ALMOST MONDAY

SIMILAR ARTISTS: Foster the People, COIN, Valley

LISTEN: “live forever”, “hailey beebs”

Interview by Jones Willingham Photos by Cole Ferguson + Kelly Hammond

You can’t read a feature on almost monday without hearing about surfing. The trio based out of San Diego met through surfing and threw incredible DIY shows at local surf shops that led to a team-up with producers Mark Needham (The Killers, Neon Trees) and Simon Oscroft (The Aces, The Naked and Famous) and the release of their debut EP don’t say you’re ordinary. That surfing background might have telegraphed almost monday’s future because they are currently riding the wave of success with the release of their follow-up EP til the end of time and appearances at nearly every festival happening this fall. til the end of time is a pulsating piece of sunny indie-pop, with songs like “hailey beebs” and the lead single “live forever” accumulating hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners across streaming platforms. It’s an impressively ambitious work of music that is seemingly designed to slot into your summer party playlists, but also sounds immaculately produced when listening through headphones. We talked with almost monday about the EP’s release, how the pandemic impacted the writing process, and what to expect from their festival appearances this summer.

Melodic Magazine: How did you guys meet? Dawson Daugherty (vocals): Luke and I have been friends for a while — we grew up together and played music together when we were younger. I met Cole through some friends while surfing when I was like 16 and heard he played guitar, so the three of us just got together and threw some shows coming out of high school.

Melodic Magazine: Every press release I’ve ever read from you guys talks about those legendary DIY shows you put on in surf shops — they sound absolutely wild. Do you have any favorite memories from that era of the band? Cole Clisby (guitar): More than anything, it was just cool to see the growth. We’d text everyone we know begging them to come to our first show, and the more we did, the more unfamiliar faces we saw. I think the last show we played at the surf shop had close to like 250 people there when the room only held 80, and we realized we didn’t even know that many people! So it was rad to just see it grow beyond just our friends liking our music.

Melodic Magazine: Something that was incredibly impressive about you guys is that you pretty much evolved into this band while the pandemic was happening. How do you think you were able to maintain that buzz despite COVID-19 happening around us?

Dawson: You know, in the pandemic, the most difficult thing was losing shows. It was just pretty challenging to build a new fanbase because we had to look solely on the internet. On top of that shift, we made the decision as a band to just really focus on putting as much good music out as possible and good visuals to go with it. We worked with frequent collaborators on most of our music videos and we just put most of our time and energy into keeping fans interested in what we were doing without touring.

Melodic Magazine: Is there a theme that unifies all of the tracks on til the end of time? Dawson: When we were trying to pick out songs for this EP, we were going over stuff we wrote before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and very recently. We just consistently landed on tracks that centered around enjoying your time while you’re here and celebrating youthfulness. Look at the song titles — “live forever”, “til the end of time”, “this is growing up” — they all focus on enjoying what’s right in front of you and making the most of your life while you’ve got it.

Melodic Magazine: Walk me through the writing process of “til the end of time”. Was that written pre-pandemic? Dawson: That was one of the songs that we wrote during the pandemic. We were kind of bouncing ideas around with our producer Simon [Oscroft] and then suddenly the lockdown happened and he had to jet back to New Zealand. I’m not gonna lie, it was seriously tough going from being in a room together to having to finish everything up online; there’s a certain energy when it’s us and Simon in a room and then suddenly we went to telling him to turn it up on his speakers so that we could hear it over a Zoom call. I don’t think we’ve ever written a song like “til the end of time” for that reason, and it definitely took the longest to write out of all of the tracks because of it.

Melodic Magazine: It sounds like y’all prefer to let projects come together naturally rather than force songs together. Dawson: Yeah, one of the tracks (“live forever”) is the oldest song; we wrote that ages ago in Brooklyn. And then the other tracks are kind of all over the place with their timelines — I guess that’s kind of reflective of our general philosophy in that we’re more focused on writing good songs and then figuring out where they go rather than perfectly lining up a whole EP in advance.

Melodic Magazine: Okay, I’ve got to know: the track “hailey beebs” — do we know if Hailey Bieber has heard that yet? How’d that name come about? Dawson: (laughs) I don’t know! We haven’t heard. I hope she has. The name actually stuck around as a joke. Like I said, it’s an older song, and the demo had a rhyme that had “Hailey Beebs” in it, and the song just sat for a while. When we started to piece together songs for the EP, we were just asking ourselves “what do we call it?” and we just decided to keep it as “hailey beebs”!

Melodic Magazine: How do you think your sound has changed from “broken people” to now?

Dawson: It’s interesting - I think that being creative in general, one of the most underrated-ly hard things to do is to find your sound. I’m not sure how other bands do it, but we really just get in the room with our team and just try to write a good song; however that happens is how it happens. So coming back to your question, finding our sound has been this interesting and weird thing of asking ourselves “Do we make another ‘broken people’?” or “Do we branch out a little bit more here?”. And I’d say that we’re on our way to doing that by putting out music consistently that’s a little bit different from the last release, you know, and hoping that it’s translating for people on the other end.

Melodic Magazine: Do you ever feel any creative pressure to follow up the success of the first EP? Luke Fabry (bass): I don’t think so. I think we want every song to be really good, but we don’t really go there thinking about numbers or streams. Obviously you’re in control of it while you’re writing it, but trying to force music to do the exact same thing previous releases achieved.

Melodic Magazine: I think y’all might be on every single festival lineup this summer. Dawson: (laughs) We’re working overtime on that right now, man. It’s gonna be wild.

Melodic Magazine: Is there any festival in particular that you’re looking forward to? Luke: I think the one that’s on our mind right now is Lollapalooza because it’s coming up first. We’re working through rehearsals to get our show ready. It’ll be the three of us and then our friend on drums, and we are so excited to bring these songs to life on stage. Dawson: We love them all. We want to play them all. Give us all the festivals!