Loss, NJHC, and Finding Their Way Back: The Story Behind Still Feel Gone's Deeply Personal Comeback.

If you’re tapped into the emo underground right now, there’s a new name worth locking in: Still Feel Gone.  The New Jersey band dropped their latest record, Presley, via RTF Records, and let us just tell you, it’s raw.

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The album was recorded and produced by John Naclerio at Nada Studios, and it clocks in at just over 20 minutes. The 8-track project wastes zero time. Presley leans into the sweet spot between emo and hardcore, pulling clear inspiration from bands like Small Brown Bike, Elliott, HUM, and Title Fight while still carving out its own lane. 

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We caught up with Still Feel Gone’s singer/guitarist Dante Dallavalle about the band. How did they start? We’re throwing it back to 2016, when a group of best friends decided to build the project: Dante, alongside Chris Lombard (drums/vox), Tito Valentin (guitar), and Ethan Baumgarten, who was succeeded by Nico Sardone (bass). “Despite us self-releasing four two-song EPs, we stopped playing before we even had a first show.”

 

Still Feel Gone isn’t Dante’s only project. Despite all the success of his other bands (Negative Force and XL Bully), something was missing. After stepping away for a while, finding the spark again was no easy task. “I really had a yearning to do SFG again. Chris and I reconnected at the beginning of 2025, but the rest of the original members were either too busy with other projects Tito plays in Bayway or just unavailable. Chris introduced me to his friend and international sex symbol, Igor Vuko, who is an infinitely better guitar player than I am, and once the three of us clicked, we practiced, wrote, and eventually recorded the album Presley with John Naclerio at Nada Recording (My Chemical Romance, Senses Fail, Brand New, much more) in upstate New York,” the singer reminisces. 

 

Igor joined the band intending to play guitar with Dante, but they couldn’t find a bass player. “He (Igor) wrote and recorded all the bass parts on the album as well as some guitar parts. I recorded some of the second guitar parts, and Chris played drums. We all did vocals. After recording the album, we had the dilemma of finding someone to either play bass or drums. Chris had played drums since we started the band in 2016, but finding someone to play bass so Igor could hop on guitar was much more difficult than we anticipated. So instead, we decided that finding a drummer and having Chris hop on bass might prove easier. I talked with my best friend (and vocalist of XL Bully), Mort, and he suggested getting our friend Angel Amarante on drums. Angel has filled in a bunch for Negative Force, and he is one of the most talented and hardworking drummers (and multi-instrumentalists) I know. He’s also an avid listener of the type of music we play.”

Dante mentioned how the current lineup they have now is ideal for songwriting; they just get each other in a way that every band should when it comes to writing music. He describes the band being back again as feeling as if they were born again. “Tito is one of my oldest and best friends. So when we realized he couldn’t do it because of his success with other projects, I was hesitant that we could achieve what we did before. But when Chris introduced me to Igor, I knew that we were going to excel. And when Angel joined and started playing drums, Chris moved over to bass, and I heard us as a full band for the first time. I was blown away. I believe in my heart that this lineup is SFG, and I am elated to just be starting out with them. It’s like rediscovering what made me fall in love with it in the first place, and these gentlemen are some of the most talented and genuine people I could ever ask to be in a band with.”

The time away from the band allowed Dante and Chris to deal with life’s issues, stating that the break helped them find each other again in terms of this project. “ We were in our mid-20s when we started the band with Tito, and after dealing with so much death up to that point, SFG was the vehicle through which I could achieve some sort of catharsis and resolution. When we stopped playing together without ever having played a show, I thought that was that, and it did hurt because I realized the potential we had.” With the band being active again, Dante looks at SFG as an outlet, “With SFG, unlike with other bands I’m in, I have the ability to express the more vulnerable and pensive parts of myself. But the way that I do it is still fundamentally colored by my soul being chained to punk rock.”

 

There are a lot of things that stand out about the Jersey scene that SFG lives in, and Dante said his favorite part of the NJ hardcore scene is its welcoming environment. “I’m biased as I grew up here, but I’m sure that’s the case when you ask anyone about their state/local scene. NJHC is very intimate in that many bands’ members consist of members of other bands.” When you have a scene that is so tight-knit like that, you’re not just looking at a music scene; you’re looking at an entire community built, full of friends and bandmates supporting each other. “I think of Rick, who fronts Negative Force and his other project, Eyes of Fear. Or Julian and Kian, who play bass and drums, respectively, in XL Bully but are the frontman and drummer of Heavy Hand. The drummer of Negative Force, Ant, is in the band Hate of Man. The list goes on and on. SFG’s labelmates on RTF Records, Defy You, largely make up the band Buffout, whose sound is akin to ours. In that sense, the scene is very incestuous. But I like that about it, and I think it speaks to the ambitions of the people making music, i.e., they have a lot of ideas and are proactive in making them come to fruition.” 

