new band just dropped, born in a parking lot
Giving a warm indiewave welcome to LiS, a freshly minted indie/alt band from Austin, TX blending R&B vocals with shoegaze and dream pop influences. Their debut single “Reach” just dropped at midnight, but I chatted with founder and guitarist Jeremy Rogers earlier this week to figure out how we got here.
The beginnings were humble. He’s a carpenter by trade but a set of broken ribs had him laid up and out of work. He got offered a gig playing in the parking lot of Austin’s famous Justine’s Brasserie where he would greet guests with an atmospheric guitar haze.
“I started buying tons of pedals and really honing in on this sort of Midwest emo style of playing, but with lots of effects so it has this natural shoegaze sound. The customers love it. I love it too. It’s the best music gig I’ve ever had. Even after my ribs healed, I kept at it because it’s great extra money.”
It led to offers to jam from tons of musicians, and he jammed with most of them, but he says everything clicked into place when he was approached in the lot by drummer JJ Johnson who won a Grammy as a member of the Tedeschi Trucks Band and has manned the kits for John Mayer, Lenny Kravitz and Gary Clark Jr.
They hit it off instantly and started writing and recording. It’s one of the rare examples of something positive coming out of two dudes meeting in a parking lot. But at the time, Jeremy didn’t realize who he was working with:
“We’d been playing and practicing for two months, and then I’m at his house and I see a Grammy on his shelf. Turns out he’s played with everybody. He’s major. We were already forming a band together and he never even told me.
But I can speak for him on this, he very much feels like this project is his baby. He’s not just showing up to the studio. He is a writing member and dictates how the music flows.”
The pair set out to find a singer by flipping through JJ’s Rolodex, but the internet ended up leading them to Liv Lopez who’s done some studio work and released her own music on and off since the age of 18. For Liv, it was good timing:
“I moved to Austin last year and really wanted to connect with other creatives who were making music simply for the love of it. That’s exactly what I found when Jeremy reached out and said he’d been working on some songs with JJ. I sent a few voice memos of myself freestyling over their songs to give them an idea of what came to me initially.”
For Jeremy, it was a seamless fit:
“We thought it’d be cool to have an R&B singer over shoegaze because we’ve never heard anything like that before. I sent her the music and she just sent me riff after riff, melody idea after melody idea via text thread.”
To round out the group on synth and bass, some mutual friends connected them with Lacy Katherine Strong, a film composer who had just moved back from Paris. After their first Instagram post as a band, they already started to get show offers, which inspired them to write more music. They’ve now got a full EP prepped and a handful of other tracks in the pipeline that Jeremy describes as cinematic swells and walls of sound that are poppy enough to make them approachable for everyone:
“I feel like we’re trying our best to capture all the best things about nostalgia throughout all of our different eras. JJ’s nostalgia is very different from my nostalgia and very different from Liv’s nostalgia. But they all work out. They all come together, and it’s something that’s relatable across generations.”
The unreleased tracks I’ve heard remind me of driving around at midnight listening to Yumi Zouma and No Vacation, but there’s an ascending edge that almost makes you wanna bang your head. Mixing a blues drummer with Midwest emo with an R&B singer with an ambient composer may seem like a tall task but it’s the perfect melting pot for the shoegaze dreamscape they’re shooting for.
Liv likes what they’re building:
“In the past, I’ve worked with a few producers who were interested in my sound, but nothing ever really came of those collaborations. I’m grateful that we all found each other, and I’m really looking forward to continuing to create.”
Nothing is guaranteed at the beginning of a new project, so I asked Jeremy if he’s scared of what’s to come:
“No. I mean, we just don’t have any expectations. We’re not like gunning for anything. We’re just being us. We’re excited though. And a lot of people we’re talking to are excited. We have pre-saves, which is cool!
I don’t think I’ve ever had a pre-save on anything in my life.”
Now it’s up to the people. Go stream “Reach,” the debut single from LiS:
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