How a band of computer geeks thrived with help from gamers
Good Kid is a bit of a stealthy success story, an “Easter egg” unlocked largely by chance over the past decade by growing hordes that have stumbled upon the general good (kid)ness of this Toronto band and stuck with it for the long run.
Yes, that’s a video game reference, though forgive this fossil if he’s out of step with more au courant gamer parlance. I’m old enough to have had my mind blown by “River Raid” and “Laser Gates” on the Atari 2600 and have an 8-bit Nintendo rig gathering dust with the other consoles in the closet. In any case, the gaming community — particularly, faithful “Fortnite” players who’ve soundtracked their online streams with Good Kid tunes — has been instrumental in the band’s slow-but-sure rise.
Good Kid has never been thrust in anyone’s face. If you’re a fan of Good Kid, you found Good Kid. That’s how a real fan base gets built, and Good Kid has now built enough of a fan base that it will hit the main stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago in early August and headline its first tour of the U.K. and Europe a few weeks later in support of its latest EP, “Good Kid 4.”
“Things have certainly hit a bigger level,” said frontman Nick Frosst, over beers with guitarist and songwriting partner David Wood.
“Every year of this ‘career’ has been a bit more than the year before. The end of the pandemic provided a real step change. Before the pandemic, we didn’t tour. After the pandemic, we toured.”
Turns out, what Frosst calls “that moment of everybody just kinda hangin’ out in their houses for a little bit” was exactly what Good Kid needed to put it over the top. It gave the band time to further flex its online presence, while cabin-fevered Twitch viewers worldwide found themselves charmed by Good Kid’s hyperactive, Tokyo Police Club-esque power pop.
“When it was over we were, like, ‘Holy s--t, we have enough fans and material to make touring around the States a thing we could actually do,’ ” said Frosst.
“We weren’t expecting any growth from COVID. We were expecting live music to become so unfeasible that it wouldn’t be realistic — and then it went in the opposite direction,” added Wood, likening Good Kid’s ascent through gaming streams to the way skateboarding videos used to break punk bands.
That Good Kid — which also includes drummer Jon Kereliuk and bassist Michael Kozakov — would be embraced so heartily by geekdom comes as no surprise, perhaps, when one learns that the band is composed of five programmers who met at the University of Toronto while studying computer science.
A self-described “bunch of nerds who love anime,” Good Kid has leaned wholeheartedly into its dorkier tendencies since the beginning. The artwork for its 2015 debut single, “Nomu,” introduced the band’s de facto mascot, Nomu Kid, and the group has gamely given its fellow geeks lots of extra fodder to chew on alongside its intricate and wryly angsty musical output ever since.
None of this has been terribly strategic on Good Kid’s part, but the band members are happy to let the whole thing roll along. They’ve kept working with artist Gabriel Altrows since that first single, and the Good Kid universe has expanded to include myriad other characters and memes and “complicated lore.”
“Some of it has left us,” said Wood. “Some of it we have very little control over at this point. But I like that a lot.”
“This is maybe a little lofty, but all of my favourite art is art that you can enjoy at many different levels,” offered Frosst. “‘Game of Thrones’ is a great example. You can watch the show once and be, like, ‘Whoa, those are sick battles.’ Then you can pay attention and read the books and the Wikipedia articles and obsess over the external encyclopedias that George R.R. Martin has written, and every one of those levels is enjoyable.
“And I like that in modern music you can do that, too. You can hear the song and go, ‘That’s catchy.’ Then you can listen to it a few times and think, ‘Hmm, the lyrics are kind of interesting.’ You can listen to it 20 times and go, ‘What they’re doing with the guitars is really cool.’ And then you can get into the lore and the ARGs (alternate reality games) we’ve done, and the little hints in the art that suggest references to other things.”
Gone are the days when Wood could pen a handwritten note to anyone who purchased music or merch from the band’s website, but Good Kid remains very much attached to its doting fan base. Wood, for one, admitted “it feels crazy” that Lollapalooza and the transatlantic tour are but harbingers of bigger things to come.