Ethan S. Snyder and Luca Antinori became friends while playing upright bass in North Shore High School’s orchestra. The duo’s musical collaboration continued to develop, and with Snyder on electric bass and vocals and Luca on guitar, they began casually writing songs together in 2020. By 2021, they had formed their indie rock band, Visual Cliff, now preparing for a performance at New York City’s Cafe Wha?.
Luca’s brother, Angelo Antinori, 28, became the band’s drummer early on, but second guitarist Aidan Arevalo, 19, is a recent addition. Visual Cliff mostly rehearses in the basement of the Antinoris’ Glen Head home, packed with drums, guitars and amplifiers, among other instruments and equipment. The band releases original music on multiple platforms, like Spotify and YouTube, and performs both originals and covers.
Having picked up their instruments in elementary school, Luca and Snyder later found themselves in ensembles together throughout middle and high school.
“I used to think he was so annoying,” Luca, 24, said of Snyder, adding that he and his “swoop of a haircut” would enter the orchestra room, sit at the piano and immediately start playing pop tunes.
Despite Luca’s initial uncertainty, the two became friends thanks to a fellow upright bassist and a shared feeling of being different from the “typical orchestra kid.” Outside orchestra, they both also sang in North Shore High School’s male a cappella group, Men Aloud.
“He realizes I’m a really good singer, he’s a really good guitarist,” Synder, 23, recounted. “He invites me over, he’s like ‘I got some things I want to show you.’”
The pair said that they began sharing songs they were working on individually and started to build on each other’s work. Snyder, who studied music and marketing at Roger Williams University, added that they still approach songwriting largely the same way, with him adding vocals to Luca’s instrumental.
“It didn’t take long for us to realize,” Snyder said, “we should probably just be making music together for the purpose of making music together.”
Luca described Angelo’s involvement in the band as “assumed.” As the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Luca and Snyder kept working on songs.
“(Luca’s) like ‘Hey, I’m doing this band thing. By convenience, you’re right here and we’re related’,” Angelo, said.
Angelo began playing the drums at 2, started lessons at 4, and eventually studied classical orchestra percussion at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was principal timpanist for the New York Youth Symphony when the ensemble won a Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance in 2023.
The three band members have been navigating the band, education and employment over the last several years. Their first show was at a bar in Rhode Island, and they perform mostly in New York and Massachusetts. But they had what Angelo described as a “revolving door” of second guitar players until they were connected with Arevalo in February.
Arevalo studies jazz performance at Borough of Manhattan Community College. The Brooklyn resident has played in several ensembles and bands since he began playing guitar roughly seven years ago. Arevalo has worked at Brooklyn Music School, where the band has rehearsed on occasion, and is a part of Kids Rock For Kids, a nonprofit founded by parents to nurture young artists.
Ian Su, Kids Rock For Kids’ music director and Visual Cliff’s producer, connected Arevalo with the band as he was considering recording a solo album and next steps in his music career.
“We meet up to talk about the album,” Arevalo said, “and he’s like, ‘There’s this band that’s looking for a guitar player called Visual Cliff. The only con is that they’re out in Long Island.’” Before Arevalo could really consider the opportunity, he added, Su had created a group chat.
Luca, who studied songwriting at the Berklee College of Music, said that he was worried at first that Arevalo’s style of playing would not mesh with the band’s sound, but added that everyone quickly connected musically and personally.
“Whenever I mention Aidan,” Luca said, “I’m always just like ‘It’s so much more than he can play.’”
Snyder approached Luca with the name Visual Cliff after his high school psychology teacher made a passing comment that it would be a good band name. Visual Cliff refers to the experiment designed in 1960 to study depth perception in infants and animals. Snyder said that when he has to choose the band’s genre from a drop-down menu, he chooses indie rock. But Luca explained that he believes genre does not mean as much as it used to because today’s market is oversaturated, and that the band members prefer to think about their style in terms of feeling.
“We sound like you’re driving down by the beach on a nice sunny day,” he said, “with the windows down, blasting music with your friends.” Luca also compared Visual Cliff’s sound to a combination of Tame Impala, The 1975 and Joy Division.
Snyder noted that the band’s style has changed over time, with the single “Rose Colored Dreams” being the step into what the band members consider to be their new music. He added that he and Luca have “honed” their creative process, thinking about telling a story rather than freestyling vocals over an instrumental.
“We’ll be like ‘One, where do we think someone is when they listen to this song? And what time of day is it? Is it nighttime? Is it daytime?’,” Snyder said. “And then we talk big picture theme. We always talk about, like ‘Is there going to be a girl in this song?’” He and Luca joked that every time they try to take a song in a different direction, they end up having a girl in the song anyway.
They added that their song “Look Around” is a good example of their songwriting process because of how many iterations it went through and how much time was spent trying to produce “something better.”
“I’m glad that we did that because this new song that we’re writing now, it’s just not right,” Luca said. “There’s something not there, and we always come back to ‘Look Around,’ and we’re like, ‘Look Around’ is that, it’s this. It’s so pinpointed. The vibe, we pinpointed exactly, and we got it.”
All four musicians agreed that there is a connection and “brotherhood” between them. Snyder praised Luca for being “selfless” in leaving room for him to finish a song when Luca could finish it himself. Arevalo and Angelo each said that the camaraderie among bandmates is their favorite part of being in Visual Cliff.
“At one of our last shows, we had a moment where we were trying battling guitar solos, and we’ve never done that before,” Arevalo said. “So that moment kind of shows that there’s, in my opinion, something really special here.”
Visual Cliff is set to play at Cafe Wha? on Sept. 27 at 6 p.m.
