Nicole Brice
Aug 31, 2026
A DIY aesthetic mixed with a little shoegaze and more
Before an interview, I usually pace around, check the time, and wonder what the interviewee will be like. But this time, maybe it was just a gut feeling—I sensed I'd meet a kindred spirit, just based on how layered and complex the music is. Music always tells a story from the soul.
Kaleidoscope Crux is all about structure, style, unique sounds, real passion for art, and a sense of community. Their lyrics feel genuine—they talk about life and people who try to outrun their past. It's raw, honest, and authentic.
The band started in 2024, led by singer Max Binet—the mastermind behind it all—plus his standout bassist, Laura Trautman, and neo-soul-inspired drummer, Greg Stelly, who complete the lineup. Max is a musician through and through, and his dad was a touring musician who stopped touring when he was born.
“I was a Napster kid and played my first show when I was 12. A lot of the people I was meeting at that point in my life were college students, and by 14 years old, I was playing in a band with all college students.”
So, what does Kaleidoscope Crux sound like? “We’re a bit antagonistic when it comes to the current music industry, and we never cut corners on ways to exploit the fuck out of that. We’re on some punk shit. Regardless of whatever subgenres we’ve been flirting with or tampering with, we come from a strong punk ethos. I think that’s very much just lost in general today.”
What do I think they sound like? Think shoegaze, some sludge, a bit of electronica, and punk energy tying it all together. Honestly? It just works.
With their new single out today, August 31, 2026, called “DM for Address”, the band has a busy rest of the year, including completing work on their full-length with ten songs. It’s rare to come across musicians not chasing clout these days, and Max is one who is in it for the right reasons – passion for the craft, and we discuss all this and more in depth in the following interview. Learn more below.
*this interview has been edited lightly for clarity
MaM: I dived into your music, which I totally dig, and I listen to everything. I can’t pin down your sound. I hear doom and sludge with a little goth, but wait, there’s shoegaze with hints of Radiohead. Help me here.
Max: We get asked that quite a bit, and when we went on tour in June for a month, we did get asked that. That was a question people seemed to have after seeing us live. People were like, hey, you’re kind of shoegaze, but what do you call yourselves, and I was just like, we don’t. Obviously, there’s elements of shoegaze and other things, and we kind of got into this scene because of the shoegaze scene. I very much made it a point to not box us into a corner with my songwriting.
I’ve always been into music saturated with effects but still kind of heavy here and there. It has peaks and valleys in softness. I’ve always been into a certain sound, and shoegaze is adjacent to that. When I was coming up in the scene, there was no shoegaze revival. There was no such thing as that. The word on the street was post-rock. There were a lot of instrumental bands, and a lot of bands using reverb and delay with these dramatic build-ups, like ten-minute songs, and that was a lot of the stuff I was listening to when I was younger, among other things. At the Drive-In is my all-time favorite band. I like The Mars Volta. Omar Rodríguez-López, who is my favorite guitar player of all time, is notorious for using a crap ton of effects pedals, and that’s the guitar player who made me switch from bass to guitar when I was younger.
MaM: And that leads me to the next question: how many instruments do you play, and what was the first instrument you picked up?
Max: I’m a third-generation musician, and my mom said that when I was about eight months old, I was sitting on my dad’s drum set, and I just picked up the sticks and did like a roll, and they were like WTF. My mom didn’t want me to be a musician and wanted me to have a more secure life. As a kid, I was always watching my dad, though, and one day I just went for it. I also played percussion in the school band starting when I was ten. As a kid, though, I had toy pianos and guitars, and I would play on pots and pans and that type of stuff. So, over the years, I picked up bass and joined the school band around the same time.
MaM: I played clarinet in school band, just for reference.
Max: I love clarinet.
MaM: It was fun.
Max: I think clarinet is awesome, and way better than flute.
MaM: I couldn’t do flute, dude. I couldn’t get my mouth right on it to make a sound. You know, they make you try out different instruments to see which one fits you, and it had to be a reed instrument. My brother played saxophone, so I chose clarinet.
Max: I did not envy the reed players in school at all, but I secretly wished I could play a reed or horned instrument, but I never really tried much. I can play pretty much anything that’s stringed. I can figure it out. Keys, piano... I’m not trained in theory. When I was in school band, I would memorize the parts. I ended up so bored with it, though, and quit the school band when I got to high school.
MaM: So, guitar, bass, and drums? Are you essentially a one-man band?
Max: Yeah, I’ve been a one-man band since pretty much since I started playing music.
MaM: So tell me more about Kaleidoscope Crux, and who is involved.
Max: KC is very much a collaborative effort, and I do most of the songwriting, but the extent of that is coming up with stuff loosely that I can bring to practice and show everyone else, so we can start messing with it to see how everyone feels, or if we want to keep it all. Sometimes, I bring in something with an initial idea, and it takes on a life of its own. I sing and play guitar, and I also handle a lot of synthesizers and samples I build. I’ll record sounds on my iPhone, like of something happening in nature or in the city, and I’ll use that. There are different layers and layers of sound quality with it.
MaM: Tell me more about the other members of your band.
