Softly is rewriting the local rock playbook

Some bands arrive with a marching band, top-shelf gear and a press release the size of a phone book. Softly showed up quietly, which is either a cruel irony or the whole point.

Here’s the thing about the Dallas-Fort Worth rock scene: it rewards the patient, the stubborn and the genuinely good. Softly is all three. And after spending an afternoon with Isaac Chavez and Harrison Castleberry, we’re ready to say something a music writer isn’t supposed to say without a hedge or a footnote: This might be the most exciting rock band to come out of North Texas in years.

Big claim. Allow us to back it up.

A band before the band

Softly didn’t spring fully formed from a garage. The story starts in elementary school, where Chavez and Castleberry first met and eventually competed together in classical guitar competitions. By high school, they were spending a weekly passion project period the way most kids spent study hall, except instead of homework, they were building something. 

Years of playing under a different name followed, including a prior project with a different lineup and a different feel. After about three years on that path, something shifted. 

“We wanted to start something fresh and new with just us,” Castleberry says. 

So, they did. They rebuilt themselves as Softly around the start of 2024.

There’s something honest about a band willing to bury its first act. Plenty of musicians cling to a name long after the music has moved on. These two took the harder challenge — they let the project go, kept the friendship and rebuilt from the studs. The change of direction was more of a reckoning than it was a rebrand.

What emerged was leaner and more sure of itself. Chavez stepped to the front with vocals and bass for the low-end anchor that gives the songs their heartbeat. Castleberry handled guitar and production, shaping the sound twice, once on the strings and once at the board. Rounding out the trio, Rafael Ibanez adds a second guitar tone that fills out the band’s sonic footprint and gives Castleberry the freedom to push the instrumentation further. And because Castleberry doesn’t sing lead, he’s found another way in. 

“I try to express my emotions and feelings through what kind of tones I play and what kind of guitar parts I lean into,” he says. 

It’s a compact operation, and that tightness shows. Two people who’ve been listening to each other since childhood tend to finish each other’s musical sentences. 

DFW keeps the dream alive

Ask most artists about their hometown and you get a polite “thank you.” Ask Softly and you get something closer to devotion.

For a while, that relationship with the local scene was complicated. Castleberry is candid about it: they had previously kept their distance because their creative goals didn’t quite align with what was happening in the scene around them. But Softly changed that. 

“We’ve been focused on building this community that we longed for in the beginning by bringing other local artists into our studio to co-write and collaborate,” Castleberry says.

That studio isn’t a rented rehearsal room. The band built a 350-square-foot space from the ground up in their drummer’s backyard, starting from a concrete slab, framing the walls themselves and packing it with accumulated gear until it became a creative hub. It’s the kind of detail that tells you everything about a band’s priorities.

“We have a great deal of support from friends in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that help keep our dream alive,” Chavez adds. 

That gratitude isn’t a formality. Fort Worth has always been Dallas’ scruffier, more earnest sibling, and a place where scenes grow in living rooms and back rooms rather than boardrooms. No algorithm sold a single ticket to Softly’s first shows. People did.

The arc of the catalog

The discography reads like a band figuring out exactly how good it can be.

“Kim, Colorado” dropped in spring 2024 as their first single, is a confident opening statement with a spoken-poetry feel and math-rocky guitar work that put the sound on the map. “MOURN WITH ME” followed later in 2024, leaning into the melancholy that runs like a river through their work.

Elsewhere, the “Say a Prayer, and Wish Me Well” EP arrived in November 2025, gathering the band’s momentum into a single, cohesive breath. It’s the kind of record that turns casual listeners into fans. “Hemphill” is the kind of song that sounds like the closing credits of a film you’re not ready to end — atmospheric, melodic, unhurried.

Then came “Stay,” which carries perhaps the most personal moment in their catalog. The voicemail woven into the track was left by Castleberry’s father after the passing of his grandmother, someone he describes as “essentially like my mom growing up.” He notes with a quiet laugh that listeners often assume the voicemail is about his dad’s death. Still, the grief in it is real.

“Dads don’t really like to share their feelings,” Castleberry says. This one did.

That instinct — to let something genuine and unrepeatable into the frame — is what separates Softly from the pack. They’re not afraid of tenderness. They’re not afraid of the messy, human artifact that makes a song impossible to fake.

Two new singles, one bold summer

This summer brought two fresh tracks, and even the titles tell you these guys have a sense of humor about their heartache. The songs, titled “hum that song!” and “srry i wasted yr time,” landed with all the lowercase, texting-at-2-a.m. intimacy their names suggest.

The latter title’s missing vowels weren’t an accident or an afterthought. Chavez says it was “an intuition standpoint,” as the stripped-down spelling matched the edgy feel of the cover art. It’s a small detail, but one that reveals something about how deliberately Softly thinks about every layer of what they put out.

One song is a plea to remember, while the other is an apology dressed as a shrug. Together they show a band comfortable holding two moods at once: the ache and the wink. That’s a hard balance to strike, and Softly makes it look easy. There’s poetry in “srry i wasted yr time” that absolutely does not waste yours.

The studio, the woods and what comes next

The best news comes last. Softly is heading back into the studio, and there’s a full album on the way early next year.

While they build and demo tracks in their backyard studio, the finishing work happens with producer Jackson Baker in Austin, whom Castleberry credits with sharpening “the vision of understanding when things need to go up, when they need to go down.” It’s a process that balances the raw and the refined, the handmade and the deliberate. They’ve done some of their best writing off the grid, “just writing and recording music in the woods,” as they put it. That unhurried, hand-built quality comes through in everything they release.

If the new album carries the same DNA, the local scene is about to get a rock record worth arguing about at every dive bar from Deep Ellum to the Near Southside.