Interview with Travis Young

Author: Ash Newton

Few remember the College Park-area metalcore outfit that was Carol. Existing for about five years between 2003 and 2008, its rotating lineup played riffy and aggressive mosh anthems in basements and bars across the DMV. But the band sparked the careers of multiple modern-day hardcore legends, and twenty years on, some of its roughest recordings emerged online for the
first time ever.
Uploaded on November 19, “live from da vault” is a compilation of live clips and demos collected from the band’s early days. The first 13 songs on the 16-track release originate from live sets played at WMUC in the summer of 2004 and winter of 2005, while the last three are demos. Across its 48-minute runtime, the album bounces between raucous breakdowns, double-timed two-step sections and brutal blastbeats. Some songs appear multiple times, like “These Bleeding Black Heart Embers”, with its oppressive opening riff played at marginally different
speeds, or Mind Controlling Snakes, with one version boasting about 20 extra seconds of background noise.
Both songs were also previously released on significantly more polished EPs, each dropping in 2021. The choice to put out “live from da vault” was a long time coming, said former vocalist Travis Young. In an interview on Zoom, he reminisced about the mid-2000s College Park scene, including WMUC’s contributions, as well as inspirations, his bandmates, and his reasoning for
bringing it all back.
Young, 38, started the band fresh out of high school, having attended DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland. There, he met guitarist Sam Trapkin, and they immediately connected. “It's a very sports-based school,” he said, “and neither of us were into sports. There used to be a skate shop in College Park called Attitude Skates. That was my hangout growing up, and then it turned out that Sam also went there, and so we started skating together.”
Attitude Skates has since been demolished, its current site an empty lot across from the Lidl on Baltimore Avenue in College Park. Many of the local hangouts Young describes no longer exist, making “live from da vault” its own time capsule of the College Park underground before the high-rise apartments encroached. He noted the former location of Atomic Music on Baltimore Avenue and the now-defunct hardcore mecca St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on College Avenue behind Fraternity Row as locations that were central to the development of Carol and the local scene as a whole.
The College Park scene at that time was explosive, he said. “The [Prince George’s County] kids, the [Montgomery County] kids, the NoVa kids, and then the Baltimore kids would all be able to put these little shows on together, and it brought people out from basically all across this area...which had a very tight-knit effect. Everyone knew each other and grew up together.”
Carol recorded one demo as a duo, with Young on vocals and Trapkin on guitar and drums, with the help of his father, a drum instructor. After that, they recruited drummers Sean Pumphrey and later David Pike. The band’s lineup continually changed throughout its lifespan, with later core members also including guitarist Justice Tripp.

For some readers, these names already carry their own weight. Tripp and Trapkin would later form lauded hardcore five-piece Trapped Under Ice; Tripp also performs vocals in rock outfit Angel Du$t, and solo as Cold Mega. Pike would go on to play in acts including Pianos Become the Teeth, United Nations and legends Defeater.
“That's what's beautiful about all these bands that are still going,” Young said, “all these kids grew up together. We all grew up going to these little shows all over the place. I think the support of the scene and how active the scene was, and how much we all saw each other every weekend, just continued to inspire all these guys to keep it going.”
Carol’s farewell coincided with the rise of Trapped Under Ice, Young noted. “Our last show was in Virginia, at a metal fest, and actually Carol and Trapped Under Ice played that show. After that, Trapped Under Ice was on their way up, and in 2008 metalcore and the kind of stuff we were playing was on its way out. At least, from a scene perspective.”
Young would prefer to keep these recordings as a minor time capsule of the Prince George’s County scene, choosing not to attach the names of his now successful former bandmates. “There’s a reason everyone’s not tagged in this,” he said, “it was a very experimental and silly stage in all of our lives.”
Silliness is abound on “live from da vault”, which features audible crowd reactions between and sometimes during songs, as audience members crack jokes and shout out their phone numbers for the recording. “I even edited some of it out, because some of it was ridiculous, but some of it made me laugh, so I was like, ‘I'm gonna leave that in,’” said Young.
The band, too, demonstrates a sense of humor: “That was Justice’s first show with us,” Young said, “somewhere in those recordings you can hear Justice be like, ‘hey, we just got a new guitar player, his name’s Sam Trapkin, welcome him,’ because it was actually Justice’s first time playing that night.”
Young’s own lyrics were “all nonsense”, according to him – the nigh-incomprehensible screaming on “Dear Livejournal” is actually away messages from early chat platforms like AIM. The lyrics on “Mind Controlling Snakes”, which jeer at the audience for being stupid enough to dance along, were written by friend Kenny Savercool of related band Nick Fury, which also has a walk-on feature on “live from da vault”. “A lot of Carol ended up being really goofy-ass inside
jokes,” said Young. Other songs are completely wordless: “I screamed gibberish during the recording process, and then we just wrote what it sounded like.”
In terms of inspirations, Young listed metalcore greats like On Broken Wings, Bury Your Dead, Throwdown and It Dies Today as central to Carol’s sound. “good mosh bands were playing [Baltimore venue] Ottobar, and that was the vibe,” he said. He credits WMUC Radio for expanding his music taste and introducing him to bands like Converge and Poison The Well. “It was accessible, and it was always new hardcore music or metalcore music on the radio,” Young
said.
Carol even shared bills with some of their biggest influences. On the same day as their first WMUC appearance in the summer of 2004, the band and friends piled into vans to play a festival in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “It was On Broken Wings, Shattered Realm, Black My Heart, The Judas Cradle, and The Warriors,” Young said, “we showed up, we played WMUC with vans of kids, because we were all going to this mosh fest that night down in Virginia. So everyone showed up, went to our show at WMUC, and then we rolled out immediately after... It took 4 hours to get there because of afternoon traffic. We ended up getting to play second to last or something, which was really awesome.”
Young finally decided to release “live from da vault” to give back to the people still celebrating Carol after two decades. “I still get hit up for a long time by people being like, ‘is there anywhere I can hear those songs? or can you send me a zip file?’” Young said, “I had a Google Drive link that I was sending out constantly. I was just kind of like, ‘this is silly, I wonder how easy it is to post ... on Spotify. This can't be that hard.”
“Really, this is fun, and why not? We've got all these recordings. Every once in a while, I'll still want to click in and find it, and rather than dig through Google Drive, it's just as easy to just put it all out there and organize it.”

Author: Ash Newton | Artist: Travis Young | 12/17/25