Basement Tapes
Before The Omnitones, Nicholas Tantillo spent a decade inside other people's bands — Giant City, Ed Ashe, Mother Goose — and filling in wherever a session player, ghostwriter, or stand-in was needed. The whole time he was writing his own songs, filling a backlog of over a hundred, but they never truly fit the groups he was writing for. So they sat.
Max Dombrowski, a longtime mentor, pushed him to stop lending the songs out and front a band of his own. Max handed over a phone with a list of band names on it; Tantillo picked one — The Omnitones. He also brought in Twin Jones drummer Greg Abell, and in him Tantillo found the collaborator the songs had been waiting for — the writing sharpened, and a solo backlog started becoming a band's material. Once the band could stand on its own, Max stepped away to focus on his solo work.
The rest filled in fast: Matt Sikora on bass, Jesse Mai on lead guitar, and Justin Winterroth on trumpet and backing vocals. Tantillo picked five songs to start shedding, and the band spent a year recording them in his basement while working the rest out at open mics. Almost none of them had shared a stage before, and the collision reshaped the songs into something far from the demos Tantillo brought in. The band put the demo tape out on Halloween 2024 with a reel of music videos behind it, and it did exactly what it was meant to do: it got them into rooms, and it gave them the B-side to their LP.
Then the lineup shifted. Jesse Mai moved abroad and named his own replacement — Sean Riggio, who'd studied under the same guitar teacher, Leroy Bach, and played the band's second show without being told he'd joined. Sikora moved on, and bassist auditions turned up Chris Moylan, another Bach student, whose command of theory and arrangement pulled the band up a level. Keys took no deliberation at all: Nick Maldonado had worked with Tantillo before, and a few jams confirmed it. Six pieces, settled.
Self Check Out
On the demo Tantillo had worn every hat, and his own parts suffered for it. For the first LP the band wanted an outside ear on the arrangements, and the choice was unanimous: Leroy Bach (Wilco, Official Claire), already in the band's DNA through Sean and Chris.
It started as writing sessions at Bach's rehearsal studio, Tantillo and Bach pulling five new songs apart and putting them back together to create a better feel and energy in each one. Then they took that feel to the band, where Bach pushed toward live takes, working the six of them through the material until the parts stopped being individual assignments and locked into one thing.
That inspired them to re-record the demos and add them as the B-side, rebuilt around what the new lineup had made of them live — and the result is the band's first LP, Self Check Out, mixed by Wesley Reno at Narwhal Studios and mastered by Carl Saff.
