“Profoundly emotional and intense, yet extremely entertaining rock and roll roller-coaster that will take you on a journey of emotions, all the way that a great film would”. New York’s Danny Rocco, with his Des Rocs project, is a man on a mission of rock n’ roll revivalism. As he explains the live show experience, it is pretty clear that he feels modern music needs to be “Desrocified” – a term that he coined himself. “You’re gonna rock, you’re gonna laugh, you might cry, and you’ll walk out of there with a feeling of spiritual nourishment in a way that I don’t think people really get today”.
Des Rocs
The title of Des Rocs’ upcoming third album To Hell And Back, to be released 12th June, doesn’t only represent its loud and fiery sonic qualities. “To Hell And Back represents the journey that I’ve been on, both personally and professionally for many, many years”. Its creation came with a lot of unique and profound challenges that he and his band had to overcome.
For example, he had suffered a serious spinal injury (“that left me in a level of agony that is hard to even convey to any other human being”), yet he felt the need to pile on additional challenges – this is the first album that he had recorded live. “I want the live energy of a band, in a way that we haven’t caught on record before. That was super important to me. And to also just challenge ourselves to do something different and to really up our game sonically and creatively.”
He stresses that within the creative cycle of his albums, he envisions almost right away how they will look, sound and feel when they are brought to the stage. “The live presentation is something that’s always in the front of my mind. Live performance is so important to me and I’m constantly thinking about that, even when I’m writing it, let alone when I’m recording it and when I’m producing it”.
Why Not? – Everything He Wants To Hear
The embrace of sheer energy can be heard from the start of the new record, with a confident howl of his name from DJ Kool, best known for the 1996 hip-hop hit Let Me Clear My Throat. “Why not? He’s one of the coolest hype men of all time. And it’s just something that I’ve never heard before. I’ve never heard DJ Kool on a rock record.”
He is self-aware, and concedes that it is ridiculous, but in a way that he finds exciting. “I just do things that I want to hear and that I think would be really cool to do. I don’t know a single other artist today who would really do something like that. Then it goes into this profoundly rocking, but also very emotional song with an extremely tender chorus.”
Des Rocs
The sound only gets bigger as the album progresses. By only track two, Fall Together, with strings cinematic to a point that the song might not go amiss as a Bond theme, albeit smothered in a rough buzz. It is a sound that he calls “bedroom arena rock”, attempting to ride a very thin line between a palatable modern sound and a bit of a racket. This time around he has enlisted the help of veteran producer Joe Chiccarelli. “This record is really like an attempt to blend it all together, to take the best of that kind of like DIY bedroom rock approach that I’ve done for a really long time, and combine it with serious live tracking with serious producers and kind of marry them both and walk this line of creating something that feels like it’s classic and standing on the shoulders of giants, but at the same time is entirely new”.
The Epic Sounds of New York
New York seems to be an infinite, bustling canvas for culture, and Des Rocs finds the chaos to be very integral to his process, from getting the Des Rocs project off the ground, to creating his latest music. “The city is who I am. It’s where I’m from. Four generations on both sides as New Yorkers. New Yorkers through and through. And this is the city in which I create”.
He continues into more experimental territory with the six-minute The Riders Of Red Hook, which although is about life in New York, has one away with verses and choruses to talk about it like an epic tale. “Red Hook is a neighbourhood in Brooklyn that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time in. In my early days of working of music, a particularly brutal time of my life. Working a day job, commuting all the way down there, working on an album for an entire winter that was very tough and ended up going absolutely nowhere.”
However, it does make sense that he has turned something that one might expect to be the new record’s most personal and down-to-earth moment, into its most adventurous centrepiece. “There’s a lot of really cool lore in that neighbourhood as well, or what it used to be. And it was just like a very fantastical and exciting song to create and incorporate a lot of those lived experiences”. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone that he was an opening act on Muse’s Simulation Theory tour. “It was just artist to artist. And it’s a time that, even though only a couple years ago that I was deeply nostalgic for”.
“That Is The Reason Why I Make Rock Music”
Everything about his frame of mind is perhaps represented well by his custom Aviator guitar, with a built in logo on a peculiar body design. It was designed to sound fantastic, while being “Danny Proof” as he “can really fly around” on it. It’s only appropriate that it is nicknamed ‘The Rocket’. “I don’t want the guitars to be props. I really want the guitars to be extensions of who I am. And it’s a fine line to walk between creating something that feels like a theatre prop, and something that’s actually a really functional, badass guitar”.
Des Rocs
However, that uniting larger-than-life sound with a larger-than-life image, comes at a bit of a price. “This guitar is not really that comfortable to play at all. I still have a big bruise on my hip because it digs in really hard. Even though I haven’t been on tour in three weeks. You just sacrifice the comfort for the creative intention”. Reflecting on the new album it doesn’t seem that Des Rocs will ever question whether the hardships have been worth it. “I just think it’s such a creatively and artistically interesting endeavour. That is the reason why I make rock music.”
Interview with Des Rocs by Nick Pollard, May 2026.
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