Kerosene Heights perform with Saturdays at Your Place and Retirement Party at Boulder’s Fox Theatre on April 15. Credit: Abby Clare
Blame It on the Weather by Kerosene Heights was released Aug. 15, 2025. Courtesy: SideOneDummy Records
Just a few short years ago, it seemed over for Chance Smith. After cutting his teeth as a teenager in the Nashville hardcore scene, the onetime vocalist began drifting away from his passion and toward the all-too-familiar void of substance abuse.
“On the worst days, I was certain anything cool happening in my life was past me — I thought I had squandered away all my time for that,” the 31-year-old tells Caribou Current during a recent call on tour in Madison, Wisconsin. “There was definitely a time not too long ago where I could never imagine getting ready to play a sold-out show and talking to a journalist about my band.”
Just before the world came to a hard stop in March 2020, Smith checked into a sober living facility in his new home of Asheville, North Carolina, where he kicked a heroin addiction and taught himself to play guitar. Plunking his way through Blink-182 songs on a cheap axe, he began developing the bedrock skills that would serve him as the lead singer and guitarist of Kerosene Heights, whose kinetic fusion of emo, pop-punk and hardcore feels tailor-made for a comeback story.
Now Smith’s band is poised for their biggest stage yet, opening for fifth-wave emo breakouts Saturdays at Your Place on a U.S. tour stopping by Boulder’s Fox Theatre on April 15. The southern quartet hits the road in support of their sophomore LP and SideOneDummy Records debut, Blame It On the Weather, a rollicking and infectious collection of songs trumpeting the arrival of a vibrant new voice in the DIY scene.
“Our first record [Southeast of Somewhere] was kind of me writing and having everybody add their instrument over the bones of pre-existing songs. With Blame It on the Weather, we pulled stuff apart and put it back together,” he says. “It just feels like every member finding their footing in the band and really bringing their own thing to the music.”
With a more collaborative approach in place, Smith says his latest batch of songs about love and loss began to take on new life with the help of guitarist Justin Franklin, bassist Elle Thompson and drummer Benji Bennis.
“I don’t feel like I’m the best or smartest or whatever, so I’ve always wanted input from outside myself anyway. I trust everybody in the band to engineer these songs in a way that will make them better,” he says. “At the end of the day, my main focus is lyrics and what the songs are about. It was good to kind of let go of the reins of the instrumentation a little bit more on this record, and put it in the hands of people I trust in a big way.”
Take the album’s simmering title track, which Smith and Franklin composed together from scratch. Triumphantly closing the record’s blistering 38-minute runtime, the song strikes at the heart of Kerosene Heights’ new all-for-one approach: “I’d love to tell you I like to bе alone,” Smith sings in his barking half-shout. “It never feels the way I think it will when I’m at home.”
“It felt like something we had always been trying to write, and then we finally did,” he says. “The song is about being in a band: touring, traveling and all the stuff that comes with it. It’s also about not taking things for granted, because everything has an end date. Through the good and bad of working and collaborating with people, it all feels worth it in the end.”
Recognizing the fleeting nature of our time on Earth, Smith set out to capture a slice of it in his band’s thrilling and cathartic approach to songcraft. Like a beetle suspended in amber, Blame It on the Weather transforms a fugitive moment into a still object you can turn over in the light.
“I wanted this record to feel like a snapshot of a year, good and bad, just like the way life ebbs and flows,” he says. “So there are happier songs, like one about me getting married [‘New Tattoo’], and then there’s sadder ones about when you feel like you can’t get out of bed [‘Die Trying’]. I think all of that encapsulates the human experience. I wanted to feel like it was all coming from the same place.”
As the new album title suggests, forces of nature also play a big role in the highs and lows of our collective human drama. That was the case when Hurricane Helene tore through the band’s home base of Asheville in 2024, displacing bassist Thompson and killing hundreds in its path.
“Driving around your hometown and seeing that level of destruction, you just have to live your daily life among this new landscape of badness,” Smith says. “But on the other side, it was cool to see how Asheville came together as a city: People helping each other and solving problems together was a really beautiful thing to see.”
At a time when beauty seems to be in short supply, Smith and his bandmates will take it where they can find it. For now, as they look ahead to a future of national tours and a growing base of dedicated listeners, they’re finding it in each other.
“Everything I thought we could do with music has already happened. So at this point, everything else is extra,” Smith says. “The fact that people care about our music already surpasses any expectations I had for myself. I’m hoping my life follows this trajectory. I just want to do cool stuff with my friends and write songs for as long as I can.”
ON THE BILL: Saturdays at Your Place with Retirement Party and Kerosene Heights. 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 15, 1135 13th St., Fox Theatre, Boulder. $37