 

For Dante, it only made sense for Still Feel Gone to release their album under NJ’s own Ride the Fury (RTF) Records. “Pat Gerity has been someone that I’ve known much longer than he’s known me, having grown up in NJHC and followed the work he’s done over the years. My other band, XL Bully, being on RTF is a plus. But I wanted Pat to want to release SFG because he likes it, not because of any other thing I’m involved in that’s adjacent to it.” 

 

In Dante’s mind, Pat’s stamp of approval on the comeback and the album was more than a compliment. “He’s done so much for us already in terms of promotion, logistics, aesthetics, etc. He’s one of the most selfless people I know, and through everything that he’s personally got going on, he still somehow manages to help push this band forward, along with all the other RTF bands. I speak with him every day, and the strengthening of our relationship has been a direct result of this band. So I have an enormous amount of gratitude for him; I can’t express that enough.”

 

The band goes way back with the hardcore scene, growing up with a brother who took him to shows as young as 11 or 12. Dante’s first band in the mid-2000s was called Skull Kid, which he describes as being influenced by skate thrash, mentioning bands like Tear it Up/Dead Nation, Forward to Death, and Get Real. “Even though Still Feel Gone’s sound leans towards a softer side, being raised in the scene still has its impact. Our ethos is still very much grounded in the cultural mores and aesthetics of hardcore and punk rock.” 

 

The people surrounding the genre(s) are a mix, but overall, the vibe is high. “The kids (and when I say kids, I mean adults as well) are great. There are people who have been coming to shows longer than I have, then people my age, and then younger kids who are all contributing to a (for the most part) constructive and welcoming environment. There was a lot of gatekeeping in hardcore when I was growing up that has disappeared in many regards. And it’s not that all gatekeeping is bad; I think there’s a case to be made about working hard to cultivate a place that is for anyone, but not for everyone. But, from my view, it seems much more welcoming today than it was when I was coming up, and that’s a good thing. There’s still cliques and the exclusionary elitist bullshit that’s always been there, but to a much lesser degree.”

 

Taking a deeper look back at the music he grew up with, everyone seemed to be into a mix of sub-genres; the hardcore kids were also emo lovers, indie listeners, you name it, but sometimes when those bands experimented, the reaction was mixed. A band Dante has a love for, Cave In, is one of them. “They basically released the seminal (and best imo) ‘metalcore’ album, Until Your Heart Stops, in 1998 and then went on to put out an album Jupiter two years later that was their introduction to prog/space rock. Hardcore kids at the time (according to stories from my brother and his friends; I was 9 years old) were pretty vicious about their transformation and vocalized their displeasure with it. But they eventually realized that Cave In was releasing their best music yet, irrespective of whether kids could mosh to it, and they came around, and Stephen Brody was recognized as the genius he is.” 

 

He also mentioned his first favorite band, also from NJ, called You & I. “They pioneered what people refer to and which I abhor (the name, not the music) as ‘screamo’, along with their kindred spirits across the river, Saetia. So, before I even got into more straightforward hardcore bands (i.e., youth crew and pissed off stuff), I was enamored with this more introspective and emotive kind of hardcore. I was so young that when I’d read the song lyrics, I couldn’t understand much of it, but I felt it. And that stuck with me for the rest of my life.” Sometimes stepping out of the box is needed, switching things up, like what Still Feel Gone has done, brings growth and some of the best tunes released. Another fave of his (and Igor’s) is the emo/post-hardcore band Planes Mistaken for Stars. “Their self-titled EP is now recognized as a classic in emo/post-hardcore, and much of that record, along with their Knife in the Marathon EP, very much influenced me and SFG specifically. But they would go on to integrate much harsher and metallic riffs and shy away from the more emo-y stuff. Our first shirt (that you can buy on our Big Cartel) is actually a rip of the classic PMFS shirt, so they have had a lasting impression. Rest in peace, Gared and Matt, from PMFS. Thunder in the night forever.”

