Carnage, Mayhem and Rabid Guitars: This Is Stereo Cupid 

Words by Chiara Rosati C.

I first stumbled upon Stereo Cupid a year and a half ago at The Fiddler’s Elbow in London, Camden. Following The Molotovs’ fiery performance, Stereo Cupid stormed the stage with a set so explosive it felt like the night had only just begun. It was electric, loud, sexy, and impossible to look away from— I’ve been hooked ever since. Their unfiltered and fearless approach feels both deeply nostalgic and sharply modern. Think blazing guitars, howling choruses, and live shows that don’t just entertain but leave a mark—sometimes literally.

Made up of Ralph McCarthy Schofield (vocals), Match Montana (guitar), Luca Arshad (guitar), and Bruno Vincent Rogelj (bass), Stereo Cupid is a London-based rock band that isn’t trying to fit into a mould—they’re smashing the damn thing. With their unapologetically chaotic performances and bold creative instincts, they’re bringing back a version of rock ‘n’ roll that feels raw, reckless, and real.

Photo by Wiktoria Wolny

I caught up with them ahead of their European tour with Beauty School Dropout – here’s what the boys had to say…

What does the name “Stereo Cupid” mean to you? 

Match: It makes me think of love songs on the radio, which doesn’t mean just romance, but anything turned into a little love story. 

Ralph: It’s a love for everything, do you know what I mean? And the name “Stereo Cupid” is vintage in a way, it has that feel about it, like a cracked radio, it’s an old school kind of sex appeal, which is something that we’re keen to work with. 

Do you feel part of a wider musical movement in this sense? If you think about the London music scene, or even the rest of the UK. 

Ralph: I think there is a move at the moment for bands to be themselves. I think people are sick of manufactured bands now, so we’re getting more outrageous personalities again. It’s fun, and that’s what you live for. That’s what the golden days of rock and roll were all about. We want to bring that back and just be unequivocally ourselves. Nobody cares what anyone thinks, so we’re going to do it because we love it and because we see results from gigs, we see that a lot of people love it, too. 

I’ve been to several Stereo Cupid gigs, and your audience always looks very engaged. Your stage presence is fiery to say the least, and it perfectly matches your music. Do you usually plan what your show is going to look like, or is it a spontaneous response to the music and the energy?

Match: I think there’s an expectation… that everyone’s just going to go mad. I think when someone pays 15 or 20 quid for a ticket and the band is just still on stage, you might as well go and put on a YouTube video. People are paying for a show, so you go and give them a show. 

Ralph: It’s called a show for a reason, isn’t it? It’s not a listening party, it’s… go nuts! We don’t think about it at all, and then you turn around and see people covered in blood, and Bruno has ripped his trousers, and that’s what we love. Carnage. There’s no high like that in the world. It’s the best feeling on planet Earth.

I completely agree with you. Was it ever a bit scarier, a bit more tense? Maybe in the early days of the band, when you didn’t know exactly what to expect, yet?

Ralph: I think, unfortunately, if you’re predisposed to fear that kind of thing, then you’re not cut out for it. I always say, in that mayhem, covered in sweat and blood, in the heat of the moment, with the lights and the bass and the drum kicking through, it’s the calmest I ever am. I don’t know about you boys, but for me, being on that stage is like… nothing else matters. I never got nervous about it. It just excites me. 

How did you form the band?

Ralph: Match and I have been in the band since we were 16 in Manchester. For us, the minute you get on stage, you don’t want to ever get off that thing. It came naturally from that. I think it was just always destined to happen. Luca, look at you, you were never going to be anything other than this. You designed yourself on rock and roll.

Luca: I could be a cowboy. 

There’s no other option for Luca: a cowboy or a rockstar.

Luca: I’ve always wanted to go into investment banking. 

Galloping to the office with your guitar on the back, haha. In terms of your aesthetic and style, they stayed consistent, but also evolved. I can definitely see that now you’re incorporating a darker look, darker makeup…

Match: I’ve always had a theory that if you put five boys on stage wearing all black, you will just always look fucking great. We’ve fucked around with other things in the past, we’ve done suits…

You have?! I wish I could have seen that, haha.

Match: But if we go for all black and someone fucking comes in a different colored t-shirt–

Ralph: He will kick him off.

Match: I will definitely kick him off.

I’m the same. I told my band that if anyone ever decides to show up in a hoodie for a gig, they’re out. Anyway, Match, your red hair is gone!

