

I want to make a name for myself as a songwriter, I want to be the best I can possibly be. I am also very competitive when it comes to music. I mean I’m not toxically competitive. I'm not shitting on people's performances or whatever, but I want people to remember me. I want to make a name for myself. I want people to know I have what it takes to be a great songwriter and a great musician, and I want to tour and of course I want to play bigger venues. All the rock and roll, the glitz and glam of it all I want it all. 

 

Angel Boy Disaster Cult has had a shift in its members.

 

The current members are me on bass and the vocals and then we have Fred Gordon on guitar whose also the singer and guitar player for my other band basement window that I play drums for. Then on drums is Garrett Yates, he is the drummer for Bronson Arm, another local band but is also the runner of the runoff the venue in Kalamazoo. 

 

Right now, I’ve only had one song that we’ve really came up with, I had a couple songs with with my old guitar player who left and we made both of those songs from jams and then this new one that I’ve been writing with Fred and Garett, I came up with the baseline and how I wanted to structure it. 

 

Unless I have something very specific in mind that I want them to do I do not care. If you’re going to be in my band I want to trust that we have a very similar vision that you know what I kind of want and I think so far Fred has been doing a really good job with writing guitar parts and Garrett does an amazing job coming up with writing drum parts, he’s a great writer and player, so I like to have full faith in my band members in that respect. They’ve really been doing a really good job and I’m really happy that I have them in my band and I’m surrounded by really talented people. 

 

Collier talked about how he became acquainted with Garret of Bronson Arm. 

 

When shows started happening again, they started playing more and then I actually became a genuine fan of them. This is a band who even if I didn’t know these guys I would be listening to them all the time. We met at a show, and then my drummer at the time last year during the fall had to leave because he had school or whatever and months went by and Garrett was like, well I’ll be your drummer and I was like that’s sick cause I’m a genuine fan of you

 

He expressed love for the local music scene in Kalamazoo. 

 

I have been in the scene since 2018. When Supertan first started, or when I joined it back in summer of 2018, the day of my first show, that night we played a house venue that was over by K College in that area. We were kind of dipping our toes in. Back when Satellite records was doing shows we played there. Then in 2019 we really started like actually doing stuff, and we started to go to shows just not even playing them. I started to know more people in the scene, I knew people from that band who knew people from the scene. 

 

I’m really glad I joined that band because it really set me up for it, if I would have not joined the band I would have never known about all this, or I probably would have but it would have taken me a lot longer.

 

But in 2019, Supertan was playing house show after house show in Kalamazoo so I really got to know a lot of the people and there’s so many people in the scene that I really love and really look up to. 

 

Though he mentioned having fun times traveling with his other project Basement Window. 

 

Basement window played a show in Clarkston in May at a dog grooming place which was really fun but really sad because I felt like we were really hurting this dogs ears because its was loud and there were dogs in the other room and some woman brought her little dog and was sitting with it while one of the bands played and I was like my ears are being pierced right now I can’t imagine what this hypersound sensitive  dog is feeling right now. 

 

Basement Window we just played a show in Detroit at a house a couple weeks ago that was a juggalo fest and it was a really shitty rundown Detroit neighborhood, and it was pretty dope like everyone was so cool and it was a cool experience but I wanna play way further than anything I’m doing now. 

 

While having experience in other bands in the Kalamazoo scene, he was also brought up playing instruments at a young age. 

 

My family has always been musical, and I think it’s the thing I’m most good at and I’m not even to the point that I want to be. Like it’s just always something that’s been in my life, like my dad used to play drums with my uncle who was a saxophone player, and like they would have a bunch of people come through, like they had a guitar player, a bunch of bassists and a bunch of horn players because they played funk. 

 

And then I started piano lessons when I was a kid, I took bass lessons also. Piano lessons for five years, then I started doing band in middle school and I played trumpet, and I started playing trumpet with my dad and my uncle. 

 

Legit has been something I’ve been into my entire life and the exposure to it  I had at a young age is what propelled me to do it. 

 

He reminisced on some of his earliest  performance memories

 

My first show ever was a wedding when I was 14. I played bass with my uncle and my dad played. I played just the two of us on bass while the bride and groom walked down the aisle. It probably sounded really bad but I remember doing well. Then I joined some bands in high school like I had a band with my former roommate and one of my best friends Brndon, well his artist name is PIB. I was in two bands in high school with him.

 

I was in two really bad bands in high school with him and we played like Old Dog and we did an open mic, and those are some of the worst videos I can’t even watch them. I like watching cringe stuff like its fun for me sometimes but like watching myself because it was an open mic at old dog and a lot of people will play softer stuff and people are just trying to enjoy their meal but they are just listening to a fucking dud go lskdfakdjf in the mic and we had to stop because our bassist didn’t tune, it was just really fucking bad, but you got to start somewhere. 

 

My first high school band was called Fiber Optic rabbits because there was this easter rabbit that had fiber optic rabbits in my parents house. This was my junior year, I played drums. 

