From Within Newsletter #9
An interview with Kyle Niland of Scheme Records
We made it to 2026… my main goal for this year is to consistently do this at least once a month for the entire year. I enjoy it a lot and I hope some of the people reading it enjoy it as well. Today we have an interview with my friend Kyle Niland who is co CEO of the almighty Scheme Records. Kyle is someone I wish I got to hang out with more if I’m being honest. A few months ago, we were both at our friend Lennon’s house in Philly for the Scarab record release. Since we’re both early risers, we ended up walking the streets at like 6:30 AM one morning, grabbed donuts, and then sat in a park and talked for what felt like three hours. Kinda old school, kinda what life is all about… an Alabama fella and a Connecticut fella breaking bread and shooting the shit. It was a good morning.
It’s no secret that Scheme Records has cemented itself as one of the coolest labels in modern hardcore. In my opinion, they’ve got an IT factor you just can’t teach. And whether Kyle wants to admit it or not, there’s clearly a lot of intention behind how they run things. No matter what kind of core you subscribe to, they’ve got a little something for everyone, and if Scheme is releasing it, you can be pretty sure it’s worth your time to check out. Huge thanks to Kyle for doing this interview, and thank you to anyone who’s reading this. Enjoy!
The man, the myth, the legend..Kyle Niland everyone. What’s up bro? Out of genuine curiosity what city did you grow up in exactly? I think you’ve moved like 4 times since I’ve known you.
Starting this off with maxed out cap stats, I’ve essentially lived in 2 places in my entire life. Southington, Connecticut and Walden, New York. I will not go into the ongoing saga of my new house but it’s a short distance from Walden. Nothing is up, I have a cold and I’m listening to One Voice while I try to start ********* artwork.
I need the TRUTH…For years I’ve been told that your younger brother Sean is who actually got you into hardcore, but what is the actual story of how both of you guys got into it?
Here we go again, I give my brother a lot of credit for getting us deeper into the core for sure. I meant to ask him the other day how we "got into" hc / local metalcore because I truly don't remember, one day it was just something that we were obsessed with and kind of drawn to without even knowing what it was. We have an older cousin that I'm sure neither of us have spoken to in decades who brought Sean to a Righteous Jams show when he was pretty young and that was probably like his first exposure to real hc..idk what I was doing that day...probably World of Warcraft. I think through that cousin (who really had nothing to do with HC but went to school with the guy who booked the show) we met a guy who’s probably only a few years older than me who lived close to us and was really into actual hardcore but played in a metalcore band with kids we went to school with. I think from there we just branched out more and consumed as much as we could, Sean’s always been a way more proactive person than me so he would find a lot of stuff and put me on. It wasn't totally one sided, even to this day we are always putting each other onto stuff. Another funny bit to all that is that the guy who lived close to us would obviously drive us to shows and shit, until he got into a fight at THE CARRIER show and dropped out after that.. in turn I missed a Death Threat show (which at the time felt like more of a big deal because they were kind of broken up) and As One fest.
Before we get into SCHEME I wanted to talk about your graphic design work. I mean this with the utmost respect when I say that you can look at a design and tell that you had a hand in designing it. I feel like you’ve done a very good job at curating your own style throughout the years. How did you initially get into graphic design and what would you say are your biggest influences when it comes to creating your own designs and style? Bonus points if you tell us the first design you ever did for a band.
I appreciate the kind words but I’ve really got no practice or intention. I see people with these great ideas that they can like visualize and put down on paper before they even touch a computer and it makes me feel like shit haha
I really don’t try and make stuff a certain way to fit in my lane, I’m just like a sick person in terms of habit.. every design kind of starts one of a few ways and through like textures / using a printer It introduces a layer of chaos / unpredictability and that I try to riff off of to find something that looks right in my eye. Sometimes I’m just burning myself down waiting for something to click and it just never does, and it leaves me feeling like I have no idea what’s going on until I do one stupid little thing that results in me feeling a semblance of peace over the design.. then I know it’s done.
To answer the other questions, I’ve always been into art / aesthetics overall. I can’t say growing up we ever had the means or motivation to get into the arts but I took a computer graphics class when I was like a sophomore in high school and it kind of gave me some building blocks to start using a computer to make designs... I think the first thing I ever made for a band was for my brothers band Downpour, it was a tank top with an american flag and a guy throwing a molotov cocktail (a piece of clip art I later saw on a Trial windbreaker). I’m not even sure why I started doing it more “seriously”, I used to make a lot of cut and paste flyers at the Southington Public Library and eventually I started making merch designs for people I didn’t know through my friend Rob, then it turned into my getting paid sometimes haha
I think my biggest influences are my friends, without them blindly encouraging me to keep making stuff (that was bad for all intents and purposes) I probably would have just stopped. Aesthetically just the entire history of hardcore music is foundational to me tho, everything I do is a poor imitation of something a 17 year old threw together in their bedroom 30 years ago on a whim.
I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but it feels like your background in graphic design has carried over into SCHEME in a really noticeable way. Everything you put out, whether it’s shirts, records, or even postcards, has a clear direction and feels very intentional. And for anyone who might not realize it, having an in-house graphic designer for your band or label honestly has to be one of the biggest cheat codes in hardcore. Do you feel like working in graphic design has shaped how you approach running the label or any other aspect of your life?
