Exhaler, a DU band formed by Lamont School of Music students Trevor Briggs (vocals), Elan Jimenez (bass), Grady Dionne (guitar), Julian Horne (guitar), Bryson Miller (drums) and Drew Tilbrooke (saxophone) dropped “Don’t Wait up on Me” on April 14.
Exhaler was originally formed by Briggs, Jimenez, Dionne and Miller during orientation week of their freshman year. The initial four-piece, who are all seniors now, later added Horne and Tilbrooke to the band.
Jimenez was rather fond of the shoegaze genre, which combines distorted guitars with buried and emotional vocals to create a unique rock sound. After bringing the genre to the band, they all quickly agreed that it wasn’t their style. So, they switched gears.
Truth be told, it’s hard to pin a specific genre to Exhaler. While their shoegaze roots shine through in certain parts, there are other parts where they get jazzy or funky with their sound. A lot of that comes from the band members’ creative inspirations.
“We all share music with each other all the time. We’re all listening to music new and old, and we have very similar jumping off points in terms of creative direction. I think that kind of helped us hone in on what we could do,” said Jimenez.
Though the band members share a similar love for the music they listen to, each of them also take inspiration from vastly different sources. Exhaler combined all of their different musical tastes into their debut album, “Don’t Wait up on Me.”
“We all also have our own very distinct taste in music that we, when writing, all bring to the table and it leads to what you hear on the record,” said Horne. “It doesn’t really fall into the categories that we listen to. It’s its own sort of thing a lot of the time.”
The new album is a reminder to listeners that life isn’t always as awesome as it seems. Briggs’ lyricism does a perfect job of encapsulating the problems that people often have socially, or with themselves, and the relationships those two subjects have with each other.
“The desired rhetorical effect of [“Don’t Wait up on Me”] is to make someone listen to it and think, ‘I’m uncomfortable right now with this story that I’m being told. I’m uncomfortable with myself in relation to the story that is being told. I’m uncomfortable when I think about my relationship to the world,’” said Briggs. “It’s not a very good feeling record.”
“We’re pretty bad at that,” added Jimenez with a chuckle.
Although you might not be adding the record to your feel-good playlist anytime soon, it still finds a place in a more introspective, late-night kind of way.
“I think we’re all pretty happy with how it turned out. Something I want to highlight is that we did it all by ourselves. Julian really hit it out of the park with our mixing and mastering,” Jimenez stated. “Something I’ve been reflecting on a lot is just the amount that we all contribute to the band is pretty impressive. It’s a process that’s very unique. There’s not a lot of bands that I know that do this very democratic thing that we do with the ‘do-it-yourself’ nature of it.”
Their DIY recording sessions at the Lamont School of Music’s recording studio paid off. One of the songs on the album is titled “Post-Nasal Drip,” which was released as a single prior to the album’s debut and has an accompanying music video featuring the band’s shenanigans in front of Colorado’s capitol building in Denver. This song has that anarchic, anti-capitalism aggression that perfectly piques the interest of one’s punk-rock-loving ears.
The fisheye lens-filled, heavily saturated music video blasts viewers back to a time when there were music videos on MTV. Briggs’ lyricism and vocals give the song a classic Beck feel. Exhaler also won DUPB’s Battle of the Bands (BoB) in March. They’ll be celebrating their victory at MusicFest with an opening set for Between Friends on May 29. Catch Exhaler at the Levitt Pavilion, and grow accustomed to their sound before attending this show by listening to “Don’t Wait up on Me.”
