Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, HOTPOT is the New Music Monday highlight!
HOTPOT is a new band in Victoria who play music rooted in a cultural combination of sounds and have just released a new single, “IOU (Hot Mix)”, with a second mix of the same song coming out soon.
Zuber Singh is the band’s vocalist, Nathan Shelby plays drums, Matt Lalonde and Aren Ludlow switch off on bass and guitar as well as Ritomo Amamiya on keys.
Singh describes HOTPOT’s music as being rooted in funk and soul, but pulls from a myriad of genres, including reggae, jazz and hip-hop. He says the best way to describe their sound is that they are heavily influenced by Black music from the Caribbean and United States.
The band has been playing for just over a year and formed as HOTPOT after Singh got booked to host an open jam in which he recruited his now-bandmates.
“I thought if I’m playing a set why don’t I bring a bunch of my friends together and throw a band together,” Singh told Victoria Buzz.
The theme of the show they were to play together was ‘kitchen’ and after a handful of practices they found they were sounding better and better, but were still struggling with a name.
“We were almost ‘Spice Box’, but we couldn’t really agree on it,” Singh explained.
“At the time I was cooking for everyone and the pot I was using was really hot, it was steaming and someone casually said, ‘oh, that’s a hot pot,’ and everyone was like, hey, wait a minute. It ended the debate that had gone on so long.”
Singh added that the same day, he burnt his hand on that pot and still has a scar from the experience.
After the first gig, the group kept at writing and jamming and kept getting asked to play local shows so they decided to make it official.
Currently the band has recorded and released two songs, one of which being “IOU (Hot Mix)”.
On July 21st, they will be releasing the same song but mixed by a different band member, “IOU (Pot Mix)”.
“It’s just an interesting solution to having two mixes, you know, we’re HOTPOT, so why not have a hot mix and a pot mix,” Singh laughed.
“The hot is more poppy while the pot is a bit more moody, bit more dreamy. It’s the same song, but they sound quite different.”
Singh says they wrote this song a long while back when he was hurting for money and a friend had borrowed a significant amount before skipping town, never paying him back.
“The reason why I wrote the song is at the time I was quite broke and frustrated because I had a friend who owed me, like $330 or $340,” he explained.
“He kind of left the country and ghosted me but I was quite desperate to have that money back so I wrote this grief anthem.”
They added that while it mostly stemmed from feelings of frustration, Singh wanted it to be an aspirational song with an upbeat energy.
Over the years, “IOU” went through a few different versions, but when it was brought to HOTPOT, it became a reggae song.
“When we played it together as a band, there was all sorts of influences and everyone added their own spunk to it, so it really evolved into a new song,” Singh said.
He added that Amamiya, the band’s keys player is a talented composer who came up with the intro and outro section, while Ludlow and Shelby produced the hot mix and pot mix respectively.
“Nate’s got a really unique style, it’s really cool because it’s a culture mixing style whereas Aren’s got a more conventional, like pop style,” Singh explained.
Preview “IOU (Hot Mix)” by HOTPOT below:
You can also find HOTPOT’s “IOU (Hot Mix)” on Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal.
HOTPOT has a busy summer schedule with several shows coming up in August and September.
On July 28th,HOTPOT will be playing the Scottish Heritage Foundation in a charity event to promote environmental sustainability, on August 2nd, they will be playing at Centennial Square in a free show being produced by the Victoria Ska and Reggae Society and on August 10th, the band will be playing at Victoria’s Dragon Boat Festival.
Follow them on Instagram to keep up with any upcoming shows.
Once the busy, summer season of playing shows is over, Singh says that HOTPOT will be trying to hit the studio once again and hopes to release a full-length album sometime in 2025.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Standard Issue Pleasure Model release song about resilience to struggle
- New Music Monday: fivefootnine release first single as they break out into Victoria scene
- New Music Monday: Charis Tazumi embraces connection in debut album ‘In Subtle Ways’
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“One of the first cool things we did as a band where we were like, ‘oh wow, this is real,’ was Koby [Andrews] invited us onto CFUV and it was professionally sound recorded and professionally video recorded,” Singh explained.
“It was actually one of the best moments of my life.”
He added that by having this, they’ve been able to use the video and recordings to apply for festivals and grants.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of HOTPOT in the comments below.
