“We’ve grown a lot since you last saw us,” bassist Danny O’Brien told me while casually crossing his legs and leaning back in a thrifted wooden rocking chair.
And indeed, Whisk, Notre Dame’s premiere indie band, has been up to a lot over the past two years. Their growth is immediately apparent to me, at the very least, in a physical sense. There’s two new people in the lineup, and now they have their own rehearsal space in the basement of a Glee Club house they’ve creatively dubbed "The Kitchen." I’m conducting our interview in their living room on a futon that’s actually somewhat comfortable, instead of in a six-man common room in Dunne. We’ve certainly come a long way.
Changes to the recipe
Joe Zawacki was added to Whisk’s lineup over a year ago while lead singer and guitarist Nathan Esser spent his junior year studying abroad in Rome. Zawacki is a senior studying mechanical engineering but devotes time outside of class to pursuing the arts as co-vice president of the Notre Dame Glee Club, as musical director of the all-male Notre Dame acapella group The Undertones and as a Whisk band member.
Ryan Downey is filling in for Whisk’s drummer Will Peeler while he is abroad in South Korea. He is a junior studying political science and music performance at the University and plays drums and guitar for practically every music group on campus. Besides Whisk, Downey is involved with the marching band, symphony orchestra, the Pasquerilla East Musical Company and jazz band.
‘The Kitchen’
“We’ve thought about renaming it,” lead guitarist Joe Lohman admitted. “People get confused and end up in our actual kitchen for whatever reason.”
"The Kitchen" is actually an unfinished basement, retrofitted with a combination of eclectic area rugs and soundproofing on the walls to deafen the sound of the band, which can be heard from the street. The unofficial venue feels very different when it isn’t filled with people, but the vibes are palpable regardless. Blue LED lights haphazardly fall from the corners of the ceiling. Posters of their earlier inspirations (specifically The Backseat Lovers’ “When We Were Friends” album art) decorate the white-washed walls. The drum set is in the corner opposite their washer/dryer combo. The band’s rehearsal is baptized under the blue wash of a neon sign shaped like a microphone. In short, it’s perfect for a house show.
It’s a huge difference from Whisk’s old rehearsal space in the Dunne chapel.
Whisk once attributed the Dunne chapel to their success, both as a convenient factor in scheduling band practice as most of them hailed from Dunne Hall and as a divine “extraterrestrial” force looking over them.
But when a majority of Whisk members were looking for housing senior year, they looked off-campus with an eye out for places with potential rehearsal spaces. When they saw the current Glee Club house’s basement, they fell in love. They could finally host their own shows.
“Now, we’ve got our own place, so we can control the climate of our shows,” O’Brien said. “More specifically, the mix can sound a lot better when we rehearse in the same place we play.”
Naturally, the member’s busy schedules and their off-campus rehearsal space make it harder to coordinate practices, but that just means the time spent rehearsing together matters more.
“As fun as it was, there were a lot of lost hours in that chapel,” lead singer Nathan Esser said. The other band members offered a sympathetic laugh.
“Our practices are so efficient now,” Lohman said. “We just run through stuff, and Nathan’s really good about immediately identifying any issues we had throughout the piece and isolating parts we need to work on.”
When I dropped in on their dress rehearsal for the Boogaloo, it was clear to me that the band operates like a well-oiled machine now. Their set is a tight 30 minutes of completely original music, with intentional breaks to interact with the (imaginary) audience. Their practice doesn’t look like a jam session; it’s like a concert.
Cookin’ in the studio
Whisk recently self-produced and released a single called “drunk on the shower floor (live from the basement)” on April 4.
Two years ago, Whisk tried to use University resources to record their original music. However, they never came out with a finished product. “It wasn’t coming together there,” O’Brien said.
Then, they tried recording with the DAJ Pyramid Show in Elkhart, but they felt as though the final product was too overproduced. An overproduced album, they said, would not be authentic to the heart of the band.
“I mean, we play rock music in a sweaty basement filled with over 100 people,” Downey said. “We want to be raw and package the special energy of our live performances.”