 

My second band was called Ringmaster Moses. I started off playing drums in Ring Master Moses, and I was doing vocals at the same time too and then I realized, at least at the time, I can’t do this. I am not good enough to the point where I can sing and play drums at the same time. I could now. Then I went up to just vocals, and I was just the front man. 

 

Then when I joined Supertan I played drums for that one too. 

 

Supertan is what I think really accelerated my drumming. For probably the first year I’d say I was just there, I had some stage presence but I was just playing then after a certain point I got really comfortable  every show I broke my kick I broke a snare, I completely cracked a cymbal like I was destroying my kit, and I still kind of do that but I got to be a bit more mindful about it now. I just loved bashing my kit

 

Then I joined a band, my old roommate’s band PIB. He’s doing his own stuff right now he doesn’t have a band but I was in his band for a while and I played bass in that. It was a little more funky and a little more tight which I was used to playing years before. 

 

Now of course I’m in Angel Boy and Basement Window but I also have a new band that I’m starting with my friend Landon, who's the bass player for Pink Pout and were starting this sludgy metal drum and bass duo and we'll both be on vocals and hell be doing low growls while I’l be doing high stuff and it’s just something were not taking insanely seriously but It’s something were really excited about and we wanna get out there. I really just want to get back to putting insane gashing holes into my kit again. 

 

He compared Domain Master’s sound to Angel Boy Disaster Cult. 

 

Angel Boy is heavy and while I want to get a little more disgusting with it, I feel like angel boy is a little more refined, you know I’m not playing guitar riffs that sound like they’re going through a chainsaw. I’m taking a softer approach, a more melodic approach with this. But with the two piece I am doing more just heavy, just screaming, just being as obnoxious as we possibly can. They are both heavy but two different styles of it I’d say. 

 

Yeah, sludgy, sloppy, disgusting, vile, inhumane, all of that. 

 

When asked about his bass tone… 

 

I literally just put it through a distortion pedal and that’s it. I bought this pedal in 2020. The distortion I had was not making my bass sound that great even though it was a Boss Bass Overdrive which everyone  praises and I’ve heard it sound good on other peoples rigs but it did not sound good with mine. 

 

MKR classic overdrive and god I never want to get rid of it. I'm going to keep it forever and if it breaks then I’ll just get a new one. Because god it just makes my bass tone so heavy and its just wall to wall bass. 

 

Some point during Angel Boy probably after the next album I want to release, I want to move up to vocals. I want to stop playing bass in it, just let someone else do it because I want to have more complex basslines, guitar riffs. I want a more complex song. Playing and singing at the same time kind of hinders one of them so I can’t be as good vocally if I’m playing bass, and I can’t be as good at bass if I’m doing vocals. It’s stuff I definitely would like to work on but I feel like I would just want to get on the mic and just like screech into the mic. 

 

The few times I was a frontman it was so much fun to just like run around on stage and I feel like nowadays especially with some of the crowds that are at the shows now that would be so much fun.

 

He talked about his stage presence some

 

Whenever I’m on stage I have to be as animated as I possibly can because like I said, I want people to remember me. People mostly remember me for just smashing my kit to pieces and being really animated. I feel anger on stage. Not like I’m actually angry but I get this primal rage out of me whenever I’m on stage and I have to do that for every show. If you look at me onstage and you’re like that guy has issues and while that is kind of the case, I mean I’ve got multiple layers, people aren’t one dimensional. 

 

I wanna be animated and I feel like being animated to me is just like being angry. I used to have really bad anger issues when I was a kid which they’re better now. But when I was younger I would have a lot of anger I did like wrestling and football in high school so I was always really active and I was always doing sports that required anger and physical activity and contact so I have always channeled a lot of anger through that kind of stuff but you can’t get too angry because when you get too angry you get really flustered. 

 

There are times where I would be on stage where I have gotten too angry, too into it, too mad, too intense to where I like to lose myself and I just forget that I’m playing a song that has like ten different.. like math rock it’s harder cause Supertan wasn’t like metal but we were kind of heavy indie rock. A lot of the songs were just like easy just smashing my crash cymbal for a minute straight but now that I’m in a math rock band sometimes I need to reign it in because I can’t switch time signatures sometimes if I’m flustered. 

 

I feel like Basement window completely elevated my drumming even harder than Supertan did in different ways like I have to be more intricate. Writing drums is one of my favorite things because I feel like a lot of songs can be really great but kind of suffer from generic drum parts. With math rock I can do that way more, because I love doing fills. I love doing weird stuff on the snare, I’m trying to think of all the terminology but like I don’t know I just play the damn thing I don’t know everything else about it. 

 

When asked about his background in music theory…

 

I do but it is super surface level and I am terrible at it. I know every good boy deserves fudge, All cows eat grass, all that stuff. I kind of know where all the notes are but like especially Fred will be like play in 6/14 times here and 8/14 there, and I’m like dude you’re gonna have to like to sing it for me, I don’t know what you’re saying dude. 

