There is a room inside Fab Factory Studios that is entirely, aggressively red — cinderblock walls painted the color of a stop sign, a bank of velvet couches deep enough to disappear into, a vintage refrigerator standing in the corner like a prop from a diner that never existed. Above the couches, in looping neon script, a sign spells out the name of the thing this room is actually for: RED SLUSHY RECORDS, glowing hot enough to bathe the whole space in its own light, so that even the studded leather trunk doubling as a side table looks like it’s smoldering. It is not a conference room. It is not built for pitch decks. It is built for the exact thing that happens in it — artists sinking into the couches at two in the morning, listening back to a mix, arguing about a bridge, signing something. 

For Shaun Fabos, the value of a space like this is not captured by a slide deck about vertical integration or synergy. He’ll tell you about a toolbox — seven years of gear, engineering relationships, and hard-won artist trust, built one session at a time, that had quietly outgrown the four walls meant to hold it. “We wanted the studio to have more of everything we built being utilized,” he says, describing the conversation that became the label. “The studio can only go so far. What can we do that will bring things higher and expand in a different way?” It reflects a founder’s logic more than that of a traditional label executive: rather than asking how to capture more of the value chain, the focus is on making better use of an expansive, underutilized set of resources. If you’re going to do it, he adds, “we gotta do something cool.” The red room is their proof.

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Fab Factory Studios had been open long enough to become a fixture rather than a start-up, long enough for the people running it to notice the ceiling. Red Slushy launched not as a pivot away from the studio but as its logical extension — the next room built onto a house that had run out of rooms. Fabos, now President, and Chris Cyre, the label’s Vice President, didn’t so much found a separate company as build a second engine into the one they already had running.

Within the larger Fab Factory operation, Red Slushy functions less like a separate division than part of a shared creative nervous system. “The companies go hand in hand,” he says. “I was just in a meeting with executives who work on both sides — what are the top priorities for each division, and how do we handle and run them.” Cyre puts the same idea in blunter, more practical terms: the label exists to answer the question of “how do we utilize everything in the studio.” An artist walks in for a session and walks out with a deal, or something close to it. The infrastructure — the rooms, the gear, the relationships, the years of engineering trust — was already built. The label was the mechanism for making sure it didn’t go to waste.

That proximity is central to what they are trying to build. A standalone rock label works from a spreadsheet and a hunch. Red Slushy works from a room with a couch in it. “Being in music and seeing how bad it can be” is what pushed Cyre toward wanting to build something artist-friendly from the inside, he says — and inside, for him, has a literal meaning. He can watch how a band behaves in a live room before anyone signs anything.

The “rock revival” narrative has resurfaced often enough—and been questioned often enough—that a measure of skepticism is understandable. Fabos doesn’t sound skeptical. “We think rock is going to be back on top,” he says. “It’s starting to indicate that that’s the case. We have a lot of love and affection for that — it’s something we enjoy a lot.” Red Slushy’s catalog leans into the genre’s elasticity rather than any single subgenre orthodoxy — the label moves comfortably from EDM-inflected rock to alt-rock to pop-rock, treating “rock” as a spectrum rather than a gate.

Where the label’s two principals diverge slightly is in their reference points, or rather their explicit refusal to have one. “Don’t hold other brands on pedestals,” Fabos says of the label’s approach — the plan was to figure it out themselves rather than run someone else’s playbook back. Cyre, notably, does have ghosts in mind, and he names them without hesitation: Hopeless Records and Pure Noise Records, the scene-defining labels whose merch became identity before their bands became inescapable. “You’d see someone wearing a windbreaker and you wanted to be a part of that,” Cyre says. “Hopeless had the coolest bands, and we want to bring that culture back — give kids who love rock music something to look up to.” It’s a subtle but real distinction between the label’s two builders: Fabos resists the comparison, Cyre embraces it as an ambition. Both conclusions point the same direction — toward a label that sells belonging as much as it sells songs.Photo Credit: Red Slushy Records

The current Red Slushy roster — Anthony Ortiz, WD-HAN, TJ Minor, The Audacity, Chandler Leighton, and Harry Was Here — reads less like an algorithmically optimized genre bet and more like the guest list of people Fabos and Cyre actually wanted in the building. For Cyre, the throughline isn’t sonic at all; it’s cultural. “It’s about building the right team and finding the right people who are in music,” he says — “the people who surround themselves in this culture, rather than the random corporate person with credentials.” That standard extends to hiring as much as signing, reflecting the belief that a label staffed by people who care deeply about the scene is better positioned to support artists within it.

