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Indie band Hush Club creates community around music and late night bites
For Hush Club, there’s an art to simplicity. The indie trio, based out of Somerville, writes groovy, swaying tunes with catchy guitar riffs and melodies about falling in and out of love. They draw inspiration from an array of music from 1960s and ‘70s rock like Fleetwood Mac to more recent pop artists like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter.
“We're trying to make you dance,” said Alasdair MacKenzie. “We're trying to write melodies that'll get stuck in your head, write melodies that are simple, and anyone can sing them, but at the same time, don't go where you expect them to go.”
“Simpler things tend to be more memorable,” Chris Haley added.
I met the band at Andala Coffee House, a charming spot in Cambridge that looks like it spawned from a fairytale book. It also happens to be located near Liz Kantor’s ex’s house – the inspiration for the band’s song “Caroline.”
Kantor (keys and vocals), Haley (guitar and vocals) and MacKenzie (drums, bass, vocals) sat around a long wooden table, swapping sips of each other's drinks, a few weeks ahead of playing The Sinclair — their biggest venue yet — on Sunday, Sept. 8.
Hush Club met as undergrads at Harvard. During MacKenzie’s freshman year in fall 2015, he went to a student rock performance, and Haley was the only other person in the audience.
“It would have been strange and rude for us not to talk to each other, so we started talking and realized we liked a lot of the same music,” said MacKenzie. “And that's our meet cute.”
Kantor met MacKenzie living in the same dorm in 2017, and the band started playing together in spring 2018.
Hush Club went viral on TikTok in December 2023 with a video of the group making pizzas in the oven on their porch with overlaid text reading, “Hey we’re Hush Club, an indie band based in Somerville, MA. If you send us proof that you saved this video, we’ll invite you to our house and make you a pizza with toppings of your choice. Leave your topping requests in the comments.” Their single “The Moon” played in the background.
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A flood of comments — 892 at the time of publication — led the band to invite a small group over for homemade pies and hatch a larger-scale plan. They promised pizza for all attendees at their Jan. 25 concert at Brighton Music Hall and sold out the show, with slices provided by Graffiti Pizza and Street Food. Their innovative ploy also garnered two features in The Boston Globe.
The band explained that it was easier to connect with audience members after smaller shows, but they weren’t sure how to continue that close knit community feeling at larger concerts until the pizza afterparty idea.
“We share time with people over food, because it's easy to share time over,” said Kantor.
For their upcoming show at The Sinclair, they’re bringing back the breaking bread concept, but this time, it’s ice cream. They also posted silly videos about this concert, dancing in different areas of their porch.
As for their music, Hush Club released their latest single “Movie” on August 13. Each of their songs originates with one artist — in this case, MacKenzie — and the others add their input to arrange and craft what becomes the finished single. MacKenzie wrote the track about reminiscing about a past relationship like running scenes in a film.
“You’re the star of every movie/ My mind’s been showing to me/ I’m reaching for your ghost again/ See us laughing in the front seat,” he sings.
Haley said the lines sound like “snapshots of memories” streaming through the listener’s ears.
For the future of their project, Haley doesn’t feel the need for Hush Club to be famous. He just hopes it can eventually become self-sustaining.
“I think it would be really cool to just have a big body of work that we were proud of at some point, regardless of whether or not we're playing massive venues or have millions of listeners or something,” he said. “If I'm like 50, and we have six albums that all were really intentional and we're really proud of then that's pretty cool, too.”