Esser, who wrote “drunk on the shower floor,” said the band wanted to emulate the “tastefully underproduced” lo-fi sound of “Is This It?” by The Strokes.
“That’s why we called this version '(live from the basement).' Our production is by no means perfect, but it’s us,” Esser said.
It’s gratifying to give fans a product, after nearly two years without any releases, they said. It’s something further than redirecting fans to an iPhone recording of their last live set on Instagram Reels.
If anything’s for sure, Whisk has evolved beyond the traps of a typical college cover band. Their original music is well-written and catchy, although I’m not sure if the band yet knows what distinguishes their sound from a sea of other independent bands on Spotify. I know I’m personally interested to see if they release “No Reason To Cry” anytime soon.
Even though this is their first single, Whisk doesn’t seem to have any pre-release jitters. “All the upcoming shows have taken our mind off of the release,” O’Brien explained.
Boogaloo Three
Last Thursday, Whisk headlined Notre Dame's third annual Boogaloo. The Boogaloo, an entirely student-run music festival typically hosted in Legends, showcases the many talents of Notre Dame’s student bands.
“We helped put together the first one,” Lohman said. “Now, it’s kind of running itself, which is a cool thing to see.”
In a lot of ways, the first Boogaloo spurred the revival of a rich live college music scene in South Bend after COVID-19 shut performances down. Accounts on Instagram popped up like @musiciansnetworknd and @nd_bands. The local bars slowly started featuring bands who performed at the Boogaloo. Nature was healing.
Ratboys, an indie rock band founded by Notre Dame alumni Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan (‘14), came back to campus last year to headline the second Boogaloo (a.k.a. the “Twogaloo”). Ratboys are a big deal as far as Notre Dame bands come. They’ve toured internationally with popular indie acts like PUP, Soccer Mommy and Pinegrove. They even recently had a song featured on national television in a Walmart commercial.
“The Ratboys were so down to earth and grateful and excited about the fact that the Boogaloo existed,” Lohman said. “It’s remarkable how much more of a presence bands have in the community because of the Boogaloo, especially playing at bars. There’s such a positive culture between everybody, and it’s an honor to headline the Boogaloo again.”
Sound of SUB
Whisk was set to open up for The Driver Era at this year’s Sound of SUB concert last Friday. But due to a production mishap, they unfortunately could not take the stage.
The band “couldn’t have been more excited” to perform for fellow students at SUB. They had sent in a video to audition and were thrilled to be selected as the student opener.
“The opportunity to play at SUB required the need for copyrighting original music, so in the development of this past year, gaining a bunch of new original music to the repertoire was really helpful,” Lohman said. “It was also helpful that the artist this year, The Driver Era, was tailored to that full live band sound.”
The band had been practicing extensively to get their set in shape for Sound of SUB. “We needed to get the hours in The Kitchen together to figure out the nitty-gritty of each of these songs, make them expressive, fun and exciting and dynamic,” Lohman said. “I don’t think the reality of this gig has hit me yet.”
The headliner for last year’s Sound of SUB concert was singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, and he came to campus just as he was blowing up. The Driver Era is of similar popularity, and I think Whisk was hoping to use this gig to gain some traction on Spotify.
All-American Rejects
Despite the mishaps at Sound of SUB, Whisk recently announced they will be opening for The All-American Rejects at Four Winds Field on April 20 — which is a pretty big deal.
“We got an incredibly urgent email out of the blue from the Musicians' Network,” Downey said. “IDEA Week was looking for a student band to open for All-American Rejects to draw more Notre Dame students to the concert. Immediately, I just started grinding, getting all the materials and bugging these guys to get everything we needed for an audition.”
Downey seemed grateful to Lucy Bullock, Kristopher Priemer and Mark Tingle for working with him to make the gig happen. Students get an exclusive discount on concert tickets (enter code: student) and free rides from the Hesburgh Library.
“It’s a big deal being from South Bend, playing at the same place I used to go watch baseball as a kid, especially opening for a band I’ve been listening to since 2008,” Downey said.
