STARTING A BAND in New York City can be a lot easier than you might think. “We had an apartment big enough for a drum set,” Matt Solomon, drummer for Darlings, says with a shrug. “That’s really all it takes.”With the Brooklyn-based group’s debut album, Yeah, I Know, just released and a slew of shows under its belt, the foursome seems to have parlayed that spacious apartment into serious buzz on the New York popnoise scene.
The members of the band met, as so many do, as students at NYU. Guitarist and keyboardist Maura Lynch lived in the same freshman dorm as bassist Joe Tirabassi and they met Solomon through friends. Moscow-born lead singer Peter Rynsky bumped into Lynch at a party during their sophomore year, and from then on the four were a tight-knit group. It wasn’t until the summer of 2007, after they all graduated, that the band formed.
“It started with us goofing around in Matt and Joe’s college apartment on Bleecker Street the summer we graduated,” says Lynch. “Peter, Matt and Joe recorded some demos before I joined and we played our first show a month or so later at a big party at that same apartment. We only had about six songs at the time.”
It’s fair to say that the band wears its influences on its sleeve.The “woo woo woo”-ing in “TV” definitely brings The Beach Boys to mind, and the group’s charming style is most likely a result of their love for The Beatles.While Rynsky says, “We all really like Pavement, the whole damned discography,” the rough edge of Darlings might come from Solomon who grew up “playing in lots of terrible punk bands.”
And sure, Darlings can sound a bit messy, but what’s wrong with that? The group blends poppy sound with slightly disheveled rock, sweetening it with romantic guitar riffs (“Gorilla”) and bouncy, organized choruses (the sweetly addictive “Teenage Girl”). As Rynsky explains, “We’re getting some where; just not quite sure where.We don’t consider ourselves to be a part of the Brooklyn ‘lo-fi’ scene but we do have our eyes set on the underground in one way or another.”
Cult status might not last too long, though.The record is barely a month old and, with plenty of buzz and shows booked, the band could very well be headlining Pool Parties by next summer. For the band’s members, whatever happens will be just fine. “Its all been very natural in terms of developing our sound and everything,” says Solomon. “There was never any ‘concept’ for the band.That being said, I think we all shared a vision of what we wanted the band to be: fun and poppy and loud.”
> Darlings
Sept. 3, Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 212-253-0036; 8, $7
