Don’t let the name fool you: Santa Barbara’s FMLY BND hardly sound like any family band that you’ve heard before. Is it the synths? The genre-bending hooks? Trance-inducing gang vocals? It’s probably a little bit of all of those things.
FMLYBND’s music, their photos and videos (their brand, if you will) all feel like the last decade of youthful musical/cultural exploration, fully realized. They don’t just play music together. They live together, they cook together, they get tattoos together. The music, as one member put it to me, “naturally flows out of our lives together.”
Maybe it’s that earnestness, more than the synths and the vocals, that defines FMLYBND’s music. And maybe that’s why it works.
The video for their first single, “Electricity”, is below, along with links to the Soundcloud of the track (where you can download it for free).