 

For Dante, he describes himself as “just a hardcore kid writing emo songs.” he explains, “It’s almost impossible to write songs without the instructions I’ve internalized from the people I looked up to growing up. My older brother’s best friend growing up, Garrett DeFalco, taught me how to play guitar at a very young age. (He was one of the original guitar players in the NJHC band The Banner.) Our first lesson, he asked me, “Do you want to learn how to read music or do you want to learn how to play hardcore?” I think my answer is obvious.” That changed it all. He wanted to learn how to play the music he had always immersed himself in. “I learned how to play guitar so I could capture the essence of the music that was changing my life at the time. I wanted to write and play like the bands I saw and listened to. I had no interest or intention to become a ‘musician’; I just wanted to play punk rock. I wanted to change the lives of other people with the music I created in the way that it changed mine.”

 

Unfortunately, we all go through the pain of losing someone we love at some point in our lives. Navigating this is different for everyone, and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Presley is dedicated to friends that have been lost and to the ones that are still around. “I’m extremely lucky to have maintained the very deep, intimate relationships with friends that I grew up with. I came of age during the opioid epidemic, and I’ve lost a lot of friends to it. The songs reflect that either through innuendo or explicitly, like in Vulcher, which was the nickname given to one of my best friends who had a very, very bad addiction to alcohol, while I was struggling with heroin.” So much struggle and loss happened, but things came crashing down when Dante lost his best friend, a loss so significant that he lost a part of himself, too. 

 

“The best friend that the world would ever give me, Vincent DeFalco, died in September of 2012 at the age of 23. That really affected a lot of people who knew him, and his death was the harbinger for a lot of other friends and acquaintances dropping dead from drug overdoses after. But, and I know that anyone who has lost someone can attest to this, it took a piece of me with him. I’ve been dealing with his loss ever since, and I don’t expect I will live a day on this planet without thinking about him as soon as I wake up and praying to him before I fall asleep. If he’s in my dreams, then that’s just a bonus.”

 

With that, he shares his best advice to those who are also struggling through the pain of losing someone. “I'm sorry. Losing someone and confronting mortality is one of the most uncomfortable and potentially devastating experiences anyone can go through. It’s universal, and it doesn’t respect class, nationality, age, politics, or your shitty taste in music. It’s coming for us all,” a hard reality to face. 

 

“When I lost Vinnie, I knew that that would be the worst thing that ever happened to me. I know I will say goodbye to my mom, my brothers and sister, my wife, my friends one day, hopefully not soon. But losing Vinnie when he was 23 years old, and I was 22, was fundamentally different. It was like a candle snuffer coming down on top of a candle, quick and disorienting and forever, almost like magic. I couldn’t comprehend it for a very long time, and only recently, almost 14 years later, have I been able to.” Dante also brought up a gentle but important reminder: “You need to heed the wisdom of the same cliches you hate hearing: make sure to stay close and give yourself and your love to those that love you. You will never get a second chance once they are gone, and you will never be fully prepared to deal with the loss. But if you live your life with love and gratitude and assistance to those you love, you will be much better equipped when the day eventually comes. And I apologize if that advice is underwhelming, but it is true”.

 

If you are new to Still Feel Gone, there is one thing you should know, and it’s that not only do they speak on what is important and what people can relate to, they’re making music out of a genuine place. This is all for the love of the craft, the love of the scene, and what is true to them. “We put everything we have into these songs, and they mean everything to us.” The band doesn’t expect their sound to resonate with everyone; they’re doing what they do for themselves. “We’re not starting a melodic hardcore band in 2003 or a metalcore band in 2013, i.e., the trends don’t register, we don’t pay attention. We love the music we’re putting out because the music loves us back. Any outside acclamations are just a plus to us”. 

 

The band isn’t just that; they’re a unit, a family, and they align with each other in the best way possible. Expect tunes in the future full of their shared experiences. “The future of this band is going to be a lot of material that Igor writes, a lot that Angel writes. Those future releases will be followed up with them sharing their wisdom, driving the music we play. Thank you, Pat Gerity RTF. Thank you to our friends and families that have helped shape us into the human beings that wrote these songs, for better or worse.”

 

TOP8’s Take:

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Still Feel Gone is shaping up to be one of the most underrated acts in the emo scene at the moment. Presley brings the right amount of emotion, raw vocals, and makes us genuinely FEEL. Tracks off of the album like ‘9 Years Gone’ and ‘Anthem’ hit you where it hurts, ‘Vulcher’ brings an energy that makes you want to desperately jam out at an SFG show, and ‘Sad in South Orange’ feels like the song you’d go to when you’re in the worst mood ever because it just resonates. Still Feel Gone is a band to keep an eye on. You can feel how genuine they are with their music. We’ll definitely be keeping up. Go spin, Presley.