New Rock City Turns New York Chaos Into a Cinematic Rock Journey on Radio 85

New York has inspired generations of rock records, but New Rock City isn’t interested in giving listeners the postcard version. On Radio 85, the band takes the chaos, isolation, nostalgia, and underground energy of pandemic-era New York and transforms it into a restless alternative rock record built around survival, transformation, and life inside a city pushed to its limits.

The album was years in the making. Kick and Rossano began recording Radio 85 in August 2020, ultimately spending four years completing the project as financial realities forced several pauses along the way. That persistence gives the record some serious weight.

Opening with “Nice To Meet Ya,” Radio 85 immediately establishes a defiant attitude before moving through a collection of stories that feel pulled from different corners of the same city. “Da Ratman!” introduces an offbeat urban anti-hero, while “A Phone Call” dives into themes of surveillance and control. “Lieutenant Greed” takes on political violence, pushing New Rock City into some of the album’s darker territory. But Radio 85 knows when to pull back.

“Different Love” turns toward self-love and personal transformation, while “Silver Lining Trap” explores loneliness and self-doubt. The title track taps into childhood and nostalgia, “Rollin’” reflects on success and better days, and “Coney Island” brings the journey to its final destination.

Inspired in part by the 1979 cult film The Warriors, the album follows its own cinematic route through New York, beginning in Harlem and eventually landing in Coney Island. It makes Radio 85 feel less like a collection of unrelated songs and more like one long, unpredictable night moving through the city.

That atmosphere comes from lived experience. Much of the album’s lyrics were written on the subway during the pandemic while New Rock City remained in New York, giving the record a distinctly street-level perspective.

Radio 85 captures the city as New Rock City experienced it: loud, lonely, exciting, volatile, nostalgic, and occasionally strange. It’s not a love letter to New York. It’s a record about making it through the whole ride.

The album took four years to complete, with several pauses along the way. How did that extended process change Radio 85 from the record you originally thought you were making?

Rossano: The band was clearly evolving towards something different and distancing from the raw and vintage sound of the first record to a more experimental and complex rock sound, so we wrote a conceptual set of songs that we published as an EP in 2018 called “Emergency Platform 1”. After that, we kept playing live until Kick started to add new sounds to his guitar that he blended with his current crispy tone, a tighter and more powerful sound that immediately triggered melodies and lyrics to come out from different perspectives. Everything started to make much more sense, and we felt really good and comfortable with this new detour in style and sound. 

Kick: The new songs came out really fast, like it happened when we wrote the first record, but with a much stronger punk character. We were listening to bands like Sex Pistols, The Cult, and The Dead Boys at that time, and we got influenced by the dangerous and intense guitar sounds of those bands. But we didn’t have a clear concept yet of what we wanted to do for a second work. We were still in the process of working on the new material when the pandemic hit, and that changed the whole game.

Everything changed; we changed, as everyone else did, and therefore everything we were working on too. During the quarantine, we stayed really focused on finishing the new songs. The moment we all were living on ironically helped us create an album that we felt really excited about, and we made the risky decision to fund a second full-length LP, “Radio 85”. The recordings started in August 2020 and lasted 4 years in total. We finally put it out in 2024. To promote this new work, we made 6 music videos and a short film. 

Much of the album was written while riding the subway during the pandemic. What were you observing or experiencing during those rides that ultimately found its way into the songs?

Kick: We never left New York during the pandemic; we stayed in the city the whole time. It was very important for us to stay focused on our music like never before, so we kept rehearsing and rewriting and rearranging what we already had, plus new songs that came out along the way. The whole situation absolutely injected a good amount of sharp and defiant character to the setlist.

Rossano: I have this thing of writing lyrics in subway cars; it helps me concentrate somehow, and most of the stuff I wrote for this album was during commutes. The stations and trains were almost completely empty, especially right after the quarantine. More than half of the people left the city, and many others that stayed didn’t want to use the trains. It looked like a doomed city, unsafe and full of strange people wandering around, like zombies.

On one of those rides I was taking to get to the studio, a weird guy sat down next to me, smoking and staring. Nobody else was in the car, so I moved away from him and he sat down next to me again, then I got off to change cars and he followed me to get in the same car. When the train stopped at the next station, I managed to quickly switch cars again. I was already late, and trains weren’t that frequent, so I ran to the furthest car, and the guy ran after me. I got in, the doors closed, it started to move, and he was left out. It was a stressful situation. Being on the streets of the city really felt like a horror movie sometimes.

