Grooms / Rejoicer

Death By Audio

Grooms are three friends in Brooklyn who play a structurally mutilated brand of noise‐pop featuring blissful interplay, sonic experimentation, and song destruction. The band is rooted in the Death By Audio collective, a fertile ground for the band’s expansive, forward‐looking catchiness. With moods that swing from the gloomy to the gleaming, Grooms craft songs filled with beauty, doom, and irony‐ free whimsy. Travis Johnson, guitarist and lead vocalist, began recording in his bedroom under the moniker Muggabears when he was a 19‐year‐old living in suburban Texas. After graduating college, he moved to New York in 2004 and began collaborating with Emily Ambruso, bassist and vocalist. The pair played with a series of drummers, recorded two EPs (Teenage Cop and Night Choreography), and played shows with the likes of Wavves, Crystal Stilts, Ponytail, and countless other great bands. After finding skins basher, Jim Sykes (Marnie Stern, Parts and Labor), the band rechristened themselves Grooms in anticipation of their upcoming debut record, Rejoicer, which showcases sounds from broken noise‐surf to campfire‐seance drone. The album finds the trio having evolved into a band completely comfortable with themselves, but never afraid to challenge their own, or listeners’, perceptions of what they are. Stacks of Moogs pitted against auxiliary percussion, scream‐choirs, warm pedal steel, and a whole host of other ideas collide on Rejoicer, and the collision is a jarring and soothing 35 minute ride through what this exciting band is capable of.

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