from first to last biography

From First to Last never fit comfortably inside one genre. The band came out of Orlando’s early-2000s hardcore scene playing music that could turn from a pop melody to a metallic breakdown without warning. Depending on who was describing them, they were post-hardcore, screamo, emo or simply a scene band. The uncertainty suited them.

Before the tours and festival stages, the group took shape in Florida’s close-knit underground. Its members slept on apartment floors, dumpster-dived for food and found an early community in the state’s straight-edge and hardcore scenes. Guitarists Matt Good and Travis Richter were drawn to the possibilities of a sound whose rules had not yet been settled. A song could be catchy and abrasive, vulnerable and violent. They did not have to choose.

The first document of that approach was 2003’s Aesthetic EP. A year later, Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Bodycount introduced a young Sonny Moore on lead vocals and pushed the band into a much larger world. The record sounded urgent and occasionally unruly: tangled guitars, sharp melodic turns and performances that seemed liable to come apart in real time. Those rough edges are part of why it lasted. For many listeners, Dear Diary became an entry point not only to From First to Last, but to an entire corner of heavy music.

The band went darker on 2006’s Heroine. The arrangements grew more ambitious, but the tension at the center of the music remained: the sense that melody and chaos were fighting for control of the same song.

Moore eventually left and became Skrillex, one of electronic music’s most influential artists. From First to Last continued through lineup changes and long stretches of inactivity, while its early records found new listeners. Young musicians kept discovering that heaviness did not have to rule out vulnerability or a strong chorus.

Good kept working inside that same broad musical world. In addition to remaining the main writer for From First to Last, he became a prolific producer and songwriter. His credits include Asking Alexandria, Sleeping With Sirens, Hollywood Undead, The Word Alive, Memphis May Fire, Blessthefall, Anti-Flag, Escape the Fate, Butcher Babies, Hyro the Hero and TX2. The work gave him years to refine the instincts that had driven From First to Last from the beginning.

Richter’s route back to the band was less direct. After a difficult period following his departure, he built a new life in Los Angeles and became a co-owner and operator of the downtown music venue 1720. The room became a gathering place for different generations of underground music scenes. It also put Richter in the orbit of vocalist Elias Villagran, better known as Lotus, and producer Nedarb.

Richter, Lotus and Nedarb went on to form If I Die First. Also consisting of vocalist/keyboardist Zubin, bassist Nolan Nunes (aka Rake; Ghostemane), and drummer Cayle Sain (Ghostemane, Twitching Tongues), and eventually drummer Derek Bloom (From First to Last), the project drew openly from early screamo, but its members also brought the perspective of the emo-rap generation. Richter and Lotus found that they worked quickly together. Vocal sessions that might have taken days were sometimes finished in hours because neither needed much explanation from the other. For Lotus, that shared language had roots in From First to Last.

He had grown up seeing himself in the band’s music and performances. Their lack of restraint helped shape his ideas about singing, screaming and being a frontman. “When I saw From First to Last, I thought, ‘Whatever that is, that’s me,’” he recalls. Working with Richter in If I Die First made the influence audible. At the time, Lotus had no reason to think it was preparing him to join one of the bands that had formed him.

The current version of From First to Last came together a song at a time. Good and Richter had begun revisiting the musical instincts behind the band’s early work. “Mirror Soul,” featuring Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, showed that the combination still had life in it. When scheduling made a larger collaboration difficult, Richter asked Lotus to try a demo.

The experiment did not stay an experiment for long. One song led to several, live performance offers followed, and Lotus’s temporary role began to become permanent. With Good, Richter, and Lotus joined by veteran From First to Last bassist Matt Manning and drummer Chris Lent (formerly of I Set My Friends on Fire and who also toured with From First to Last as a tech and also played keyboards on stage during their self-titled era), the group completed a new EP, signed with Fearless Records and returned to the stage. Shows at Welcome to Rockville, Sonic Temple, Aftershock and Warped Tour gave the lineup its first chance to work itself out in front of the audience.

Lotus arrived with an unusual advantage: he already knew what it felt like to be a From First to Last fan. He understood what listeners responded to in the old records, but he also knew that trying to reproduce Sonny Moore’s performances would reduce the band to an imitation of its younger self. His own voice, a distinctive melodic tone that can break into a visceral scream, gave the new songs somewhere else to go.

His role is not limited to singing. Lotus has been deeply involved in writing the new material, bringing in experiences and influences the band could not have drawn on 20 years ago. “I like to think what we’re making now is what From First to Last was always going to end up sounding like,” he says.

Richter describes the earliest records as containing the band’s “source code”: sharp dynamic turns, memorable melodies, physical heaviness and performances that were never polished past the point of feeling human. The phrase became useful as the members worked on new music, but it was not a command to copy old songs.

Some things have inevitably changed. The members are older, and the new material deals with adult experiences of loss, fractured relationships, survival and rebuilding. The process has changed too. “When we were young, it was like throwing darts blindfolded,” Richter says. “Now that we’re older, this is more deliberate.”

That deliberateness does not mean sanding away the volatility. It means knowing when a ragged vocal is more effective than a perfect one, when a melody needs room and when a song should simply hit harder. The new recordings retain the band’s old tension between control and collapse, but the people making them now have a clearer sense of what they want that tension to say.

From First to Last are not trying to reenact their former life. For Richter, the return continues work that ended before he was ready to leave it behind. For Lotus, it is the unlikely result of years spent absorbing the band from the audience. And for Good, it is a chance to bring everything he has learned as a writer and producer back to the sound he helped create.

With a new EP arriving through Fearless Records, the band has found a way to acknowledge its past without becoming trapped inside it — a blast from the past that refuses to live there.