Sort of, yea I guess. I care too much about having appropriate flyers / ads for the releases / stuff we make.. which at the end of the day is probably a little underwhelming from a sales perspective. Moreover the point is leaving behind a unified web of stuff like Rev or Dark Empire or even like Watermark, I’ve personally gotten so much out of all that. I think the least I could do is try and make something that someone can look at in 20 years and think we had a cool thing going. Thats probably going to come off as being a legend in your head but obviously I really like HC and I think its alright to approach it with a little bit of a conservationist mentality without being some weird covetous geek trying to shield it with a glass case.
Backing up a bit, tell me how you and your boy Chris started SCHEME and why.
Chris used to do Reconsider Records, and I wanted to do the AW 7” myself. He folded RR but still wanted to be involved in stuff, and I had the artistic drive to fill out that part of the label so it only made sense to work together to do stuff. One of our early interactions was him getting me a copy of the Way It Is 12” for secret Santa and I think that sealed our fates as Supertouch hardcore kids.
You are easily in Method of Doubts top 1% of fans and this year you got to put out a 7 inch for them finally. How did that come together considering they kinda weren’t a band for a while?
Liam / Yoon have always been like varying degrees of brothers to me... I’ve always liked the band from the first 7” on too. I think Liam and I kind of view hardcore the same and I think I always encouraged them to do more when they felt like it. The Wreckage / AW squad were pretty down with MOD as a band and also had a hand in encouraging them to play shows too. I think I offhandedly mentioned that if they ever did more I’d like to do it and it just turned into a reality eventually. I couldn’t be happier, they are an important band to me personally and probably one of the best hc bands of the last decade.
Staying in the lane of SCHEME releases, you recently put out a 12-inch record for Feels Like Heaven titled Within Dreams. How did you originally link up with the band? They’re a Swedish group that some readers might not be familiar with yet, so from a label perspective, what drew you to them and made you want to release an LP together?
Funny enough, Mike from Fatal Realm might have shown me their 2nd EP.. he’s pretty into Rev Summer styled HC and I think we were posted up one day and he put it on YouTube. Or I made that up idk. I think it all really starts with hearing the Existence LP when it came out, I bought that and the Blow Your Brains LP from Quality Control and was blown away by the Existence record. It was kind of my perfect spot for HARD hc, Integrity / Slayer / but with a classic Swedish twist. Basically I posted about them until they became my friends, on some psychotic voyeuristic tip. It snowballed from there, I think Linus from Existence might have sent me the first FLH ep on and I was obsessed and pushed it on Danny from AW and some others, I ran the songs into the ground and on the off hand mentioned to Linus or Erik that I would like to do a record for FLH .. than I met some of them at Unfest last year and they had heard of my interest through the Swedish grape vine and they had already wrote the record and were recording soon so I said to forward me it when it was done. But at that point I was kind of already on the hook for it, I gassed up the other swedes so much about it that if I bailed on it id look like the American chump. Very luckily the record is the best LP we will ever release. I think a good motivation for what draws me to it is that as I get older, I’m more and more tired of the same shit. I’d rather take a chance on something new than fight for a scrap from the table trying to be the same as everyone else. You heard the record, it’s obviously melodic and it’s fine if people don’t want to call it hardcore.. Everyone can keep swimming in whatever shallow end they’re comfortable in, but at least we can put this out and at least we tried to do something new (new for us that is). More so I’m just not worried about what people think about my taste or how our label is perceived.
Going back to the design lane for a moment, I wanted to talk about the Scheme Comp for a minute. We don’t really need to talk about the importance of compilations within hardcore, I trust that most people reading will understand that already. I’m more interested in the art for the comp. Me and you are both fans of things like Magic the Gathering and fantasy type novels and imagery. What was the initial plan for the art and how did you settle on the epic knight we see on the front cover. Was green always the plan for the color scheme (no pun intended)?
Well the original intention was to commission some art and like all things Scheme.. it never got done, we have commitment issues. Be it time constraints or money stuff we could never lock anyone in to do it, I think the first guy kind of wanted to do much (too much for us at the time that is) and then I wanted to have Peter Maria do a painting for it but I put him in an impossible position as far as a timeline went. So when it came down to the wire I found that picture of a knight from an old Dungeons and Dragons manual and basically drew around it / Did a lot of copy machine tricks. The whole time the theme was FANTASY FROM REALITY, so obviously some kind of Knight / Dragon combo was on the table. I think the green was a nod to the Rev comps.
Will there ever be a SCHEME Comp sequel…?
There was supposed to be a 7” comp last year with Fatal Realm and Existence.. and other malcontents but no one but Existence got their songs over to me so instead of holding them up we made a flexi disk with both of their newer singles on it and I think that was for the better. I think another comp will happen. Chris has a name picked out and everything.
Before we wrap things up, I have to ask about Almighty Watching. I’m to Almighty Watching what you are to Method of Doubt, a super fan of sorts. I know there’s recorded material and that an LP was the original plan, but you’ve also mentioned the possibility of a split and other ideas more recently. Can you break down where things stand right now?
Yeah we’ve got a split coming out in the spring, details are still being ironed out but it should be cool and the very least interesting. Otherwise we have like 10 other new songs that are demoed to some degree, the hold up really being me writing lyrics for 10 more songs haha. So figure split sometime in March and LP hopefully in late summer.
What’s a dream release for SCHEME in 2026?
I think the second Scheme comp could be really cool considering we’ve got like a concept in mind already... AW / Wreckage LPs will be cool to have out around roughly the same time. I don’t really have any aspirational releases but I think our years are pretty full already so it’s a pretty good feeling.
Thank you for doing this. The last part is yours to give a shout out to anyone or speak your mind…
Cooperation over competition; shout out 2 Square One, Feels Like Heaven, Method of Doubt, Sunday Drive and the Northern Unrest.
