Against The Current: “I’ve seen a lot of bands come and go. We’ve gone the distance, and I’m really proud of that.”

Approaching fifteen years since their formation, Against The Current find themselves reflecting on a journey that began when the members were still teenagers discovering their place in music. Formed in 2011 by Chrissy Costanza, alongside guitarist Dan Gow and drummer Will Ferri, the band quickly gained an online audience during the early YouTube era. Their early releases attracted a global following, setting the trio on a path that would take them from recording music as teenagers to touring internationally and building a loyal fanbase.

Over the years, Against The Current have grown from viral newcomers into a globally recognised pop-rock act, with milestones ranging from their first EP releases and Warped Tour appearances to headline tours and major festival stages. Along the way, the band have developed a strong connection with their audience, with their music resonating far beyond their New Jersey roots. Now, fifteen years on, they are marking the anniversary with a series of intimate shows in cities that have played key roles in their history, giving fans the chance to celebrate the band’s journey together.

In our latest Cover Story, V13 sits down with Chrissy Costanza to look back on fifteen years of Against The Current. From navigating early success in the digital age to growing up in the spotlight and leading a band that began in their teenage years, Costanza reflects on the lessons learned, the community built around the music, and why this milestone represents both a celebration of the past and the beginning of the band’s next chapter.

Did you ever imagine when you first started the band that you’d be talking about it 15 years later?

“It makes me feel so ancient. It’s a lot of yes and no. When you’re fifteen years old, it’s hard to imagine what thirty looks like and what fifteen years later looks like, because that’s double your life at that point. So in that sense, no, I never imagined it. But for me, there was never really a backup plan or a plan B. Everything I do in life, I tend to do for life. I’m not a half-assed type of person. If I’m in, I’m really in. So I couldn’t see a world without Against The Current, even that early. I’m both surprised and not surprised, if that makes sense?”

I grew up when being in a band was all Bon Jovi and bands like that. It was all about brotherhood back then, it was all about a brotherhood and taking over the world. What did being in a band mean to you then?

“Bon Jovi was my first ever concert. Questions like that are difficult because it’s such an emotional thing to put into words. Up until that point, I felt like a misfit. I didn’t know where I fit in, and I kept trying to find what my thing was. I tried everything under the sun. I had been doing music my whole life, which at fifteen felt like a long time. I’d been singing since I was three. But I also tried dancing, theatre, cheerleading, and sports. I discovered very quickly I was too short for basketball.

I tried everything. Although I had fun doing a lot of things, I never really felt “this is it” until I joined the band. I’d been writing my own songs, and I loved making music. I knew music was where I belonged somehow. But once Against The Current started, it was the first time I felt like, this is where I’m supposed to be.”

When did the anniversary become a conversation?

“Last year we started talking about it because we realised it was going to be 15 years, so we thought we should probably do something. Against The Current had been in a bit of a period where everyone was doing different things. I don’t want to call it a break because that sounds scary when bands say they’re on a break. We weren’t on a break, but we weren’t in cycle either. So it felt like a good chance to come back to the world, play some shows, and celebrate the fact that we’ve been doing this for so long.”

Was there a turning point where it went from something you enjoyed to something that felt like it was really going somewhere?

“It happened pretty early. One of the biggest things Dan, Will, and I have in common is that we’ve never taken it lightly. We’ve probably taken it too seriously sometimes, to the point that we stopped ourselves from having fun because we were so focused on improving. But it felt real very early. We started the band at 15 in 2011. In 2012, we posted our first few things online, and they went semi-viral for that time. From our first video and single, there was an immediate response. We thought, okay, there’s something here, and we’re going to keep going. For us, it was never just a for-fun thing in our parents’ basement. It always felt like this was what we were doing.”

Back then, what did success mean to you? And what does it mean now?

“At the time we grew up in the YouTube era, which was kind of the precursor to TikTok and reels now. Things were very quantified. The music industry has always quantified success by gold, platinum records but, with YouTube, you could measure things daily. You could constantly check metrics and performance data. So success became very numbers-based. How many shows can we sell out? How many tickets? How many streams does this video have? Those things can be metrics of success, but they’re not the only ones.

