A new kind of noise
It’s not just that Draag has never played music like this before.
The Los Angeles-based shoegaze band has never heard anyone else make these kinds of sounds either.
Adrian Acosta, the band’s lead vocalist and principal songwriter, says that Draag has been around a long time but has only just begun to find its footing.
They’re going to play Santa Fe for the first time when they open up for Wednesday on Tuesday, May 14, at Meow Wolf, and a few days after that, their new EP, Actually, the quiet is nice, will be released.
“Sonically,” says Acosta, “we’re tapping into territory that we’ve never tapped into before.”
Acosta and his band have been making music since around 2015. His longest-serving bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Jessica Huang, joined him after he placed an ad on Craigslist looking for a musical collaborator.
Draag, named after a song by Brainiac, a 1990’s indie rock band, released EPS in 2018 and 2020 and their first full-length album, Dark Fire Heresy, in 2023. The new EP, which will be released in May, serves as a bridge to the next album, says Acosta.
Draag doesn’t just write and perform the music. They also serve as their own producers, and they record their albums in a studio Acosta built at his own expense.
“It’s a very ambitious record,” Acosta says of the next album. “That’s one of the reasons we thought it would be good to release an EP in between the first and the second album. The EP serves as a nice transitional piece leading up to the LP. But we’re not done with it yet.”
The band’s sound, dominated by synths, guitars, and repeating melodic patterns, is something that Acosta says comes straight from his childhood.
“I grew up very isolated,” he says. “My family was into hip-hop or traditional Mexican music, and I was the weird kid. I liked that stuff, but I was fascinated by things that would drone. Growing up there was a heater in my house, and whenever we’d turn it on, it would sound like a beautiful chord. I was always chasing that sound. When I started to play guitar, that’s what I was trying to create.”
Huang, a classically trained pianist, spent time in her youth playing oboe in marching bands and never joined a rock-and-roll outfit until she answered Acosta’s call on Craigslist. She didn’t have any gear at the time, and she’s steadily learned more about making music in the studio.
Santa Fe is the start of Draag’s touring schedule for the year, and they’ll also hit Oregon, Colorado, Montana, and British Columbia, Canada, before May is over.
The themes for the upcoming EP developed naturally over the recording process, says Huang, and they find Draag feeling a little more playful than they did on the 2023 release Dark Fire Heresy.
“I think we wanted to show a different side to how serious and dark we can be,” Huang says of the EP’S title. “When we came up with the name Dark Fire Heresy, we were like, ‘OK, that’s really tough.’ And it seemed to fit the themes in that album. But now we’re kind of going back to childhood. … We started thinking about things before life’s trauma and things that happened to you. We were looking at nostalgic footage of things like ’90s weather channel music.” — Spencer Fordin
Draag, opening for Wednesday 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 14 Meow Wolf
1352 Rufina Circle
$20 866-636-9969; meowwolf.com