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, Kill Your Darlings are the New Music Monday highlight!
Kill Your Darlings are relatively new on the scene and play a unique blend of punk, grunge and riot grrrl music.
Until recently, the band was comprised of Vi Gaffney on guitar and vocals, Mitch Beatch on guitar and vocals, Shay Joseph on drums, Skyla Trousdale on bass and Claudia Bachinski on lead vocals.
However, Bachinski and Trousdale had to move away from Victoria to pursue other endeavours which led Kill Your Darlings to divvy up the singing amongst the remaining members and recruit a new bassist, Hazel MacPherson.
The band was started as Beatch had not played in a band in Victoria and wanted to be more involved in music.
He texted around to some friends and the band came together in a really organic way, with all members keen on the music they were playing.
Their first show was a battle of the bands, which was held at UVic, for which they played a mix of covers and originals.
“It started really small, just the five of us in my living room jamming and we did mostly covers for the first five or six months,” Beatch told Victoria Buzz.
“We had to cram a little bit for that first show because they had a requirement where you could only play two covers and it had to be a 30 minute set, so we had to band together to get some songs that we had written previously on our own to bring to the band,” Gaffney added.
Once they had that first show under their belt, the band was hooked on the adrenaline that comes with performing and started booking more shows as soon as they could.
When it came to what to do next and how they wanted to record their music to present it to the world, Kill Your Darlings chose a really unique way of capturing their sound.
Gaffney’s mother is a local filmmaker in Victoria, and offered to record their set in a live session, to fully capture the energy the band can bring to the table at a live performance.
The band chose the live music venue known as the Rat Shack, located just outside downtown Victoria, as the setting for their live session.
Once they had the setting, they got a local sound engineer on board, found a stylist, then selected the songs they wanted to record.
“We chose four of our originals that we played at both our first shows,” said Beatch.
“We had, I think, eight or nine originals at the time of those first two shows and those were the four that I feel best represented us as a band.”
In mid-April, they did the recording in one day, playing each song three times, and by early June, they were ready to release the session via their YouTube channel.
Kill Your Darlings chose their song “Third Act Breaker” to highlight for New Music Monday.
This track was written by Beatch, who wrote this song about his experience as an American citizen living in Canada, watching as conflict escalates back home and around the world.
“It was written about the debauchery of war and the sides that people don’t consider, because I feel like war is so often romanticized, but I wanted to highlight in that song it is really just a whole lot of innocent, young people being shipped off to their death,” explained Beatch.
“People joke a lot about, like ‘oh, world war three is coming,’ which people have been saying for decades, but I was just thinking about how it could actually affect a lot of people I know and love at home if that were to happen.”
He said that these thoughts came to him in the middle of a class at UVic and he just tuned out his lecture and started writing the song instead.
The name, “Third Act Breaker,” is in reference to peoples’ third acts of their lives get cut short when they go off to war, because some of them don’t come back.
When it came time to flesh the song out as a band, he said that Bachinski really brought the song alive by bringing her own flavour to the tone and vocal melody of the song.
Check out Kill Your Darlings performing “Third Act Breaker” live at the Rat Shack below:
For now, the band says the song is only available on YouTube. They thought about releasing the tracks via streaming services, but with their new lineup, they would rather hold off and release new music with a more accurate representation of their sound.
They added that the best way to check them out and hear their new sound, is to come to a live show.
Coming up, Kill Your Darlings have a show slated for August 22nd, at Phoenix Bar and Grill, and they will likely have one announced soon in late-September.
To stay up to date with new releases and shows, follow Kill Your Darlings on Instagram.
Related:
- New Music Monday: People w/ Poise combine poetry and music on unique EP
- New Music Monday: Braxton Glass records instrumental EP reflecting on life-changing hike
- New Music Monday: faun.a collaborates with nature on new soundscape EP
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.
“Having local bands that maybe aren’t as well-known on the radio is so important for the music community in Victoria, because it’s so diverse and inclusive,” said Gaffney.
“It’s so important and CFUV does a good job of that.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Kill Your Darlings in the comments below!