For example, this crazy ride influenced the story around the song “A Phone Call” and gave us the idea for a music video in the form of a suspense short film set in a ghostly and eerie environment where someone got chased everywhere.

Experiencing situations like that in a major city during the peak of the pandemic brought a unique set of intense challenges, from the eerie silence of the streets at night to the constant anxiety of the everyday news without knowing what’s going to happen next. So I guess that’s why the album came out that intense in the most part.

You’ve described Radio 85 as a journey from Harlem to Coney Island, with The Warriors influencing its cinematic concept. At what point did you realize the songs were connected enough to build an entire world around them?

Rossano: The concept around the album was gradually making more and more sense; the unprecedented circumstances and the time it took us to finish it inevitably pushed us to find some connection that could make sense with all the songs. We’re fervent fans of cult movies and books from the 70s and 80s and also the earliest horror cinema; we love sci-fi books, comics, and all those intriguing cinematic elements, artwork, and themes from that era. We watched Night Flight, B movies, played vinyl and cassettes, etc.

We lived the analog time before the internet explosion. At some point, we felt the need to travel back in time more and more during the nasty and ugly times happening in the present, so we revisited all those movies and shows, and when we re-watched ‘The Warriors’, we felt an instant click. The 1979 cult film is set in NY, where a gang called The Warriors is mistakenly blamed for a crime they didn’t commit. The action actually takes off in the north end of the Bronx and finishes on their home turf of Coney Island in southern Brooklyn.

The concept story around the album ‘Radio 85’ takes off in Harlem, where we both used to live for many years since 2010, and ends in Coney Island, and everything in the middle is a challenging and wild ride that we both lived in real life and is represented in all the songs. Some moments were glorious and some others intense and challenging.

Kick: Yes, the album opens up with ‘Nice To Meet Ya’, a song that greets you and also warns you about the upcoming ride. Coincidentally, the movie also starts with a meet-and-greet in the Bronx with Cyrus, the leader of the most powerful gang. All of the gangs end in Coney Island, where they release and set The Warriors free. The album wraps up with a song called ‘Coney Island’, a blissful and relieving moment that puts an end to the entire ‘trip’. The whole aesthetic of that film started to connect to the sounds we were exploring, if that makes sense.  It's a very surrealistic approach, but sometimes visuals and sound start to feed the inspiration, and suddenly songs start to make sense around each other.  

‘The Warriors’ made us want to bring back what we love and think is great about that time and apply it with our own vision and exploration of this moment. The movie made us imagine scenarios where we were chased from the north of an inhospitable city to the south hiding and sometimes facing the ‘bad guys’ with bravery if you know what I mean.. It became the main core built into the aesthetic and concept of the album. We just love that movie and the soundtrack is outstanding.

The record moves between heavier ideas like surveillance and political violence and more personal themes like loneliness, nostalgia, and self-love. Why was it important for both sides of that experience to exist on the same album?

Rossano: We found extremely necessary to explore all human emotions and represent all of them in “Radio 85”, that way we completed something that made sense especially in times of social crisis. Sometimes the songs express themselves through a universal idea, and some other songs turn into short stories where there’s a main character, and everything is interconnected around that fictitious figure. Others just help us reflect on our own personal vision of the world and human nature. It depends, every single one asks for different ways of communication, points of view, perspective.. Some of them are simpler, or more complex.

Kick: We wanted to touch on the whole experience of living the times we were in, the whirlwind of moments of self-reflection to the communal experience we all were observing around us at the same time.

After spending years inside the world of Radio 85, what does New York City represent to New Rock City now compared to when you first started making the album?

Everything and everyone changed, as we all know, since 2020. It was a global metamorphosis. New York feels and looks different; it healed, it changed, we did too, and got on with our lives. The most important thing is what are you going to do with what you learned.., we never stop creating and writing about it and that keeps us safe and sane. New York has been our favorite place to be in, and it still is. We feel we discovered a new side of the city's energy, and the songs have made us expand our perspective of what it's like living in New York. It’s always been our generator of ideas, a place of alchemy, always exciting and inspiring under any circumstance. We just kept digging, and continue to do so.