Denver, CO · dance · electronic · electropop

Breathe Carolina

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Started as screamo-electro, ended up as a straight dance act — both halves still show up live, MySpace nostalgia colliding with festival EDM.

Breathe Carolina began in Denver in the late 2000s as a duo of David Schmitt and Kyle Even, both veterans of local Colorado bands whose earlier projects had opened for each other before breaking up when their members left for college. Schmitt started recording songs alone on GarageBand and brought Even in to finish them; the band's name came from a dream Schmitt had as a teenager about calming down a woman called Carolina.

The pair posted their early tracks to MySpace, where plays climbed from around 10,000 in 2008 to over 30 million the following year. An EP, Gossip, appeared in 2007, and a deal with Rise Records led to the debut album It's Classy, Not Classic, written and recorded in Schmitt's home studio and released in 2008. The project toured heavily in the scene around Warped Tour, pairing screamed vocals with autotuned pop hooks and programmed beats in the style known as crunkcore.

Its widest exposure came with the single "Blackout," later certified platinum in the United States. Further albums followed under the same core sound: Hello Fascination (2009), Hell Is What You Make It (2011), and eventually Savages (2014) and Dead: The Album (2019) after the lineup changed.

Even left the group in 2013 and was replaced by Tommy Cooperman, leaving Schmitt and Cooperman as the current pairing. Schmitt steered the group away from its post-hardcore roots and toward dance music, working in house and bass house and performing DJ sets, so the current incarnation is primarily an electronic act, though older material still surfaces in the live show.

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