Match: It’s hard to maintain. We were going on tour, and I thought that it would look sick. It did, but way too much work.

Yeah, I’ve been there. Moving on to musical inspirations, whose career do you admire the most?  

Luca: Michael Jackson? Haha.

Match: Maybe Metallica. All the boys are healthy, and they’re fucking bringing in the dough for long years to come. Those boys are living long and good and making big fucking money. 

Ralph: I want to live that Oasis life for a little bit, I’ll be honest. 

In terms of your collaboration as band members, what does the creative process behind your songs look like?

Ralph: Often, the premises start with Match. Match will bring a great track to the room, put it into the space, and all of us will sit on it, listen to it, and work on it. I tend to write most of the lyrics, but Bruno and Match jumped in on lyrics before, because I tend to go down the Morrissey route. I use massive words all the time for absolutely no reason, trying to be mysterious, again for no reason. Then, when we get into a live space, the reason our show is so good is because we do not feel like a track is finished until we’ve written it live, as well, and made it work outside of the rehearsal space. 

Bruno: Yeah, I feel like songs aren’t just an audible experience, but also visual. When we’re writing them, we’re sort of planning a blueprint in our head of how it’s going to look on stage when we’re performing it, not just how it is going to sound. As we were saying before, people pay 15 quid for a ticket, and they come to a show that is also visual. When you write songs, you have to bear that in mind. Well, we do at least. When you’re writing different parts of the songs, you’re also planning different parts of the show. 

Every song has a specific identity for you. 

Bruno: Yeah, exactly. When you go to a gig and you’ve never seen the band before, you are not going to know the lyrics or tune by heart, so the band has to capture the audience in some other way. I still remember when The Hives supported Arctic Monkeys, because the singer ended up hitting his own face with the microphone. Now, I don’t know a single The Hives tune, but when he did that, I was like, that’s actually kind of cool. I mean, that was a mistake, but still. 

Ralph: We had the same thing happening three weeks ago. I kicked the microphone into my own face, and I was basically bleeding from my mouth for the rest of the show. It looked fucking cool, though. Maybe I should buy some blood for next time. 

If it’s good fake blood, it looks great. Otherwise, after five minutes, it will look like something a kid would use for Halloween. Invest in good fake blood, that’s my advice. 

Ralph: Invest in good fake blood, people!

What do you think of music videos, then? 

Ralph: We’ve done a few in the past. The thing is, we’re focused on just growing our name right now, getting the gigs and the tunes out there. Music videos are a lot of work, often for not a huge amount of reward, until you’ve got a large enough audience to really invest in that. We want to work on more, but at the moment our ideas are too big; it would take millions. We don’t want to do things half arsed. We’d rather not do it.

Luca: I think music videos are just a thing of the past. I’ve not heard of anyone saying they found out about a song through the music video. It’s an additive, but…

Ralph: Nobody watches them anymore!

Match: But there’s a beauty in these videos…

Luca: When’s the last time you were like, “I need to go watch that music video”?

Match: Bro, so many times… even Yungblud’s “Hello Heaven, Hello”. Fucking cinema.

Ralph: Yeah, if you are that size.

Bruno: Also, if you want to see us perform, come and see us live. Music videos are often rehearsed, while you can see spontaneous stuff on stage that you probably won’t see at our next gig. It’s always something different. You might as well come and see an exclusive thing.

What would be your dream gig? 

Ralph: It has to be like the Colosseum or something like that, an ancient amphitheater, or like Red Hot Chili Peppers in front of the Pyramids. That would be amazing… or even playing on a boat in bloody Hong Kong. 

So, you can go see Jamie! (Their former drummer, who recently moved to China)

Bruno: Exactly! Another one would be on top of the Burj Khalifa.

Ralph: Now, that would be a music video if someone wants to fund that.

Luca: The Sphere!

Bruno: Sydney Opera House.

You really liked this question, didn’t you? Haha. Moving on to social media, what is your approach in terms of online visibility?

Match: Can I be completely honest? A fucking part of my soul dies every single time we have to sit and make a fucking TikTok. You have to do it, this is the thing, but I hate it. Imagine trying to tell Freddy Mercury: “Here you go, mate, you’re going to have to do a fucking dance for TikTok.”

Bruno: Or to Sid Vicious, like: “Right, this is going to work great for the algorithm…”

He’d punch you in the face.

