The indie rock band Good Kid has charted its own, atypical path in the music business.
The Toronto-based band — vocalist Nick Frosst, guitarists Jacob Tsafatinos and David Wood, bassist Michael Kozakov and drummer Jon Kereliuk — formed in 2015 among students at the University of Toronto. Their cover of Laufey’s “From the Start” went viral, with more than 200 million streams on Spotify, and their music also has been featured on the video game “Fortnite.”
Their own experiences in the “Fortnite” community convinced the band to make their catalog DMCA-free, essentially allowing their music to be used on YouTube, Twitch, fan animations and more without any copyright restrictions.
Over the past 11 years, they’ve released a slew of singles, which have been compiled into four EPs. Now, the band will release its first full album “Can We Hang Out Sometime?” on April 3, and it feels like the start of a new era for the band, according to Wood.
“Yeah, it does. It also feels a bit like the closing of a chapter as well. We have a lyric in our song ‘Wall’: ‘It’s coming to a close.’ I think we wanted to really start with that song as a single because of that line,” Wood said. “We wanted to come out with our new music as a bit of a statement. And so saying it’s coming to a close, reflecting on the music that we’ve previously released that really got us here and that built us up. But now, we’d love to express this new chapter of music that we’re writing. And not in a finale way, but just sort of welcoming in this new era of music that we’re going to be writing for the next little while. We’re just really excited to keep writing and keep putting out music and trying new things.”
The upcoming album was produced by John Congleton, who has worked with acts like Bono, David Byrne, Lana Del Rey and Eddie Vedder.
“It really created a unique identity for many of the songs on the album. There’s still a few in there that feel familiar, Good Kid music, because we wanted to keep that for our listeners,” Wood said. “I know a lot of bands will sometimes release a record and it’ll sound so unbelievably different from what they’ve done in the past. And sometimes you feel a bit left out when that happens because you love that music that brought you there. So we wanted to keep it familiar at the same time, trying new things and then bringing forward this different story.”
A week after the album’s release, they’ll hit the road for their Can We Hang Out? tour. Good Kid will play Pittsburgh for the first time with an April 13 show at Stage AE, with INOHA opening.
“My dad’s been to Pittsburgh and keeps telling me that I have to go because it’s a deceptively beautiful waterfront and great downtown,” said Wood, whose family also roots for the Steelers. “So I’m really actually very excited to get to Pittsburgh.”
In a Zoom conversation last week from Toronto, Wood spoke with TribLive about the album, the latest single “Eastside” and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
The debut album comes out on April 3, so how has it been sitting on it, waiting for it to be released?
Yeah, very, very difficult. This one took particularly quite a long time for us to get all our mixes in and all of our feedback. I think we were used to doing singles and EPs and a lot of that is really quick iteration over songs. This was our first experience with a full body of music all at the same time, so it was a very unique experience for us.
You mentioned doing the singles and EP. Was it hard to get the songs for the album all to fit together into a cohesive package?
It wasn’t so much that it was hard. I think it was that it was just a first-time experience for us doing that. We were able to get a pretty cohesive through line through a lot of these songs. Some of them are pretty different from one another. But I think there were some core themes that we were able to walk away from the album with, particularly around love and friendship and existential crisis, a lot of the stuff that we are pretty familiar with, in terms of writing.
It was fun to try to piece all these things together. I think what was different for us is that we had songs at this point that were almost brand new songs to us, like we had just written them. Some songs were written in the studio, and others we’ve had sitting around for maybe seven, eight years even. I think “Tornado” is a track that we first brought to the band seven or eight years ago — that was a Michael song — and we finally were able to find the best version of it and put it on the album.
Was there a creative direction that you wanted to follow for this album?
We didn’t know exactly what that creative direction was going to be until we got there. When we were in L.A. recording the album, unfortunately, it was during the forest fires that were happening in California. So the entire time that we were there, we were under this intense pressure, not just from us as artists, but the literal environment around us, pretty much every day checking our phones to see if we have to evacuate at some point. So it created a ton of external pressure.
