Set The Tone With… Caustic Waves

Published by

Fox Reviews Rock

on

27th Jul 2026

Today for the next instalment of Set The Tone With… Caustic Waves

Set The Tone With

The premise behind this post type is to get an insight into the daily lives of the bands that we love! We have given them some situations to attribute a song to and let us know why that song in particular is perfect!

You can check out the answers the band gave below, as well as jam out to the tunes they picked. Want to listen to the complete collection from this segment? Click the Spotify link below!

What is the perfect song for the gym?

I’m not a gym kinda guy, but my weekly ritual involves an early morning 10K run at the weekend, accompanied by some loud tunes. I usually go for something fast and upbeat to keep me going. Let’s go with Every Time I Die – Post-Boredom from their final album, Radical.

Every Time I Die – Post-Boredom (All Rights Are Retained By Every Time I Die)

What is your go to happy song, when you’re angry or sad?

I’m a big Weezer fan, and it’s hard to look past the summery vibes of Island In The Sun.

Weezer – Islands In The Sun (All Rights Are Retained By Weezer)

The perfect song to put on while cooking?

We have Alexa in our kitchen, but I don’t often get to listen to music on it – usually my kids switch off my music and tell her to play some absolute nonsense! I managed to listen to a couple of tunes by The Ocean the other day, so let’s go with Jurassic | Cretaceous from Phanerozoic II.

The Ocean – Jurassic|Cretaceous (All Rights Are Retained By The Ocean)

The song are you most proud of?

There’s a song on my new album called ‘Spotlights’, which I’m really proud of. It’s the longest Caustic Waves song to date, with an extended middle section. It’s quite influenced by Tool, and has a lot of crazy polyrhythms where the guitar, bass and drums are all doing their own thing before coming back together again. The drums in particular were really complex to figure out, and it took me ages to get the dynamics just right as it builds back up again. Lyrically, it’s kind of about self-obsessed people with “main character syndrome.”

Caustic Waves – Spotlights (All Rights Are Retained By Caustic Waves)

Your all time favourite rock song?

Oh man, that’s an impossible question, so I’ll just need to go with the first thing that popped into my mind – Everlong. The Colour And The Shape is still one of my favourite albums ever.

Foo Fighters – Everlong (All Rights Are Retained By Foo Fighters)

The perfect song to set the mood on a date?

I’m going to go with some 70s soul, Curtis Mayfield. There are loads of 70s films with excellent funk and soul soundtracks. I loved Shaft and the Isaac Hayes soundtrack, so I looked for similar films and found Superfly, with a great soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield. Let’s go with ‘Give Me Your Love (Love Song)’.

Curtis Mayfield – Give Me Your Love (Love Song) (All Rights Are Retained By Curtis Mayfield)

A song by an amazing local band we might not know about?

I’ve seen Beneath A Steel Sky twice this week, so I’m going to go for their song ‘Quetzalcoatlus’. They are a fantastic post-metal band with slow building epic songs and 3 singers. Two of them sing clean harmonies, whilst Greg (also in the band Codespeaker) has an amazing heavy growl. Sandy and Ian (guitars) used to play in Secondskin, and my first band Keitel played with them loads of times 20+ years ago. It’s great to see them still making excellent music all these years later. Sandy is also a fantastic artist, and did the artwork and layout for my new album, Echoes.

Beneath A Steel Sky – Quetzalcoatlus (All Rights Are Retained By Beneath A Steel Sky)

The perfect pre show song to amp you up?

This is a tough question for me, because I do all my recording in my home studio. A session for me is normally a couple of hours at the end of the day, once I’ve managed to get the kids to bed! I don’t tend to psych myself up for it too much, I usually try to get up and running quickly and pick up from where I left off the night before. So, I’m just going to pick a classic song to get me going – Glassjaw’s ‘Tip Your Bartender’, which is the opening track from one of my all time favourite albums, ‘Worship And Tribute’.

Glassjaw – Tip Your Bartender (All Rights Are Retained By Glassjaw)

A great song you think Fox Reviews Rock won’t have heard before?

I listen to a lot of lesser known bands, so I can think of loads of options here, so again I’ll go with the first thing that came to mind. I came across a great band from Portland, Oregon called The Adio Sequence. Their song ‘Paranoia’ is fantastic, and really well written – lots of cool parts crammed into a 3 minute rock song. They have similar influences to myself – Incubus, Deftones etc and are well worth checking out!