Match: Yeah! I think social media destroys shit for musicians. We put our effort into the music, into writing things to express ourselves. That versus the fucking dude that dances on TikTok is two different worlds. So how can you merge that? It’s hard.

Ralph: There’s too much access. What happened to going to see a band live? Five people walk on stage, and they’re there, they’re real, they’re tangible. This doesn’t matter anymore because you see them every day on your Instagram. 

Bruno: This is why we had rock stars, because the only time you could ever see them, what they actually look like, was at one of their shows. Take Jim Morrison, he used to be an alien to the public because you’re not going to see him anywhere else but on stage. Now you’re so used to seeing artists on social media that when you go to a gig, it almost doesn’t feel that special. You’re not going to hold on to those memories. It’s just the world we live in now. Obviously, you still need great music to be successful, but the approach is just completely different. Take an eleven-minute Pink Floyd song. Every single note, lyric, and word is put at that second for a specific reason, and people don’t appreciate that kind of thing anymore.

Match: They just play a 1.53-minute-long song by Charli XCX.

Bruno: Especially in the pop industry, when there were six or seven predominant songwriters, they just ruled the whole table. Jack Antonoff has written solely number one hits and made this blueprint of what makes a pop song successful, and that’s why all those songs sound the same and are very short. That’s the reality we live in.

Match: You write a breakup song for everyone who’s been heartbroken, and you put in some fancy words and how you’re still better than them, and that always fucking works. You write the “I don’t need you anymore” song, or the “I really fancy this person” song, and that will always fucking work. It’s just the same blueprint. You look at the charts now, and everything follows that. 

Ralph: Same with all this depressed scream music that is just everywhere. They shout any random female name, a politician’s name…

Match: They shout Maggie Thatcher…

Ralph: Yeah, they say something about how they’re fighting against the system and then do a massive shred for three minutes, and they are like, oh, this is such genuine music…

Match: It’s hard to navigate this field. As a rock band, you either start fucking writing 1-minute pop songs that are about nothing, like 1975…

Bruno: 1975 are not a rock band, though, anybody who calls them a rock band is a fucking idiot.

Ralph: But fuck it, we have to do it, and we love what we do, let’s be positive.

Change of topic, what do you usually write about lyric-wise?

Ralph: We write about what we live, the life that we enjoy, the hardships that we face. We write about our lives honestly. We don’t write music for some escapist need of expression. 

Bruno: It’s more a form of relatability. We write about the human feelings that we all experience, but we never sugarcoat it, and it’s never a cry for help or a way of being sorry for ourselves. 

Match: It’s the life of a 20-something-year-old in London. 

Ralph: And although it doesn’t look like it, we really do enjoy this. 

Don’t worry, you’re human beings beyond musicians, so there are always going to be pros and cons. What is next for Stereo Cupid? I know you’re going on a European tour with Beauty School Dropout, congrats! 

Ralph: We’re going to keep smashing through shows, keep building our scene. We love playing live, that’s our pride and joy. We’d love to play more European dates after this tour. Next year will be festival season, we’re manifesting here, and of course, we’ll release more tunes. We’re also going to start a residency at the Blue Post in Soho.

I go there very often! I’ll definitely come to your shows. My last question is actually going to be a little psychological test: what colour, animal, and body of water best represent Stereo Cupid?

Ralph: Colour? Red because it’s aggressive, sexy, visceral, guttural, bloody. It’s in your face. Animal?

Luca: Kangaroo. 

Ralph: Definitely not. 

Bruno: A panther.

Ralph: I like panthers… but we’re a dog with rabies.

Luca-Match: Big dog.

Ralph: I don’t know, I think we’re a yappy little Jack Russell with rabies that’s also red. It injured itself, and it stinks. A body of water would be like a shit puddle that forms in the middle of a bad football pitch.

Luca: Camden Canal…

Ralph: That’s a good shout, yes.

Your colour represents what the band is at its core. The animal represents how you’d like to be perceived from an external point of view, and the body of water what your sexuality is like.

Ralph: Tick, tick, tick! It’s like… you’ve been out in Camden all night and you’ve had a pretty mad night. You’re completely pissed, and underneath the canal tunnel, there is a fucking stinky little dog with rabies yapping at you, the red is because it’s scratching itself so it’s bleeding… and this is Stereo fucking Cupid.

This should be the cover of your first EP.

Photos by Wiktoria Wolny