Sundown in Oaktown is an exciting introduction to a raw talent, who makes genre-bending, prismatic music, in service of human connection and the quest for identity. The 12 song album was co-produced by Geoff Rickly from Thursday (No Devotion, United Nations) who also performs on “alcatraz.” The album also features contributions from Aaron Gillespie (Underoath, The Almost), AJ Perdomo (The Dangerous Summer), Tim Payne (Thursday, LS Dunes) played bass on “_EMBRKDRO_,” “orchids,” “alcatraz” and Jarrod Alexander (My Chemical Romance, Alkaline Trio, Death By Stereo, The Suicide File) contributed drums to “_sangre_azul_,” and “orchids.”

Scott says, “In 2020, amidst all the isolation and anxiety, I dusted off an album I had started a couple years earlier, but had not finished.” He adds, “I had hit a number of roadblocks that had discouraged me, and had continually lost my momentum. I channeled all my energy into this album; I lived it, I breathed it, I slept it, I dreamt it. I found a lot of help along the way, and with every exchange and contribution I re-energized to dig deeper and keep grinding. From Geoff Rickly who adopted my project and guided me along the way, my beautiful friends/family and everyone in between, and AJ Perdomo, Aaron Gillespie, Tim Payne, Jarrod Alexander, Jesse Cannon. All these contributions gave me the extra push I needed at exactly the right time, and I am so stoked and honored to have been able to work with these legends of the scene that I grew up admiring.”

Born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaii, Scott was steeped in local music traditions, raised as much by the soft strum of the ukulele as he was by the warm Pacific winds. As he grew up, he found Reggae’s soft upstrokes and Hip Hop’s bombastic drum machines. Being a child not just of the island, but the internet as well, Scott followed the distant call of mainland sounds — emo, punk, hardcore — to Oakland, trading the big island for the big city. In Oakland, Scott saw lines drawn everywhere, neighborhood to neighborhood, rich to poor, and began his new life, trying not to slip between the cracks, and lose himself in a city that will spit you out or swallow you whole. Living paycheck to paycheck, Scott started writing music under the name triton. as a way to make sense of his fractured identity, combining the gentle sounds of his youth with the roar of city traffic, car alarms, and broken windows.

On Sundown in Oaktown, triton. radically reimagines the boundaries of genre, in order to redraw the stifling lines of personal identity and social construct. Album opener “_bougainvillea.” deftly explores the isolation of a new city, “All alone / two thousand miles away from home / doing things my way / and who's to say there's something wrong with beer in the morning,” by transitioning from bedroom pop to washed out Hawaiian slide guitars, while cycling through different recording fidelity as a signal for distance. Later, class, religion and culture are all bound up with a genuine vulnerability on the song "_fruitvale:" “all these faces i'll never know / embarcadero and the afterglow / taking BART around town”, instead of hanging around: “living in a house that / i could never call my home” as a slow motion guitar melts over lofi beats.