A lot of that ended up coming through on the album, and this ended up being a much grittier sounding album than we’re used to. We ended up with a couple songs that were a bit angrier in tone. I think “Eastside” and “Rift” are good examples of that. And even “Tornado,” once that song is out — it’s got this kind of chaotic feel to it — we were all feeling that in the moment. I’m just really happy that we were able to finish the album and were able to see the project all the way through.
How did working with John Congleton help to shape this album?
Working with John Congleton, it’s hard to describe what he provides. It’s pretty unique. He gave us a brand new soundscape to work with that we would never have been able to do on our own when we went in there. John Congleton has this very old-school philosophy of music composition and editing. He likes to have bands feel like they are playing music together in a room rather than each individual piece being sewn together into this perfect song. So what we ended up with was a much more raw sound. Then from a production side of things, he was able to create effects with preamps on guitars and vocal effects that we would never have been able to dream up.
You mentioned “Eastside,” the latest single, being a little grittier. What’s the story behind that song?
“Eastside” is kind of a punky song about running into somebody that you just hate. It’s almost like an animated version of that. It’s like a fight song for running into your nemesis, almost like running into Gary from Pokemon (laughs) or that old-school sense of rivalry. I think what tied it together for both Nick and Jacob for that song was stories of people in their lives who looked down on them in a way and thought less of them and those sour interactions that you have with somebody. Sometimes you can just ruminate on it and you can fester those feelings, or you can channel it and create something. I think that’s what we did with “Eastside.”
With the band’s career, how important has your independence been? Could you imagine taking orders from a record label?
Sometimes that sounds pretty sweet actually. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone telling you what to do and having someone in the room who can tell you what the next step is, but I think at the end of the day, the independence of our band is so important. It’s really given us the freedom to do anything we want creatively. A lot of the decisions we make are not based on what is the most optimal choice? We’re not making decisions on generating stats or revenue for the band. We just want to keep this as a creative project and as long as we remain independent, we can continue to make the music that we love. And we can continue to engage with the fans that we have, the community we built.
It’s also allowed us to create our own world with animated music videos, working with artists that we want to collaborate with, not necessarily artists that we’re asked to collaborate with. I think more importantly is how it’s affected our ability to keep within the band’s ethos, this idea of free music and having our music be DMCA-free and copyright-free for Twitch and YouTube so that content creators and streamers can use our music, however they like and interpret it however they like, We wouldn’t be able to do that with a label. A label would very quickly shut that down. So staying independent lets us keep that identity. That identity over the last half a decade has become really important to us as musicians and almost in a philosophical way: this is how we want to approach music. We want it to be shared as widely as possible with as many people as we can. We want other people to collaborate with us, so that’s where being independent is the most important.
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That decision to make the music open to pretty much anyone, did you get a lot of pushback on that?
Yeah. Right away. Yeah, it was sort of like, what are you guys doing? I remember with anyone we talked to that was sort of in the industry, they would say, ‘Well, you’re cutting out a ton of revenue. It’s not going to be sustainable.’ But we just were able to push forward with it anyways. I think the results have been so great for the band. I think I would never have done it differently. Now that we’re five years into the future and we’re seeing the results of it, we’re seeing the impact of it, it’s helped us build a reputation as the creator-friendly band, the band that if you’re making videos, if you’re an editor, if you’re just a kid with an Instagram page or you have a TikTok channel, you want to make creative content, you can always use our music and you can always collaborate with Good Kid. That’s really important to us. I wouldn’t do it any other way.
It’s been a little bit of an unconventional route, so where are you hoping that this journey takes the band in the future?
I just really hope it helps us with our long-term goals as a band. We just love playing shows. We love touring. We want to hit different places on Earth. We want to go to South America to tour. We want to go to Asia to tour. We want to continue to spread our identity and our brand of just good, positive vibes and music. Ultimately we also have ideas, we’ve created these animated characters with the help of our artists, Gabriel Altrows and Xierra, who goes by Xray Alpha Charlie, just two amazing animators that we get to work with all the time. We’ve been working with Gabe since day one, actually. So any way that we are able to continue to expand on that animated universe and continue putting out more episodic music videos and even maybe bigger ideas: we could eventually hopefully get to a point where our Good Kid universe is adapted as a comic book series or a manga or an animated series. These are all just ideas that are possible because we still have that creative control over what we’re doing and that motivation.