Quickly rising indie rockers, The Kents, strive to evolve
Fresh from an appearance at Hillside Festival in Guelph last month, Lindsay, Ont., band The Kents will return to the area Saturday night to play the inaugural Pulp Social indie music and arts event at The Tannery in downtown Kitchener.
The indie-rock quartet — featuring Warren Frank (lead vocals and guitar), Luke Shauf (bass), Freddy Kwon (guitar), and Tanner Pare (drums) — released their second EP, “Within Waves,” last October, and have had their music featured on “Hockey Night in Canada,” the World Series, and the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Such high-profile TV placements, as well as recognition on Apple Music and CBC Radio, have helped the band’s popularity rise quickly, earning the group over 2.5 million streams on Spotify, including over a million alone for “Caroline (I Can’t Explain),” the most recent single from “Within Waves.” As Frank explained in a phone interview this week, the success of the song is extra sweet given the personal story behind its lyrics.
“It’s an important song to me. Carol Frank was my grandmother, so Caroline is a bit of an artistic licence, but I wrote this song just reflecting on my dad, really — his mom, Carol, passed away when he was 18, and he’s such a positive person, he’s just a great guy. My friends look to him as an inspiration, not just me looking to him, but everyone that knows him speaks so highly of him, and I think that’s such a testament to his character,” said Frank.
“He’s had some rough hands dealt to him in his life, yet he still is this person of great character, and showing love to so many people, and so I was really just thinking about that before we wrote this song. I wanted to write about how my grandmother, who I never really met, had still influenced me through him. So it kind of speaks to both of them, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It’s cool to say that a song that’s written about how much I love my dad has over a million streams — that’s a rare thing to say.”
Frank said The Kents originally formed in high school, as part of a project for guitar class.
“It was really fun, actually. We had to cover a different song from a different era, a different decade of music, every week, and we were doing it as a group project,” he said. “The initial idea was that you’d split up into new groups every week, but we felt the chemistry right away and we asked the teacher if we could just stay in the same group, and he thankfully obliged.”
Though the band members went their separate ways for university, they would reconvene in Lindsay each summer just to “hang out and jam,” with the informal sessions leading to the writing of original material and, eventually, the group’s debut EP, “Waking,” in 2016. Frank said “Within Waves” was a musical step up from “Waking,” which he said had more of a “pop-oriented” sound.
“When we worked on this, we felt that we had transitioned a bit from being just a straightforward pop band, and this felt like us growing up musically, in a sense,” he said.
While still based in Lindsay, Frank said the band are playing it by ear with respect to one day making the move to Toronto (though Kwon already lives there). They will head to the city in December, however, to record their first full-length album, a record Frank said will continue the group’s musical evolution.
“We’re real keen to even push things farther than we did with ‘Within Waves,’ really try and find the sound that we’ve been trying to attain. And I know that’s the most cliché sentence that a band member could say,” he said with a laugh, “but it’s the truth. We’re really trying to find the sound that we want to be associated with, and we’re excited with this new batch of songs.”
The Kents will perform at Pulp Social with Lost in Japan and the event’s organizers, local band Hugo Alley. The event was created to promote the local independent arts scene and promises “wall-to-wall art popups and indie rock,” with local artists selling original paintings, prints, clothing, and more during the concert. Tickets are $15 in advance and can be purchased on Eventbrite. Tickets will also be sold at the door for $20.