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The dream signing, when Fabos allows himself the exercise, isn’t a hypothetical superstar — it’s a band already in the building. It’s a telling answer, because it collapses the distance between “who we’d want” and “who we already know” — the same sense of proximity they want to build into the operation also appears in its imagined version.

Many labels claim to be artist-friendly the way many airlines claim to care about your journey. Fabos and Cyre’s version comes with a specific, almost aggressive logic attached: better to own a small piece of many successes than a large piece of one failure. “Have five percent of ten pies instead of seventy-five percent of one pie,” Fabos says, and it comes close to expressing the label’s mission through metaphor.

He backs it with an anecdote rather than a policy. A few weeks earlier, Red Slushy was presented with a deal structure that would have shortchanged the artist on the other end. “We immediately flagged it — they wouldn’t benefit in the long run — and we helped them fix it,” Fabos says. “If you have a racehorse, why would you shoot it in the foot and then ask it to race?” The easier path, he’s clear-eyed enough to admit, would be to take the worse deal and pocket the difference. “It’s harder and tougher,” he says of doing it the other way. “But we have a lot more faith and trust in the people we do business with.”

Cyre frames the same instinct in terms of time horizon rather than deal terms: “I want this to be a true business — longevity, and a true business with our artists. I want to build long-term relationships.” Between the two of them, artist-friendliness stops being a marketing line and starts looking like the actual operating thesis — the bet that trust compounds and extraction doesn’t.

Fabos and Cyre — alongside their partner, and Shaun’s father, Steve Fabos  — have built enough of a working relationship that disagreement isn’t treated as a crisis to manage but as a Tuesday. “We have an internal agreement that if something comes up we’re not in agreement about, we talk about it,” Fabos says. “We haven’t had that many disagreements — it’s been more internal.” Notably, the one place they say they don’t fight is over hit prediction, because 

They’ve made peace with not trying to predict it at all. Fabos reaches for a familiar art-historical example to make the point: Van Gogh, he notes, is said to have used some of his paintings as chicken-coop doors—worthless in his own time, but now among the world’s most coveted objects. “We don’t look at music that way,” he says. “We want to get it out and get feedback.” Taste, in other words, is treated as something to learn from after release rather than a gate to enforce beforehand.

Since its January 2023 launch, the lesson that has emerged for Fabos and Cyre is less about a particular release cycle or operational adjustment than patience itself. “It’s a lot harder than it seems,” Fabos says. “The biggest lesson we’ve probably learned is that it takes time. A lot of energy and pushing. You have to stay the course.” It suggests that building a label around relationships rather than purely transactional considerations may take longer—and that the team sees value in making that investment.

The horizon they’re both describing runs decades, not quarters. “In twenty-five years, we want Red Slushy to be one of the top rock labels,” Fabos says. “We want to create a space that’s going to have artists running our direction because they want to be with us, because they want to be on our label.” Cyre’s version of the same future is almost identical in shape, right down to the emphasis: “I hope that we’re the label every kid looks up to and wants to be like. We support artists, do artist-friendly deals. I want this to be a true business — longevity, and true relationships with our artists.”

Ultimately, it is a straightforward ambition for a label founded within a recording studio in 2023: not disruption, not scale for its own sake, just the slow accumulation of trust with enough bands that, eventually, the culture builds itself. Whether Red Slushy gets there is a question the market will answer. But the toolbox, at least, is finally getting used.

SPIN Magazine newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.

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