Alyse Zavala, the ferociously mesmerizing front woman of the ferociously mesmerizing band LYLVC (pronounced “lilac”), prides herself on getting through barriers. “Any door that has a lock on it,” she says, “give me a little bit of time and I’m going to get through that freaking door. You know what I’m saying?”
Yes. She’s saying she’s going to get through the freaking door.
So I’m surprised when the music playing in the bar where LYLVC will be performing in a few hours gets too loud and we try to go outside, only to be thwarted by a locked door.
“I thought you said you could get through every door,” I tease.
“I can get through every door,” she says. “Do you want me to try? I have a lock-picking set if you want me to grab it from my purse.”
It’s tempting. But based on things she has already told me about her life, watching her pick a lock would be anti-climactic.
Alyse leads a double life. By night, she fronts a dark and very loud techno-metal, rap-rock band. By day, she oversees several very sensitive “white hat” cybersecurity hacking operations. So she’s as conversant with “pen testing” (penetration testing), “DDoS” (distributed-denial-of-service attacks), “red teams” (pros who test security systems by simulating cyberattacks) and “bug bounties” (incentives to ethical hackers) as she is with writing songs, recording, making videos, and touring the world with the likes of Atreyu, Biohazard, and Saliva.
To put it another way, she’s probably the only person you can watch rocking out in custom-made corsets in post-apocalyptic settings and giving buttoned-down PowerPoint presentations in more modest clothing and Clark Kent glasses to auditoriums full of tech nerds.
She’s not wearing glasses today, so the stories she’s telling take on added intensity. She looks you directly in the eye, her blue-tinted, shoulder-length hair adding a touch of the otherworldly. She is, however, wearing one of her custom-made corsets, a black-leather number with criss-crossing bust-to-shoulder straps that manages somehow to be both sexy and demure. Meanwhile, she emphasizes with gestures that showcase her four-inch nails. Her “claws,” as she calls them, keep her from playing guitar, but they don’t impede the typing that she does every day while looking for soft spots in cyber defenses.
“I just get the very flat keyboards,” she says.
Alyse’s disparate vocations have proven surprisingly complementary.
“I work remotely,” she says, “so I can hack during the day, and then we have soundcheck right after. And then I sing at night.”
Her vocations are also symbiotic. Last April, approximately five years after she put the band together, LYLVC signed to Howard Benson’s Judge & Jury Records, the home of Saliva, Butcher Babies, and Alien Ant Farm. Until then, she’d funded the group herself. “I wanted to sing,” she says, “but that dream is really freaking expensive.” Lucky for her, so-called ethical hackers — especially those who’ve risen to the position of executive director of adversarial penetration and security testing at Options Clearing Corporation — make good money.
Hacking also helps her keep the wracked nerves associated with professional metaldom in perspective. “I can handle extremely high-pressure situations,” she says, “because I’m having to break into world markets, you know, for options, stocks, and futures. Like, this is very high-stake stuff.”
How high? “I’m in charge of four different hacking operations, and it’s a massive amount of work. There’s eight systemically important financial market utilities — SIFMUs — and if the network goes down for over an hour, the United States financial stability could tank. And I have to hack their systems. If I make a mistake, it could impact the world.
“But,” she says, “I’m paying for my dream.”
Her “dream” has an unusual origin story. Her mother took her to church every Sunday, and little Alyse would delight the congregation with a cappella renditions of songs she’d made up. “I just started writing songs for God and about praying and about being thankful and grateful for the life that I have,” she recalls. “And my mom would go up to the pastor and be like ‘Hey, she wrote this song! You should hear it!’ And the pastor would be like ‘That’s really catchy. You should do that in front of everybody!’”
Her hacking origin story is unusual too. Not long after dismantling and reassembling her family’s computer at the age of 8, she made a Linux-based program enabling her to dump passwords. A few years later, she was earning money by removing malware.
Somewhere in between, however, life went dark. Beginning when she was 10 and continuing for five years, Alyse endured serial abuse at the hands of her step-father, abuse that eventually got him nine years in jail and that directly inspired the brutally slamming LYLVC cut “Crawl Space.” “Smile fake beaten I can’t evolve,” she emotes. “Lie awake cheated another doll / Fist-fucked life took another toll / Wrist-bound face-first dragged across the asphalt / I guess I never listen / I don’t want to listen / Oh my God Daddy take me to another prison”.
