It turns out you don’t have to quit your day job to chase your dreams. If you’re The Montaines, all you need is two days off.
That’s how long it took the local indie rock newcomers to record their debut, Normal People, a five-song EP that came out in November and features sticky guitar riffs and romantic songs about discontented youth that sound like they belong on a 2014 Tumblr playlist.
“If you go play a show, everyone is like, ‘Can we hear these songs now? Can we find them on Spotify?’” lead singer Alec O’Brien tells DCist. “So we wanted to release the music as soon as we could after our first show. We just got in the studio and got it done as quickly as possible.” That meant releasing an EP roughly four months after their first show, which they played in July.
That urgency precedes the band’s existence. When Alec, 25, moved to D.C. from Raleigh, North Carolina a couple years ago, he immediately started frequenting local venues and looking for potential bandmates for him and his brother, lead guitarist Jack O’Brien, on Bandmix, a networking app for musicians.
On the app, Alec found a lot of local artists who “just wanted to play a couple of shows here and there and jam,” but he was looking for a more serious commitment. So were rhythm guitarist Luke De Cresce, 23, and drummer Ryan Damico, 27, and the three eventually connected along with the band’s original bassist. (Seamus Mulcahy, 25, recently took over bass for the band.) “They are also very ambitious people and are really into what we’re doing,” Alec says of meeting De Cresce and Damico. “It’s kind of hard to find people like that.”
The future bandmates met up for the first time in May at 7DrumCity, the Truxton Circle music school and practice space beloved by local artists, and hit it off immediately. “We started playing a couple of songs. They sounded good. And we were like, you know what? Let’s do this. Let’s start a band,” Alec says. For De Cresce, the immediate feeling was, “Alright, these are my boys,” he says.
The newly-formed band didn’t waste any time getting things off the ground. They named themselves The Montaines after Alec and Jack stumbled across the French word for mountain, montagne, in a poetry collection (“I kept telling myself I was gonna read it to try to get myself back into French, but I never did,” says Alec, who studied French in college.) In late July, just two months after their first meeting, The Montaines played their first live show at Brookland’s the Public Option.
By September, the band was all set to record. They spent a Thursday and a Friday at Ivakota Recording, a Capitol Hill studio run by producer and engineer Ben Green, and emerged with five songs ready to mix and master. Normal People, named for one of the EP’s standout tracks, was released on Nov. 10, and has racked up thousands of listens on streaming platforms.
The Montaines’ influences are primarily bands from the early 2010s indie scene that they grew up listening to: The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, Interpol, The National and The Strokes are among the favorites the five band members rattled off on a recent Zoom call with DCist. You can hear those influences all over Normal People, with Alec O’Brien’s emotive voice at times bringing to mind The Kooks’ Luke Pritchard as he sings lines like “your lips feel like they’re bored of mine” on “Normal People,” or “you look so good with that vacant stare” on “Tomorrow Morning.”
Failing relationships and withholding lovers make up the world of Normal People. Alec O’Brien, who wrote all the lyrics on the EP, says he wanted to tell stories people could relate to. “I try to draw as much as I can on real experiences that I have, so that it’s real, actual emotion coming through when I’m singing,” he says.
They might wear their idols on their sleeves, but The Montaines are much more interested in defining their own sound rather than just emulating other bands, says lead guitarist Jack O’Brien. “It’s less of like, ‘Oh, I want to sound like that.’ It’s, ‘I want to hear what it will sound like when we’re all just one person,’” he says.
Most of The Montaines have lived in D.C. for just a couple of years or less, but they’ve already taken the stage at some of the city’s most cherished smaller venues, including Comet Ping Pong and a porch at Adams Morgan PorchFest. “D.C. is the home of go-go music, but also hardcore punk, which is the coolest thing ever,” De Cresce says, gushing about his newfound home’s musical heritage. “It has bestowed upon the city a bunch of really cool venues and cool people that remember those scenes.”
Next month, The Montaines will head back into the studio to record two more songs. Aside from that, their 2024 plans include “a whole lot of shows,” De Cresce says, including a set Friday at DC9 with Brigitte Calls Me Baby and a show at Pie Shop on Feb. 22.
“We’re a pretty ambitious band,” Alec says, speaking about The Montaines’ next steps. “We want to see how far we can take things.”
Normal People, the debut EP by The Montaines, is available now on streaming platforms. They have shows DC9 on Friday, Feb. 16 and Pie Shop on Thursday, Feb. 22.