Now they mean almost nothing to me. I don’t care how many streams a song has or how many tickets we sell. I’d rather play to 200 people who are having an amazing time than 20,000 who are just there because they had nothing better to do. Success now means feeling joy and feeling true to who I am and who we are as a band. Failure, for me, would be doing this for someone else’s vision or dream.”

“Although I had fun doing a lot of things, I never really felt “this is it” until I joined the band. I’d been writing my own songs, and I loved making music. I knew music was where I belonged somehow.”

When things started going viral, did people’s attitudes toward you at home change?

“My family didn’t change at all. They kept me very humble. But at school, it was funny. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and I definitely felt like a misfit. I wasn’t relentlessly bullied like in a teen movie, but I didn’t really fit in. When our videos started landing on the YouTube front page, everyone suddenly saw them. Nobody knew I was in a band. Nobody knew I did music. They probably barely knew anything about me except that I was the slightly strange alternative girl in a school uniform with a weird haircut and small gauges. Then suddenly people were saying, ‘Chrissy, I saw you on the front page of YouTube last night.’”

I remember the first time I had an article published. I didn’t tell anyone. My nan went to the newsagents and bought the magazine. It was Metal Hammer. She was in her seventies and telling everyone.

“That’s so sweet. My mom and my grandmother are definitely my biggest fans.”

What are your memories of recording your first EP and touring for the first time?

“It was surreal. It was a whirlwind. Everything felt like adult sleepovers on tour. It was silly and goofy. When we recorded our first EP, we drove seventen hours from New York to Georgia in one of our parents’ minivans. We slept in bunk beds in a tiny room at the studio because we couldn’t afford hotels. It felt like a giant sleepover where we were also making music. We were in rooms where artists we admired had recorded. Walking into a real studio and seeing plaques from bands that inspired us was surreal. It felt like a dream come true.”

V13 Cover Story #120 – Against The Current

Who were those bands at the time?

“At the time, it was bands like All Time Low and a lot of Warped Tour type bands. Ironically, that’s not what I grew up listening to, but it felt like a clear path at the time. Walking into the same rooms those bands had recorded in was surreal.”

What do you learn from playing festivals like Warped Tour?

“Festivals are great because you meet so many people. Usually, festivals are one day, and everyone leaves. But something like Warped Tour is the same group of 50 bands travelling together all summer. We were outsiders in that scene at first, so it was a great way to make friends and learn the ropes. We also learned a lot behind the scenes — how bands run their crews, their production setups, their playback rigs.

We were figuring everything out as we went. On the performance side, I actually prefer club shows over big arenas. I like being close to the crowd. I like sweaty, chaotic shows. But a great festival stage can have that same energy. Everyone’s packed together, jumping around, covered in sweat or mud, just having the best time.”

I remember seeing you at Leeds Festival and that day being incredibly hot.

“It was so hot. If you’re talking about the one about eight years ago, I remember that day because it was insanely hot. I didn’t even bring clothes for that kind of weather because I thought, it’s the UK, why would I need shorts?”

Exactly. You pack waterproofs for UK festivals.

“It was insane. It was so hot.”

“When we recorded our first EP, we drove seventen hours from New York to Georgia in one of our parents’ minivans. We slept in bunk beds in a tiny room at the studio because we couldn’t afford hotels.”

In terms of Warped Tour, I interviewed New Found Glory a couple of months ago, and we talked about how they’d grown up influenced by bands like Green Day. Then they went out, started touring with them, became friends, and worked with them. Was there that kind of camaraderie with the bands you grew up influenced by when you met them and started crossing paths?

“Definitely. One of the best examples of that is Yellowcard. That was one of the few bands in the scene that I actually grew up with and knew. I grew up on a lot of my parents’ music, so I was very new to the scene when I met Dan and Will. A family friend of mine, who passed away, influenced me a lot to join a band and be in this world. He did a cover of “Ocean Avenue” in his shows, and I loved it. I asked what the song was, and that introduced me to Yellowcard when I was about eleven. It was really surreal because he was such a big fan of Yellowcard, and then he passed away a month after the Warped Tour we did with Yellowcard, when we met them, did a collab video with them, and became friends with them.

