In 2023, the band now known as Soulcage was playing the basement of a Des Moines fraternity house. The crowd was expecting some frat party jams. Instead, they got a grungy slap in face that might have left those in attendance bruised and wondering what, or who, they had walked into.
Unsurprisingly, Soulcage doesn’t play a lot of fraternity houses anymore.
Today, the band is headlining local venues around Iowa, including a performance at xBk Live in Des Moines on Monday, April 6. Soulcage will be one of the bands in the lineup for the Hellraiser Appreciation show, a free concert presented by Lazer 103.3 to celebrate 30 years of the Pella-based rock station.
This show is one of several across the state this month, including at Wildwood in Iowa City on April 12 and the Loft in Waterloo on April 17. This is all amidst a rollout of new music, including a new single drop for “W.D.Y.W.F.M.” this Friday, April 3.
It’s a busy time for Soulcage, a long way removed from basement house shows at frats. I chatted with Soulcage about the formation of the band, its early days and where they’re headed next.
It’s 2020, Ace Tipton and AJ Fucaloro have been jamming together for a few months in Fucaloro’s basement with a few other people. Eventually, they start looking for a new guitarist. In comes Jayden Young, a 15-year-old with the ability to melt your face off.
“He’s just this prodigy. He has been doing lessons for years, and so we bring him over, and he’s just a total rock star,” Tipton said.
Over the next couple of years, Tipton, Fucaloro and Young continue to play with their cover band around Iowa, even winning a talent competition at the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. But creative differences and a wish to start writing their own music pulled that band apart, leaving the three boys on their own.
“Eventually, it was just me, AJ and Jayden; we were looking for a singer and a guitar player,” Tipton said.
Tipton invited a friend from middle school, Anthony Cooper, to fill the second guitarist spot. Finally, the band found their lead singer, Jayden “Erdy” Erdman, through Facebook — though not without some confusion.
“I thought he was Jayden [Young] at first because he just had a Pearl Jam cover photo,” Tipton said. “I mean, his name is Jayden, too. It’s Erdy, but it’s Jayden. So, I thought it was just a Facebook page that [Young] made to get away from his parents.”
As the quintet started writing their own music, they decided to go by the name Monstrophe, a moniker they’d keep till the end of 2023 and pay homage to through their debut album of the same name, which came out on June 20, 2025.
“We’re Soulcage, but those are Monstrophe songs,” Erdman said. “All of them are written or conceived or thought of when we were named that.”
“I think we were all just trying to get our feet wet and mesh together as a group musically and cohesively,” Tipton said.
That process of coming together resulted in a debut sporting a blend of classic rock, grunge and alternative with a heavy mix of distorted guitars. The tracks throughout containing leads sharp enough to shave with and a thick rhythm section that drives their sound forward. It’s a fully realized effort for a young band finding themselves, though the members shared just how much their process evolved along the way.
“From a songwriting experience, it’s such a stark difference from the stuff that we wrote towards the start [of the album] to the very end,” shares Tipton. “Like ‘On Fire’ was the first song that’s on this record that we wrote together.”
“On Fire” is driven almost entirely by a greased-up bass riff provided by Tipton, accented by a guitar poking it’s head over the shoulder as if to ask “what are you doing?”
“Just the process of going from that, where it’s like ‘So and so has a riff. Everyone’s going to mesh with it, add our own little flavor to it.’ But for the most part, it revolves around one person, whereas stuff that we wrote towards the back half of the album— like ‘Clouds’ is the last song that we actually wrote for the album. That one’s so much more holistic.”
Erdman frames their album as a reflection on the coming-of-age journeys of its members, all the way up to the present.
“It’s a compilation of all the shared experiences we’ve had in the band and then separately as individuals,” Erdman said.
Soulcage is currently gearing up to release six new songs over the course of 2026 with the latest single, “W.D.Y.W.F.M” releasing April 3, and more to come soon. It’s a release schedule of a band confident in their trajectory, who understands that their formative experiences have created a band stronger than their individual parts.