 

Reading sheet music is so hard. I took bass lessons my sophomore year in high school for like a month or tow, every season was just me going there and him putting the note sheet in front of me and the sheet that shows you where the notes are on the bass and it would literally just be me looking at the note sheet and be like D? Okay D. And then I’d play the D and I’d be like F. I would just do that the entire time he never butted in to say anything, he didn’t push me or anything. It would just be that the entire session and then he’d be like, 7:30 already wow, like literally every time. 

 

I’m not familiar with a lot of the intricacies of music just in general but I know I can play. To be a musician to even be a really good musician you don’t need to know much of that. 

 

Though he said he does see the value in learning music theory.

 

A lot of people I know who are just way better than me, they know way more about their instrument than I know mine but I feel like if you just have the feeling and just know what notes correspond with what sounds good together, I feel like you’re pretty much set. 

 

When asked if he ever questioned his level music theory knowledge...

 

Maybe in high school a little bit because I was in band and I was around people who were so into band and knew way more about all that than I did and I was like always in the last chair pretty much. Nowadays I’m very confident in my playing and very confident that I can stand toe to toe with even some of the better people in the music scene. I saw a band recently that I was like damn that guys so good but I could do that. It’s nice to have that mindset because for a long time I was never like that. I was like ugh I could never do that, I’m not there at all wow. You know I’m like I’m not there but I could get there, very soon if I tried. 

 

He expressed the importance of creating an image for oneself.

 

An image is a really good thing you have to strive for especially if you want to make it more. That’s something I really need to work on, I need to work on how I want to look, to convey what I’m doing. Social media is a whole beast of a thing and I’ve got to get better at that. 

 

There are plenty of bands where you look at their social media and you just follow them because you want to know when their next show is gonna be. You want to know, oh is this band coming to my town? There's a few bands that I like that will post really funny shit on their instagrams or whatever and I feel like I pay attention to those pages more and I feel like you should want people to pay attention to your pages more, I mean, you want to make it. 

 

It’s such a vital thing now in this day and age where you need social media to get your name out there. 

 

When asked what it meant to make it…

 

Making it for me would be being able to live off my art. It would be me being comfortable enough where I don’t really need to work another job.

 

When asked why he creates music aside from the emotional processing aspect of it...

 

I don’t know, maybe I’m really fucking full of myself but I just want to prove myself. I also really like inspiring people, I want people to be inspired by music and even my playing. 

 

There was one time when I went to guitar center and I was playing on one of the electronic kits and this kid walks into the drum room and looks at me with giant eyes and his mouth’s wide open and he goes out into the guitar room and grabs his dad and his sister, brings them into there is like look at that dude, look at that! And his dad was like, you’ll get there someday and I turned around and was like you’ll get there someday. And it was literally like one of the greatest moments of my life because I don’t know what the kid is doing now but I hope he’s playing drums, I hope I inspired him to play drums. I really want more people to play music, it makes me feel really good when people say that I have inspired them. 

 

Music is such a powerful connector. Like you can fill 50,000 seats just by playing your instruments for like 2 hours or even an hour or a half like you can get packed crowds that scream your shit, and I think that’s so cool. 

 

When asked about what music inspires him the most

 

There’s two songs on that album, Queens of Stone Age Songs for the Deaf, my favorite album of all time and Queens of Stone Age is my favorite band of all time. I think they’ve inspired me more than anyone ever has. 

 

My favorite song of all time, It’s called Song for the Deaf its the second to last song on the album. It feels demonic in a way and I love that I love music that sounds like if I believed in God or I was a Christian I would be terrified of this, that’s kind of my music to a T. It’s just really demonic, it’s super melodic, the guitars and everything on that song is mixed perfectly, there’s a backing singer who played with the band a little bit, he just died recently, Mark Lanigan, he put his really rough vocals to the background but he wouldn't be like singing, it would just add. And I like when people do that they put vocals where they're not really singing but it just adds to the mix. I feel like for me it’s like the perfect song. I think every part of that song is just perfect and I could listen to it constantly.

 

There’s also another song on that album called Song for the Dead. They play it a lot as a last song. The drum part, Dave Grohl is my favorite drummer and he plays drums on that album and he has this drum intro at the beginning that is just the most aggressive shit, you don’t expect it but it just goes right in and its nothing but assault the entire song, it does get slow but it doesn’t damper at all and I also like that, I like being assaulted by my music, I like feeling like I just got my ass kicked. 

 

He talked some about a sensation he feels at live shows.

 

Most of the time, every show I go to I am like damn I wish I could be up there right after this person. 

 

He says he has plans to host a DIY venue in his current house to help support the Kalamazoo music scene, he plans to call it…

 

We’re gonna call it Punk Hazard, it’s a place in One Piece because I’m a huge One Piece fan. I’m not finished with it yet. I have a few hundred episodes to go. 

 

I think that’s such a cool name for a venue even though the place itself is very gross. But yeah, it’s called Punk Hazard.  

 

Collier’s next gig is December 10th at the Hell Hole. He’ll be playing with Basement Window and Domain Master.