Later, they asked me to do their Disney cover with them, and they brought me to Disney to perform it for a weekend. It was so fun, and we’ve become friends. I genuinely love those guys. I think they’re one of the nicest groups of people on earth. Anyone in their orbit is lucky and better for it. That was one of the craziest things for me. It was very emotional because they’re tied so much to someone I lost who was so important to me. They ended up being not just one of the best bands musically, but also some of the best people. They really defy the “never meet your heroes” thing, because meeting them made me see that there are a lot of different artists in the world, but they are some of the best.”

Going forward, you started releasing music and becoming more popular outside America. In terms of the success, the nominations, the magazine covers, and things like that, like you said, people didn’t know you were in a band at first. How did you go from one extreme to the other, and how did you cope with that?

“It’s weird even now. A lot of the people in my life, because I started the band so young, are people I met once I was already in the band, and the band already had success. I don’t have a lot of friends from before I was fifteen or sixteen. I only have one friend from high school. I just didn’t really find my people there, though my best friend is from high school. It is weird sometimes. Dan and I went into Guitar Center the other day because they came out here to shoot a video, and his guitar snapped on the plane. We had to find something for the shoot.

We were at the counter talking to two people, and one girl asked if we were in a band. We said yes. She asked what band, and we said Against The Current. The guy kept talking, and the girl suddenly turned around and said, ‘Against The Current? You’re Chrissy Costanza from New Jersey. You went to school with my friend.’ She said the name and it was someone I hadn’t heard since I was 17. We were friendly in high school, but we didn’t stay in touch.

It’s crazy to think there are people I’ve completely lost touch with who might still think, ‘That’s that girl I went to high school with.’ I separate my public and private lives a lot. I don’t act like an artist in my everyday life. Some artists are very artist-y all the time and like people catering to them. I’m not like that. I still feel uncomfortable being an artist. I feel uncomfortable having fans or calling people fans. It feels like a weird gap.

Against The Current 2026 Tour Artwork

I make music, people like the music, we go to the show, and we all scream our hearts out together. I’ve always said I’m Against The Current’s biggest fan. Being at the show feels like Against The Current karaoke night, and all my friends are there screaming the lyrics together. That’s how I’ve coped, by pretending I’m not really an artist. I’m just a fan of the band.”

Did you feel extra pressure because you quickly became the focal point of the band for the media and fans? Did that add pressure for you?

“Yes. I’m very much a perfectionist. I’m an oldest daughter, and I take a lot of responsibility on myself, even for other people. For me, the hardest thing has always been taking responsibility for the band. Anything that happens in the name of the band, whether I was actually involved in it or not, feels like it falls on my shoulders. I feel responsible for every person we hire, every person’s conduct, the way they act. I feel that more than ever, now that I’m older and understand the gravity of it.

I definitely felt it when I was younger, too, but I didn’t know what to do with it. If we had a manager being rude, or things were happening that I didn’t agree with, I didn’t know how to step in and manage it at the time. That’s always been the hardest thing for me as the frontperson and the leader of the band, feeling responsible for everybody’s actions. Every member of the crew, every member of the team, even the label. If things go well, I feel like I just did what I was supposed to do. If things go wrong, I feel like that’s my fault, and I didn’t do enough. I’ve always struggled to find the place where I can pat myself on the back and say, ‘This was good. I can be proud of this.’”

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who became successful very young and had to grow up with that. Do you feel you had to grow up really quickly to cope with it?

“Yes. I feel like I grew up really quickly in some ways and was very stunted in other ways. The strange thing about being an artist is that you’re thrust into the real world. You’re touring, in meetings, in rooms with adults all the time. You’re always at the adult table. But at the same time, people handle you and handle a lot for you, for better or worse.

