They started as a group last September and quickly amassed a local following by playing free house shows, including their initial Live at The Sheraton. Now, the band’s playing popular Denton venues, headlining home gigs and getting ready to release their debut record. And it all started with a Discord post from vocalist Ian Coxon.
“I just posted, “Hey, I need a guitarist, bassist and a drummer, and Angel [Demello] was the first one to answer,” Coxon says. “I met [Will White] through another friend.”
Coxon found lead guitarist Oliver Roan through a similar post on Discord.
“I was just like, ‘Hey, I'm a guitarist looking for a band. I play grunge,’” Roan recalls writing. “And Ian was like, ‘Do you like Nirvana?’ And the rest is history.”
Coxon had long wanted to start a band but finally made it happen because he felt stuck in his creative process.
“I was like, ‘Everything I write just sounds like it was written by me,’” he says. “‘I need friends.’”
With new minds to bounce off from, songwriting has been much more productive for the musicians.
“I just write a full song, then I'll bring it in and one of them will be like, ‘Hey, that part sucks. What if we do this?’” Coxon says.
Their live show is simply killer. “Flytrap” is a thrash-punk anthem reminiscent of Minor Threat with a sick wah-wah powered solo from Roan and ear-splitting screams from Coxon. On the more melancholic side, there’s “Stomach Virus,” a laid-back jam with a strong backbone from White, and “Easy,” a Smashing Pumpkins-esque cry for the past with Coxon whining over powerful open chords from Roan and Demello: “Take me back to when it was easy / Am I enough for me?”
Their last gig at The Asylum on July 7 was interrupted when the cable to Roan’s amp burned up and split in half. While he scrambled for a solution, the rest of the band broke into an impromptu jam to keep everyone’s heads banging. Coxon screamed, “Fix my shit! Fix my shit!” while Demello and White went all out. Roan came back moments later with a fresh chord and Coxon yelled out a triumphant, “My shit’s fixed!”
Spun has impressive chemistry for a group whose members have known each other for less than a year. Individually, their influences are all over the place: White and Roan are heavy into psych rock and metal, Coxon prefers grunge and Demello leans into the industrial scene, but that’s just more to draw off for inspiration.
“That’s kind of the beauty of the band,” Roan says. “We all come from very different musical backgrounds, but they still meet, in a way. We just kind of Frankenstein them together and end up with something that's really cool.”
Despite being great friends now, the band didn’t start on the best of terms. There was initially a bit of dead weight holding them back.
“We had another member that was blocking stuff,” Coxon says. “He's become like a whole villain.”
“We all thought about leaving the band during that time,” Demello adds.
“That guy left for some trip and we were like wait — we fuck with each other,” Coxon says jokingly. “At first it was sluggish; we were spending like a year on one song. The first day he left, we wrote three songs.”
Since then, it’s been all about momentum. After pulling around 60 people with minimal advertising for their first show at The Sheraton, they continued to hit DIY shows, including a Punks For Palestine benefit gig and a last-minute spot at The Asylum, then earned their first show at Andy’s Bar back in March. They attribute their quickly growing popularity to their community.
Woven Through a Tightly Knit Town
“I think a good amount of it is just Denton,” Coxon says. “It's kind of close-knit, so like one person hears something and tells their six friends about it.”“Denton is very emo-driven,” Roan adds. “I think Spun stands out because we can mix and experiment in a way that people aren't turned off by it.”
One of the hardest barriers for a garage band to overcome is laying down a track in the studio. Rocking a live show is comparatively easy — the crowd’s adrenaline does half the work — but the mixing and production on a track can make or break a first impression on Spotify. Their less-than-stellar experience recording their first two singles, “Flytrap” and “Easy,” led Spun to be more selfish with their sound.
“It was the first thing we'd ever recorded,” Coxon says. “I think we were just really excited. After a while, we were kind of like, ‘Well, I would change this and that.’ But this time, we know what we want and we're being kind of annoying about it.”
Coxon says that their new recording process is inspired by the late producer Steve Albini, opting for live recordings of the full band over piecing a song together track by track.
“The best way to experience a Spun song is if you go to a show live,” Roan says. “So we wanted to capture how we sound live on a record, and doing it piece by piece didn't work well.”
The band has several shows lined up in July and a tentative release of August for their debut project, so there are ample opportunity for new fans to “get Spun.”
