INTERVIEW: Echosmith are cool kids asking you to ‘Hang Around’
Photo: The Echosmith trio features, from left, Graham, Sydney and Noah Sierota. Photo courtesy of Nightdove Studio / Provided by press site with permission.
Echosmith, the successful band behind the hit song “Cool Kids,” are back with a new single that takes the group in different musical directions. “Hang Around” is a nice preview of things to come for the band, which features siblings Sydney Sierota, Noah Sierota and Graham Sierota, and they love the new tune so much they have named their upcoming fall tour after the single.
“Hang Around,” which will likely be included on an upcoming album, sprang from the musical doldrums of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was kind of funny because we were writing a lot during COVID, of course, like most artists, and we were just experimenting a lot,” Sydney said in a recent Zoom interview. “And I actually ended up moving down to San Diego, and our youngest brother, Graham, moved up to Idaho. So we all ended up in completely different places, so we ended up having to be really intentional for the first time with making music because we’re all family. We used to all live together, and we used to live within a couple miles of each other. So it was interesting because then we started to write on Facetime or whatever and then just plan these trips where we’d meet up in L.A. and write songs.”
Sydney remembers driving to Los Angeles one day to meet her siblings at Noah’s home studio. Before the drive, Noah sent them a new track he was working on, and she started to mentally develop the song while she was making the commute.
“So I was still driving, and I was coming up with ideas as I was driving just listening on Bluetooth,” she said. “And anyway we went to the studio, and it was really cool. I don’t know, the song came around in a really natural way where we just ended up wanting to talk about our relationships and how special they feel, and it just happened in a couple hours. And then we listened again the next day, and we were like, wait, this actually feels really cool. I think we finally felt like we unlocked exactly what we wanted to do with all of our new music.”
Echosmith have had a solid run in the music industry. They are billed as a multi-platinum-selling trio, according to their official biography, and their last album is called Lonely Generation. They are simultaneously moving in new directions with “Hang Around” and honoring their past with “Cool Kids,” the song that put them on the map. In fact, fans can’t get enough “Cool Kids,” with the song, which is almost a decade old, now trending on TikTok.
“I think for us we’re always wanting to make the music that we want to make,” Noah said. “We decided, in a certain way, to go back to our roots, playing a lot with organic instruments and then finding new ways to manipulate those sounds to be something that feels really fresh and innovative, new to us. I think at the end of the day I hope that our fans primarily connect to the message and the personality of our music, and I feel like that hasn’t so much changed as much as it has gone deeper. I feel like the music is the vehicle for that, and it’s been really fun to play with new things and experiment in ways we never really have before. I think we felt much more creative freedom this time, and I think rather than feeling anxious about that, we feel a lot more excited, a lot more passionate.”
For the band, Noah plays bass and provides production expertise, in addition to vocals. Sydney is responsible for vocals and keys, while Graham is the drummer. Together they create music that is centered on “joy” and “warmly candid introspection,” and their tunes are described as “gorgeously airy yet unapologetic,” as their website states. The new tune, Noah said, will be part of a full-on album; currently songs are being finished and mixed, and they are waiting for the right time to release the recording to the world.
“We’ve been making a lot of new music,” Sydney said. “We love the whole concept of making an entire album and having a body of work that feels cohesive. I know that some people are arguing that maybe the album is dead. ‘It’s only a singles world.’ We don’t feel that way. … [But] we want to share our music and not hold on to something for so long, which is why it’s been so freeing to do all of it with way more creative control. It’s been really cool to be able to decide with our team that we’ve selected what song is coming out and when, and we don’t have to wait another year to put another song out. We get to decide that, and I think that’s really special, especially after being in a system that’s not quite that way. It feels really great to do it this way, and we definitely are working toward a larger body of work. But we have a lot more coming very soon before we get to that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Echosmith’s new single is “Hang Around,” and they are gearing up for a 25-date fall tour. Click here for more information and tickets.