A lot of artists become infantilised because they’ve always had teams managing them. That’s where it can go wrong. In some ways, you mature too quickly. In other ways, you become completely stunted because you go from your parents’ care to a manager’s care, a label’s care or some other handler’s care. Then you have to learn how to be an adult on your own. I’ve seen that a lot with artists who started young. It goes one of two ways: either they can’t do anything on their own, or they become too adult too fast and lose something.”

Let’s move forward to the anniversary shows. Why did you choose small, intimate venues?

“We really wanted to have the best time with that core group of fans. We knew they would find the presale code, get their tickets, and show up first. They would really be the ones there. We didn’t want anyone there who was just casually thinking, ‘I’ve heard of that band. They’re kind of cool.’ Not that we don’t want those people in general, we do, and they’re welcome, but this was a moment to celebrate 15 years of something we feel we’ve built together with our fans. It’s been a group effort, and we wanted this moment to feel close, not distant in a big room. We wanted everyone right on top of each other, like a party with a stage. You can’t really have a party with more than a few hundred people. Even a 300-person wedding sounds huge. That’s kind of how we’re thinking about these shows.”

“If things go wrong, I feel like that’s my fault, and I didn’t do enough. I’ve always struggled to find the place where I can pat myself on the back and say, ‘This was good. I can be proud of this.’”

In terms of the choice of cities, was there a reason for that, or was it just how it was planned out?

“Partly because they’re major city hubs. We were only doing a handful of special shows, not a full tour. If we’re doing one UK show, we do London. If we’re doing Germany, Cologne has always been our biggest market. They’re hubs where people can travel in and out easily, and they’re also places where we already have a higher density of fans.”

What do you remember about playing those cities early on?

“We’re playing LA, New York, London, Cologne, Amsterdam, and Paris, and all of those cities have very early core memories for us as a band. Each of them has an iconic venue we played, or some kind of breakthrough moment. Cologne was the biggest sold-out show we had ever played, multiple times at different points. London always felt more like a hometown show than a hometown show. We spent so much time there, did so many tours and festivals there, that we almost think of ourselves as being from the UK, even though we’re obviously not British.

Paris took us a long time to break through in, so that felt like a triumph. Amsterdam has always had crazy energy. New York is our hometown show, so our families can come. That one also changed a lot. It used to be more of a gentle YouTube-era crowd, and then suddenly it became this rock crowd with crowd surfing and mosh pits, and we were like, yes, this is amazing. For LA, I had never been to the West Coast before we started touring. Then we played The Roxy, which is such an iconic venue, and I had that moment of thinking about everybody who has been here, everybody who has stood on this stage, and somehow now I’m standing on it too.”

When you listen to the older material now, what do you think of it? How do you feel you’ve changed or grown as a songwriter and as a band?

“A lot of the songs I still feel really good about. The main thing I hear is how much my voice has changed. It’s grown a lot. I’ve worked on it a lot and developed it into a different, more powerful place. Even the tone is different. I sound like a little kid on some of the old stuff. I can really hear that I was fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen. Even my speaking voice has deepened a lot. We posted an old YouTube clip on Instagram recently where I was thanking people for the support, and my voice sounded so high. I was listening back, thinking, when did I ever sound like that? So I have the same reaction when I listen to some of the old music.”

To wrap up, you’ve talked about the band not really being on a break. Do you see this as a celebration or the start of a new chapter?

“It’s both. Absolutely both. It’s definitely a celebration, but celebrations can also bookend things and start new chapters. We’ve got some surprises in store. I don’t want to say too much, but there are some pieces coming. We’ll call it a celebration, but I think it’s very much the start of a new chapter, and people will see why very shortly.”

I was going to ask what comes next, but maybe I’ll leave it there. When you say the words “15 years of Against The Current,” what emotions come up for you?

“I feel really proud. It’s hard for me to be proud of things, but I am proud that we’ve gone the distance. I’ve seen a lot of bands come and go, bands that felt new when we already felt several years into our career, or five or ten years in, and they’re not here anymore. So for better or worse, we’ve gone the distance, and I’m really proud of that.”