INTERVIEW: Have a pool? Since We Were Kids! would like to say hello.

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INTERVIEW: Have a pool? Since We Were Kids! would like to say hello.

May 19, 2025

John Soltes

73 Views Art Banura, Danny Banura, Since We Were Kids!

6 min read

Photo: Since We Were Kids!’s new album is called Armageddon Session. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Raquel Figlo PR with permission.

Since We Were Kids!, the skatecore band from Southern California, recently released their new album, Armageddon Session, which is now available on vinyl courtesy of Irish Voodoo Records. The punk-rock outfit, featuring brothers Art Banura on drums and Danny Banura on vocals and guitar, plus bassist Frank Chavez, has been going strong for more than two decades, and they show no signs of stopping. These days they couple their aggressive songs with reflection on how the world has changed, but they still like their old antics, like skateboarding in backyard pools.

“I want to say two years ago we started writing it,” Danny said in a recent phone interview about the new album. “It probably took us a year to record it because we were tweaking shit and making it sound the way we wanted it to sound. It was definitely a long process, and finally it came out at the end of 2024. We just made a vinyl for it, and that’s pretty much why we’re trying to really hype it up now.”

One of the key songs on the new recording is called “Past Tense,” which is a nostalgic trip down memory lane, back to the day when Art and Danny would enjoy playing punk rock and skating around in pools. Oh, wait, they still do that on a regular basis, but sometimes it feels like the world has moved on from that skatecore scene. In the song, the actual pools where the brothers skate become a metaphor for how they view the world today versus yesterday.

“We’re getting old, man,” Danny said. “We thought we were rad back in the day. Modern-day fans, they don’t take it the same. … The older the swimming pool the better it is, and they try to fix it up to make it modern, I guess you could say. They have love seats. They add a lot of shit to them to make them more modern. What we’re saying is we think they’re awesome [as is], and we still love it, and it’s old. Modern-day society, they don’t like it. They want to make it better. They want to make it modern.”

Art notices how the culture has changed, too. When he and Danny started skateboarding, they were on the fringes of society, like the scenes documented in the influential documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Back then, skateboarding was a hobby. Today, skateboarding has become a sport.

“Skateboarding has changed to the point now where it’s in the Olympics,” Art said. “When we were doing it, it was kind of a rebel thing. It was kind of underground. You had to seek it out and find it. You weren’t bombarded with it, and now it’s a mainstream thing, kind of like music, too. Younger people and the younger generations were into different kinds of music. The punk rock music is different now than it was when we were doing it. It was a little faster then, and it was kind of like more driving. And now it’s just more about image and more about looking cool.”

Danny added: “We’re still living in the past tense. I guess we’re still living in the past. We still value the past over the present.”

The brothers still skateboard all the time. Art said he gets out there twice per week, and Danny is right there as well, maybe every three days or so. They typically skate “permission pools,” or drained concrete ovals that they have permission to skate. They crank the music and hit the backyards with friends. If there’s not a good pool in the neighborhood, they’ll stop at a skatepark — somewhere in the desert region where they live, not too far from the lonely highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

“When we don’t have a pool in a certain area and if there’s a good park, we’ll take a few runs there,” Art said. “Our general thing is definitely the backyard pools. They’re very difficult. They’re not made to skate, and they’re never the same thing. So it’s always creative. It’s always fun.”

Danny concurred: “You could have two kidney pools … made by two different builders, and it will skate two different ways. It’s a mental and a physical challenge. That’s what I love about it. It’s still challenging and fun, I guess. We’re old, so we try to stay young doing that shit.”

Combining punk rock with skateboarding culture was a natural fit for the brothers. They remember when they were children meeting up with older skateboarders, and these cultural elders showed them the music of Agent Orange, Social Distortion and the Sex Pistols. They were hooked.

“The two went hand in hand, and then when we saw our first Thrasher magazine, that’s kind of how it was,” Art said. “It was punk rock and skateboarding. You just kind of got swept up in it. We started focusing on music once we started seeing the skate videos and hearing the soundtracks. That’s where we got to the point where we started playing music. My brother started playing guitar and playing in bands before I did, but that’s where it stemmed from.”

Danny remembers back in the day when Thrasher used to release skate rock tapes. They would pick them up and think to themselves how f—ing hard the bands sounded. The aggression of the fast-paced music appealed to Danny and Art.

“Where are these f—ing bands skating at?” Danny wondered at the time. “Skate rock is what they called it. I gravitated a lot to that. … I liked that shit. To me punk was punk, and then skate rock was next-level punk.”

These memories are what informed the creation of Armageddon Session. The brothers like to make their music and hope that fans dig the tunes as well. For example, Art remembers playing the song “Armageddon Session” at some of their live gigs, and the sonic onslaught went over well.

“We were playing ‘Armageddon Session’ the song before we recorded it, and people were digging it,” Art said. “It’s aggressive, but it’s not a fast aggressive. And it’s got a heavier beatdown part at the end — a breakdown, I would say. … We tried to mix it up and included as much as the aggressive stuff as we did the more melodic stuff because we like a good mix of everything. It’s got to have that energy, or else it’s just boring.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / [email protected]

Since We Were Kids! have a new album called Armageddon Session, which is out now on vinyl from Irish Voodoo Records. Click here for more information.

Image courtesy of the band / Provid