Kayzo on Tour
The DJ/producer born Hayden Capuozzo has always felt the need for speed. As a kid, the Houston, Texas, native sought his adrenaline fix by playing hockey for his school teams. But his love of fast-paced sports planted the seed for a different sort of passion. As he explained in an interview with YourEDM.com, "Music, electronic to be more specific, was always a big part of my mental preparation for games. I like to think of my music as how I played hockey — energetic and always moving."
After hanging up the skates, Capuozzo moved to Los Angeles in 2012. The world soon got its first taste of his manic mixing style when he entered the Discovery Project, a DJ competition hosted by Insomniac (the famed party promoters behind Las Vegas' Electric Daisy Carnival). His winning mix earned him a slot at Insomniac's Escape From Wonderland festival, Capuozzo's first-ever gig as Kayzo.
Over the next couple of years, he dropped a steady stream of singles and remixes that showcased his frenetic fusion of trap, dubstep, and hardstyle. His 2014 track "Tekken" earned placement on Illinois dance-pop duo Krewella's Ministry of Sound compilation, The Future Sound of EDM.
After launching his own label and metal-inspired merch line, Doghouse, Kayzo dropped his 2017 single "Wake Up." It was a delirious onslaught of ping-ponging electronic percussion, chipmunk-style vocal samples, and accelerated beats created in collaboration with Israeli dubstep duo RIOT. The track racked up 200,000 plays in its first day on SoundCloud and has since garnered more than 18 million streams on Spotify.
The inherently aggressive nature of Kayzo's music and DJ sets — where he's been known to slip in edits of metalcore acts like Bring Me the Horizon and A Day to Remember — made him a natural choice to provide an official remix for Papa Roach's nu-metal anthem "Last Resort" in 2018. Kayzo's EDM/rock crossover campaign continued with his first full-length album, the aptly titled Overload, which crosswired his blitzkrieged beats with squealing guitars and arena-sized vocals from Micah Martin of Iowa hard-rock outfit The Zealots.
