To most people in Hawaii, the phrase “back in the day” evokes memories of light and sunshine, of playing at the beach in shorts and T-shirts and slippers.

For Romell Regulacion, however, “back in the day” refers to the darkness of night, and to his performances in the seedy warehouses and clubs that hosted the “dungeon” scene of Honolulu in the 1990s, with people dressed in black and covering their faces not with suntan lotion but with other-worldly makeup.

Regulacion was the frontman for Razed in Black, Hawaii’s most successful musical group from the Goth and industrial genres — and one of its most popular of any genre, with five studio albums and a long list of credits on movie, television and videogame soundtracks.

Regulacion performs on Saturday at Nextdoor in what will be Razed in Black’s first reunion performance in 15 years.

“I’m happy to be able to perform again at home,” he said. “As long as I’ve been away from the islands, Hawaii is still home for me, still in my heart, and the longer I am away from there the more I realize what the islands mean to me.”

For Regulacion, there’s no contradiction between the gloomy fatalism of his art and the sunny optimism of his birthplace. It’s just a matter of accessing a different part of the soul.

“Hawaii is not known for that scene,” he said, “but as we went on tour and got on the record label and met more and more people who were pivotal in the scene, I found that we’re all the same.”

Goths have an outlet for their angst, Regulacion said. “We have the music and the dancing and the image and the lifestyle to let that go and escape.”

He remembers a friend visiting him at his Ewa Beach home and wandering into his closet. “I heard him yell, ‘Oh, you do have black! That’s all you have!”

Now a hairdresser based in another sunny clime, Florida, he remains true to the Goth lifestyle he developed growing up in Hawaii. He wears Goth clothing at his shop, including a pair of well-worn, “wasted shoes with nails in them,” he related — “not for the style, but because they would fall apart. I love these shoes.”

HIS MUSIC is heavy in virtually every way, with deep, driving baselines, scratchy guitars, spooky electronic effects, pounding percussion and moody lyrics.

Regulacion describes his music as “fitting well” in the Gothic-industrial scene, because it is neither exclusively but is acceptable to fans of both.

Most of the lyrics refer to the pain of relationships — or, in Regulacion’s case, mostly a single, long-term relationship that took him on a roller coaster of emotions. Regulacion kept a record of thoughts and ideas during the relationship, using them as themes for his tunes.

“I was nervous the first time when I realized how much of myself was going to be exposed,” he said. “You can put all of the albums together and pick key songs out of them and kind of peer into my history. … There were true feelings, and once it was written and performed, I felt better because it was like I let it go.”

For all the darkness of his music, Regulacion is actually a classically trained musician who started piano lessons as a 5-year-old growing up in Ewa Beach. That training is reflected in many of his well-crafted songs.

“I write songs that have a journey, like movements in classical music, to have a beginning, a middle and end. I like it to have, if possible, emotion without actually listening to the lyrics. I always thought that if I could isolate a lick or a sound, or one of the layers of the song, if it sounds good on its own, then we’re good.”

By middle school, he was pleading with his parents for an electric guitar, rejecting their advice to get an acoustic guitar because “I already knew I want to be a rock guitar player.”

His passion later became the synthesizer — then the ultimate instrument for electronic music makers.

“The whole dark electronic scene appealed to me, even before it was known as the dark electronic scene,” he said. “When I first heard Depeche Mode from the 1980s and all the synthpop from back then, New Wave, all that really kind of spoke to me.”

After graduating from Damien — where he was considered “the weird kid,” he said – he got a music scholarship to the University of Hawaii-Manoa and played for its concert band, but his path in music was already set.

“By my college days, I was already in the recording studio and doing sessions and performing and traveling,” said Regulacion, who graduated with a business degree.

Razed in Black had its origins as a solo electronic project, originally known as Lost Souls, which Regulacion launched in 1994. He was signed a year later by the Cleopatra Records, then one of the most prominent Goth record labels based in Los Angeles, and changed the name to Razed in Black.

He remembers the days when his style of dark alternative music could be heard on the radio three times a week, and drew large crowds to warehouses and other underground locales every other month — usually advertised, in the days before social media or texting, via word-of-mouth or a homemade disk that was passed around between fans.

“I miss the days of fliering and postering, and pressing four-song CDs to hand out to people,” he said.

RAZED IN BLACK’S music would go on to be featured in television shows including “Mission Hill” and “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” the film “The Rage: Carrie 2” and the videogame “Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam.” Its popularity eventually took Regulacion away from the islands to Los Angeles, on tour around the mainland and to Japan, where he had a large following.

“I got to compare, unintentionally, other scenes with Hawaii, and I was surprised to learn that Hawaii had a pretty good scene,” he said.

Regulacion will be joined by longtime colleagues Ivan Delaforce on drums and guitarist/vocalist Jacques Phil Guerrero, with Danny Laforga and Conor Haley providing the all-important electronics support. Although circumstances have forced them to live apart for all these many years, they’ve been able put the Saturday’s concert together using email and Skype.

“I don’t know what to expect out of myself, but out of the shows that I’ve done prior to this particular one, it already means a lot to me, so I hope that translates on stage,” he said.

Expect a full evening of entertainment from Honolulu’s alternative scene. DJs Nocturna, Du Nord and Nightfox will spin goth, industrial and dark alternative music, with guest appearances by costumed dancers and dark, exotic performances.