Max: Laura, our bass player – LT we call her. She’s our rock. She’s big sis. Always there holding it down. So many mundane things that I just can’t get to, or whatever, because I’m writing the songs, booking the shows, etc. – from the get-go, Laura just fit in, and I didn’t really need to vocalize much what I needed. She could intuitively just tell. She’s just perfection. Couldn’t ask for more out of a bandmate. She actually started out on guitar, and I’ve known her since I was playing in that band with college students; we met through one of them. She switched to bass when she was older, so she still has this very melodic way of writing basslines, like you don’t hear much, in our wheelhouse. Usually, bass players are just holding down the root notes, but she’s doing these second-guitar-player-type things. She’s doing counter melodies to what I’m doing. She may choose a note that, with the chord I’m playing, forms a bigger chord instead of just holding down the root note, and she does so much of that type of stuff that I still am noticing it every time I’m listening to the songs.
MaM: I love bass players. I think they are the most underappreciated members of any band because the bass players just seem to get no love. You always hear about the lead guitarist or the drummer, but what about the bassist? And she’s a female bass player? Hell yeah.
Max: She’s not squeamish. She’s not afraid of her femininity. She doesn’t play into it much, though. She’s like an OG feminist before that movement got sideswiped by clout chasers.
MaM: Back when the riot grrrl movement actually meant something.
Max: Absolutely. That’s my dawg. That’s one of my best friends in life that I can always come to no matter what it is. Her husband is a bass player, and he’s been in the scene a long time, too. They’re both teachers, and they have a place on the outskirts of town where we practice, and they’re just family.
MaM: So, who does drums for you?
Max: We’ve had a couple of drummers, but Greg Stelly is playing drums for us right now. He also plays in Passenger 11, which is like a local neo soul type of thing. But yeah, they’re more jazzy hip hop neo-soul.
MaM: Lyricism – you have themes in your music that tell the story of what’s going on in the world now; what influences your writing?
Max: Things that piss me off and that I can write about and not have it come across as I’m shaking my fist at the sky. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy aging scenester, but there's a lot of scene politics I don’t agree with, and I sometimes address it through my lyrics. If you don’t have staying power via your songwriting and authenticity, and if you don’t have a lot to say, you’re gonna run out of fuel, and then you’re going to be stuck on the highway of the modern music industry, stranded, and I’ve seen it happen to people a million times.
MaM: Tell me more about the band name.
Max: Well, I wanted something that wasn’t like a one- or two-syllable word that’s been used a million times already. If you search Kaleidoscope Crux on Google, nothing else will come up except our band.
MaM: You have new music dropping later this month. Tell me more about that. I know the last release was in June.
Max: We dropped the first one on the first full day we were back from tour. We dropped the single and the video, which we shot in downtown Lafayette. Northside Lafayette. It was in the area I grew up in, and my childhood home was actually torn down and built over by a coffee shop and some condos, and so I’m walking around that block with a megaphone shouting the lyrics into the camera. It’s on YouTube and just got uploaded to shorts. It’s like a minute-long song. It’s on our Instagram and our website, too.
The newest single comes out August 31st, and it’s called “DM for Address”. The title is about bands that basically outcast other people in their community by having an invite-only house show in a private residence, whereas back in the day, there was an address on the flyer, and anyone could show up. You’d walk in, and it’d be a kegger. Now, you walk in, and everyone is sitting around on their cell phones in their own bubble.
MaM: I think that’s awesome you’re addressing that.
Max: No one song is about any one thing. It’s like a still shot of what was going on in my brain when I wrote it. Sometimes you can be riffing on the same topic, but it can go to different aspects. We have a video coming out for it that is a house party scene, and when we get there, other people are playing our instruments. It’s pretty cool.
MaM: What does the rest of the year look like for you musically, and as far as shows?
Max: We’re doing a rollout for a 4-song EP right now, and since we’ve gotten back from tour, we’ve been working on what will be our full-length. Ten songs. We actually recorded the bulk of this full-length already, but we only decided to keep four tracks from that session. We then replaced those four tracks with four new ones, so that will be the full-length we release. Our EP was mixed and sorta produced by Alex Newport, who has done Sepultura, Melvins, Mars Volta, At the Drive-In, and Death Cab for Cutie. He had a band called Nailbomb with Max Cavalera from Sepultura. I got in touch with him on a whim. I was having a real psychedelic moment that night, and I thought to myself, “What’s standing in the way of me working with the people I really look up to?”, and I was like, “Perhaps just hitting the DM’s?”, and so I followed him and he had followed up back, and I hit him up, he said he liked our songs and said he’d like to work with us. After that, I hit up one of my close buddies from back in the day, Justin, and told him, “We may need a manager, dude.”
What a perfect way to wrap things up. Max and his band are keeping that DIY punk spirit alive—even in a world that's all about numbers and stats—while mixing in a bit of shoegaze flair and plenty of layers. Chatting with Max was honestly a breath of fresh air; it's rare to meet someone who really gets it, who has that big-picture artistic vision, and who speaks straight from the heart. Kaleidoscope Crux’s new single, “DM for Address,” just dropped everywhere today, and their full-length is coming later this year. Definitely give their music a listen on your favorite streaming platform, and make sure to follow them on social. This is a band you’ll want to have on your radar.
*Cover photo by Justin Ditch
To learn more about Kaleidoscope Crux:
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