“I love going to Philly! I’m really a Philly head. I’m wearing a full body 2 shirt right now! That’s my favorite band,” says Uriel Avila, vocalist of Fort Worth shoegazers trauma ray, who are hitting the road for a double-headlining tour with Glixen whose first 15 dates will also feature Philly’s own Her New Knife and Knifeplay, all of whom Avila tells me he’s a longtime fan of during a recent phone chat. This shoegaze extravaganza of sorts kicks off tonight in San Antonio and includes an April 19th stop at The First Unitarian Church, and Uriel says he’s stoked for the lineup and experience.
“I hope that there’s a lot of cross pollination with fans of Glixen. We’ve been playing really high-octane tours recently, so I’m wondering if we’re gonna get the shoegaze shoegazers, or like shoegaze moshers… I’ve been doing a lot of crowd work in this past year and really getting into it… I just like seeing movement. It adds to the memory of the show. I’m hoping to get some stage diving and crowd surfing, depending on the size of the venue.”
One of those “really high-octane tours” Avila’s referring was a fall 2025 run with Liverpool metalcore outfit LOATHE headlining and Bay Area hardcore punks SPY opening, which included a November date at The TLA that gave Uriel a chance to take the ten-minute walk to check out the Liberty Bell. And last spring trauma ray found themselves opening for blackgazers Deafheaven and death metal outfit Gatecreeper on a tour that featured a stop at Union Transfer. trauma ray even spent two months in the first quarter of 2025 supporting post-hardcore legends Touché Amoré throughout Europe and the UK. “It was genuinely the best year of touring… I have been floored with the response people have had,” Avila says of the experience.
The year prior to that had trauma ray headlining PhilaMOCA and opening Union Transfer for indie rockers Panchiko, but it’s their 2023 performance at Johnny Brenda’s that would seem to be their most “famous” area appearance, immortalized in the official video for “Spectre.” “Will McCarthy was filming us while we were on the East Coast, there and in Boston, but Sunny from hate5six was also filming our set at the Johnny Brenda’s show. Will was like, ‘This guy with a camera was in my way, and I shoved him out of the way,’” laughs Avila, before clarifying that his buddy Will was more of a skate filmmaker at the time and unaware of Sunny’s significance in the scene.
“Spectre” is off of Chameleon, trauma ray’s debut LP, which dropped in October of 2024 on their current home of Dais Records (also home to our phriends Xeno & Oaklander). And this February trauma ray and Dais Records released the follow-up to Chameleon, Carnival, a 5-song EP (which, like Chameleon, was mixed and mastered by Gleemer’s Corey Coffman, who trauma ray love) which Avila explains sort of marks a new chapter in the band: “With Chameleon, we had half of it shelved, and the other half was like on the spot, like ‘We gotta write four more songs to finish off this record!’ But it’s a good window into what we can and have done over those eight years, but with Carnival, we had nothing written, and we had like five months. We wrote it all in a span of maybe 10 practices.”
Carnival’s songs are also the first batch from trauma ray since guitarist Jonathan Perez, who previously made up the band’s core writing duo with Avila, moved from Texas to San Diego, leaving Uriel to depend more on the remaining three members, but he’s quick to note that they totally pulled through: “The first couple songs were written basically without John… I leaned on the other guys a lot more, and Coleman [Pruitt, guitarist] really stepped up. It was kind of serendipitous.”
And when I ask how trauma ray fans have been reacting to the new music, Avila tells me that they’ve been loving it, and that he’s been really enjoying the interactions: “We’ve been getting a lot of DMs, and I’ve been responding with screenshots of all the creepy-ass clowns from the ‘Hannibal’ video [laughs], like ‘Thank you!’ and then a pic of a creepy-ass clown.” But he says that one of the ultimate compliments is all of the people who have been asking for the tabs and wanting to learn to play the songs: “I learned to play music by learning the music of my favorite bands, so I think on TikTok I’m gonna do a run-through of the songs.”
While Uriel says he and trauma ray are super excited for these double-headlining dates with Glixen (especially their show at The Church: “That’s a historic and awesome venue!”), which run through mid-May, he’s also looking forward to a few things this summer, in regard to both music and leisure. “In terms of being at home, I want to be in a body of water as much as I can. It feels like it’s gonna be a hot summer in Texas,” says Avila, before letting me know that he and the band are quite excited about this new chapter of trauma ray: “I’m hoping to do a lot more design work and maybe writing some new songs, maybe working on LP 2. The last EP’s a bit darker than Chameleon, and maybe we’ll go more in that direction, or maybe we’ll work all of that in together… We’re gonna keep experimenting. It’s a new frontier!”
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