Band Walks onto Land

Don’t ask Santa Barbara’s Trout Club for any fishing tips. They’ve now moved onto land.

Four years to the day after their dropping their debut EP, the garage-rock quartet, named after the small mountainside neighborhood off Highway 154, is releasing their first full-length album, Land Practice, on December 23.

“That was kind of a cute little accident, not at all planned,” laughed lead singer, rhythm guitarist, banjoist and occasional violinist Quique Hernandez-Black. Neither was most of what the band of lifelong friends — including Kai Zheng on lead guitar and keyboards, and twins Malcolm and Cedric Bobro on bass and drums, respectively — has weathered since that EP, Welcome to the Trout Club, came out in the final days of 2019.

At the time, the group was playing as much as they could, from house parties to squeezing themselves onto the bills of bands they’d befriended. Of course, not three months later, all that changed. The pandemic dealt a blow to the young, budding band. “It was a big jump from practicing together and jamming all the time, working on songs together and playing live a lot to suddenly all being kind of home alone,” said Hernandez-Black. At the height of their momentum, Trout Club found themselves reimagining the way they’d been playing together for years. They were forced to evolve.

“The pandemic was kind of a cool opportunity to get a little deeper with our songwriting, because instead of just bringing in something and jamming on it for a couple hours, now we’re talking about it separately,” said Hernandez-Black of their lockdown-era collaborations. “When we got that break, it felt like an opportunity to work on really honing our songwriting style and to practice our instruments.”

He recalls the origins of “Space,” written shortly after the pandemic began and one of the 10 tracks on Land Practice. The band devised a system they called “skeletons,” where one member would make a frame of a song with its most basic elements — the tempo, the chords, maybe some lyrics — and send it to the rest of the band. The other three guys had their own copy for listening, practicing and ultimately, recording.

With “Space” pieced together remotely, Trout Club knew they were onto something. Hernandez-Black was blown away by the process. “I mean, it was a whole different way of doing things. This was a crazy amount of freedom.” Freedom had its own challenges — with unlimited time, perfectionism runs wild — but Hernandez-Black and co. were game to put in the hours.

It shows. Listen to Welcome to the Trout Club for fun, though maybe not so fully formed songs, then check in with “Space,” “Stage Door,” and “Candy (In My Mouth),” their two latest singles, for catchier, more fleshed-out tunes with intent. “Stage Door” recalls the raw energy of Trout Club with more filling, while “Candy” glides through a keyboard and bongo-flecked bossa nova with some twists and turns. All three highlight the range of Hernandez-Black’s vocals and Zheng’s guitar work, not to mention the band’s ear for arrangement and a bump in production value.

The fresh sound visibly excites Hernandez-Black. After all, besides the handful of new tunes, songs like “Fog” and “Mr. Mystery,” Trout Club’s first original, were reworked from the ground up to show the band’s evolution in a sort of sonic March of Progress. “I mean, we put so much time into recording our own parts,” Hernandez-Black acknowledged. “I put violin on a couple songs. I kind of taught myself to play [just] for this. The end result is these songs we’ve played for so long elevated to a whole new level.”

Come 2021, vaccinations and the return of band practice, Trout Club not only persisted but drew on their remote-work habits when Zheng and the Bobro bros moved to the Bay Area. Performing at Zheng’s wedding, which Hernandez-Black also officiated, was a recent highlight, and no matter the physical distance, it seems the boys are as close as ever. Hernandez-Black sees nowhere for them to go but up. “We really grew from [the pandemic]. And that’s kind of the mood of this album, is this period of growth and change. I love [the name Land Practice], because it reminds me of our roots, getting together and doing band practice. We’ve kind of been brewing under the ocean for some time, and now we have something to show for it. And I’m so grateful for everyone that listens to the music — the fact is, it’s just me hanging out with my friends and doing what we love to do together.”

Stream Trout Club’s debut LP Land Practice December 23 on Spotify and Apple Music, and support the band by purchasing the album on Bandcamp and Shopify. For more information, see https://linktr.ee/troutclub.