Hail the Sun frontman Donovan Melero has an obvious spot in his heart for music, not just as a performer, but as an avid reader of music publications.
From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, the Northern California native noticed a decline in some of his favorite music magazines, leaving him with the idea to take up the coverage himself and elevate up-and-coming bands by creating his own magazine, Kill Iconic.
“Years before I started it, I saw a window opening in the music genre that I listened to that was no longer being covered too heavily,” Melero said during a recent phone interview. “(In) 2016 onwards, it just shifted, and there is nothing wrong with that. I can respect a business model’s ability to shift to their subscribership or their reader base, but it left out a lot and a big window that I knew there was still a demand for, but it just wasn’t large enough of a demand for a major publication to really take notice.”
To celebrate the biannual Kill Iconic magazine and its mission to highlight new groups, the band will perform the second iteration of the Kill Iconic Festival at House of Blues Anaheim on Saturday, March 23 alongside Intervals, A Lot Like Birds, Being As An Ocean, Night Verses, Geoff Rickly, Andres, Body Thief, Makari, Moondough, Outline In Color, The Seafloor Cinema, Ahh-Ceh, Erase Theory and rosecoloredworld.
“I want people to have a good time and to be moved for one day and maybe discover a band they hadn’t heard of before,” Melero said. “I’d like to see people join what is the Kill Iconic community and the culture that helped sculpt the people that continue to discover us and help to sculpt where the future leads us.”
The founding principle of Kill Iconic can be traced back to the early days of Hail the Sun, which formed in Chico in 2009. Melero and guitarist Aric Garcia have been friends since the third grade and have made music together since they were 12. They later attended California State University Chico,…
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