Scary Kids Scaring Kids

The name Scary Kids Scaring Kids is only partially accurate. They're really more cute than scary. They definitely are young, though. The sextet from Gilbert, Arizona, formed in 2002, during most of the members' junior year of high school. Their mothers bought them some of their first pieces of equipment.

But peaceful upbringing or not, they still rip-roared out of the suburbs with a debut EP, After Dark, full of tunes that were heavy as hell. But between all the emotional yelps of vocalist/bassist Tyson Stevens, and the distorted crunch of guitarists DJ Wilson and Chad Crawford, there has always been a thread of moody melody. Much of that comes thanks to the synth and piano stylings of Pouyan Afkary, a laid-back, long-haired kid with a keyboard tattoo, who didn't even know how to play keys when the band started.

"It was a kind of instrument that brought a more diverse sound, to keep it more melodic, maybe. We wanted to be heavy, but we wanted it to blend as well," Afkary says. "So I took a couple years of piano lessons as soon as I decided to play keyboard for them."

It worked out, and momentum has built so that Scary Kids have been steadily grinding on the road for most of the past year, including a high-profile slot on the Take Action tour. The self-titled followup to their 2005 debut full-length, The City Sleeps in Flames, dropped on Immortal Records in August.