Kayzo Discusses His Transition From Hockey To Dance Music

Hayden Capuozzo, best known behind the decks as Kayzo, is renowned for his distinct sound that fuses all styles of bass music with rock and metal. Prior to his work as a bass music heavyweight champion, he was a hockey player who traveled around the United States and Canada.

From when he was three until he was 19 years old, the producer played hockey, and his goal was to become a professional player.

“I pretty much spent every waking second of my life training and playing hockey,” he says. “Any chance I got to explore anything outside of sports at that time in my life was overshadowed by my hockey ambitions and goals.”

While Capuozzo had musical opportunities when he was younger, they “faded out” and weren’t a priority for him. He says he was never in a band, but he was an avid fan of all things rock and metal. As he began delving more into dance music, he used it to pump him up for hockey games.

The Los Angeles-based producer says he played hockey at four different high schools, but the one that introduced him to electronic dance music was during his sophomore year, which had several players from Europe on it. His teammates would play house and techno in the locker room whenever they had the AUX cord. He was hooked on the genre and, after attending Lollapalooza and seeing Skrillex perform, he became interested in music production.

Capuozzo started making music when he began college after feeling the burnout from playing hockey for so many years. This brought a strong passion and energy he hadn’t seen since playing hockey, which he says was difficult to break away from as he felt he had lost his identity.

“When I started to find music and understand it from the producer’s aspect and understanding of it and wanting to learn how to make music, I felt this huge rush of excitement, drive, focus and passion for something that was new,” he says.

The Welcome Records label boss decided he wanted to switch from Texas Tech to a music school, even creating a PowerPoint presentation to show his parents why he should transition schools. His parents said yes, allowing him to drop out of college and attend Los Angels’ Icon Collective for the nine-month program. Capuozzo says he applied his work ethic from hockey to his music production during this time. Thus, Kayzo was started in 2016.

“I wasn’t a musically gifted child and I didn’t grow up playing instruments, but I had these ideas in my head that I knew I was going to work harder than 99.9% of people in my position,” he says. “I’ll work 16 hours a day in the studio, I’ll work longer and harder and I’ll make it work because I don’t know anything else. That’s how I lived with hockey and I got to this point in my life where I was older. I dropped out of college for this. I have to do this. I gave myself no safety net. I wanted to make it work, but I had to make it work.”

Indeed, the artist has proven to make his Kayzo project work as he has performed at acclaimed festivals and venues around the world such as Coachella, Lollapalooza and Electric Daisy Carnival. Some of his top hits include “Suffocate,” “Battle Dums,” “WAITING,” “DOMINATION” and “Braincase.”

However, when he began his project, he felt uninspired, so he looked back to the rock and metal music he listened to in his formative years.

“[That] is what I grew up loving and this is a huge part of my life and my identity as Hayden,” he says. “How could I bring that piece of me to the Kayzo project that I had with dance music at the time and bring a piece of me of who I am with pre-writing music and [articulating] that through my music? That was the start of breaking ground on my interpretation of rock and electronic music—that’s where it blossomed.”

Capuozzo’s blend of metal and rock with bass music creates a distinct sound rarely seen within the genre. The producer features a guitar player and a drummer during his Unleashed XL Tour sets. He has also fused his energetic music with artists of various genres such as Bad Omens, Papa Roach, Subtronics, Atreyu, Our Last Night and Black Tiger Sex Machine.

“That’s the cool part about this music and taking different worlds and bringing them together,” Capuozzo says. “You’re throwing paint at the wall and you don’t know what color you’re going to get, so you may not get the same color every time. You’ll get different interpretations of stuff, and I think that’s what keeps me motivated to make music is that whoever I work with, whether it’s another electronic artist or it’s with a band, it’s with a singer or a guitar player or a drummer, it’s always different and that’s what I like about it. There’s no repetition, there’s no repetitiveness to this.”