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Born into the pop-culture filled 1990’s and bred in Southern California, Paul Muro and Mel Torres were childhood friends since the beginning of their educations at Walt Disney Elementary. Once Muro received his first guitar and Mel his first drum set, their friendship grew richer with a common passion for music. They devoted copious amounts of time towards music throughout their childhood and later into their adolescent lives at the home of Torres, simply playing music and doing what they loved.

While Muro and Torres were enjoying regular guitar and drumming sessions, Andrés Garcia received his guitar and continued his musical interests, totally unaware of Torres and Muro. Once these three boys reached adolescence, with Torres and Garcia meeting at Oxford Academy and Muro attending Brookhurst Junior High, they formed a musical project that nurtured a thirst to form a studio band. Muro, Torres, and Garcia searched for a female vocalist to complete their visions, but Dan Kim, Tim Pei, Ashley Nguyen did not match their musical tastes. However, vocalist Annes Kim and bassist Brian St. Halire proved sufficient.

With a desire for a fresh start, Muro, Torres, and Garcia found bassist Alan Hernandez from Western High School. Hernandez provided emotional strength for all band mates. The formula was completed when Valerie Sabatino of Oxford Academy joined the four men.

After numerous performances at and countless hours in the studio, a key performance at Chain Reaction in May 2009 truly united the band as a second family of extremely close companions. Throughout all of their personal strife and proud accomplishments, it whittled down to that single spring night of performance. A throbbing crowd of music-hungry teenagers filled the floors, not only listening to Emerging From Below’s musical messages, but they were the only band that night with a circle mosh pit.

This performance at a local venue of Orange County was not enough for their hopes of larger scales of success. Mel Torres inspired high hopes for Valerie, Paul, Alan, and Andrés; Torres teamed up with a booking assistant, Minh Tran, to search for other sources of expanding their influence in Southern California to make the summer of 2009 the band’s largest turning point yet.