Her step-father eventually pled guilty to two counts of felony rape, second-degree felony illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material or performance, and third-degree felony gross sexual imposition. And, according to Alyse, he would also keep her from eating, hold her under water until she thought she would drown, and, yes, lock her into a crawl space under the bathroom floor. “He used mechanisms like that,” she says, “to weaken me.”
Observing Alyse now — fearless, poised, articulate and with a degree from Campbell University in biology (specializing in genetics) — it’s clear that those mechanisms failed. She has, in other words, found her way through many a freaking door, including but not limited to learning how to survive post-abuse.
“At 16, I got my first job working on the Geek Squad at Best Buy,” she says, “but I was too young to sign a lease. So I had to make these shady deals with landlords. And, of course, they wanted to have sex with you, but it’s never going to happen. You just kind of smile and give them your paychecks, and then they give you a room, you know?”
Most people probably don’t know. Most people also probably don’t know how to feed themselves by gaming pizza sites and exploiting their cyber-vulnerabilities. “Back in the day, you could get points to earn free pizzas,” she explains. “I just miraculously became a great customer!”
She’s being facetious, but there really is something miraculous about her saga. Music, especially “music that had pain in the lyrics,” is one reason she survived. “It made me feel like those people survived, and look at where they are now. If they can get through it, I can get through it too.”
Eminem and Chris Cornell were foundational, as was Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. (“So many freaking songs on that record really resonated with me”.) So it was perhaps inevitable that when Alyse put LYLVC together she’d add the rapper Oscar Romero to spit fire in conjunction with her Wagnerian vocals atop and amid the thunder generated by Seth ‘Sketti’ Morgan (guitar), Cameron Gillette (keyboards), Lee Hutt (drums), and Rachel Pappalardo (bass).
Alyse likes the singer-rapper dynamic because it allows her, as she puts it, “to tell the same story from two different perspectives.”
“A lot of people,” she says, “when they see a male and a female on stage, they assume that they’re singing to each other. So we need to make sure that it doesn’t come off as romantic. It needs to come off like we’re both feeling and going through whatever the emotion is that we’re trying to explain.”
Listen to LYLVC’s three singles or its five-song EP Perfect Drug, and you’ll hear, at volumes typical of genre-mashing metal, exactly what Alyse means. She’s particularly proud of “Barely Human.”
“I’ve healed a lot from my childhood,” she says. “But if I feel like I’m going to get hurt again, it turns off my emotion switch, and to survive I have to be this unemotional computer thing just to get the job done.
“But what if I turned off my emotional switch permanently?” she wonders. “What if I made a virus — I make viruses every day — that impacted the human genome and many humans died, but the survivors have to replace their arms with robotic arms or replace their eyes with robotic eyes and we’re all barely human? How are we going to fight to survive in this new world when we just want to turn off our emotional switches and go full AI?”
Can she really make such a virus? “I haven’t tried yet. It’s just in my head. But I won’t kill off humans, I promise,” she says encouragingly.
So far, “Barely Human” is the only LYLVC track that sounds as if it could’ve been written by Alyse’s techy alter-ego. And she’s only released eight songs. This time last year she was telling interviewers that LYLVC’s second EP was imminent. Why the slow rollout? “It was all about trying to get signed, baby,” she says. “I’d been releasing songs on my own, and it always felt like I was getting bigger, but it was still plateauing. There were still certain gates. I was, like ‘Man, these locks on the freakin’ door — how do I get around?’”
She crossed paths with Judge & Jury is how. “And now we’re on MTV Live every Saturday. We’re in every gym. Planet Fitness and all the fitness places that have TVs play our song ‘Barely Human.’ They play us in all the Six Flag amusement parks. They’re going to be playing the ‘Barely Human’ video before the trailers for the movie Tron. So we’re hitting now because we have people that are willing to make the phone calls to the right people. But, yeah, we have a lot of unreleased music that we’re finally going to start putting through the Judge & Jury pipeline.”
Tonight, LYLVC is the first of three opening acts for Saliva. When the band comes offstage, Alyse and Oscar will head straight for the merch table where they’ll preside over LYLVC T-shirts, CDs, posters, crop-top camisoles, and panties. They’ll enthusiastically shoot the breeze with fans and sign autographs too.
But first the group explodes its way through a 30-minute set. You can’t help wondering whether the other two openers — Austin John Winkler’s latest band the Founder, and Earshot — regret having to come on next.
“I always try to be a hard act to follow,” says Alyse. “I don’t care who’s coming after me or before me. I’m going to give everything I have on stage. I only have a certain amount of time to smack people in the face with what I’m trying to bring to their lives and create that connection.
“I don’t take it lightly.”
