For more than two decades, Scary Kids Scaring Kids have held a distinct place in heavy music, balancing volatility with melody, atmosphere with abrasion, and emotional immediacy with a sense of scale. Records like The City Sleeps in Flames and Scary Kids Scaring Kids established the band as an enduring presence within the post-hardcore generation of the 2000s, while their explosive live shows helped make SKSK unmistakably their own.

At the center of the band’s formative years was vocalist Tyson Stevens, whose voice and presence remain inseparable from the music that first defined Scary Kids Scaring Kids. After the band’s initial breakup and Stevens’ death in 2014, his legacy remained an essential part of its history.

When SKSK returned, the goal was not to recreate the past. Founding members Chad Crawford and Pouyan Afkary helped guide a period of evolution through collaborations with a wide range of vocalists and musicians, leading to Out of Light and Maps Written in Water and expanding the band’s sound without losing its emotional core.

Through that era, Albert Schweizer became an increasingly central part of SKSK’s live identity and, after years performing with the band, became its permanent vocalist. RISE marks the first Scary Kids Scaring Kids record built around Schweizer as the full-time singer, introducing a newly unified SKSK at its heaviest and most ambitious while preserving the tension, atmosphere and melody that have defined the band from the beginning.