Future Monarchs is a band eleven years in the making. Built around the songwriting talents of childhood friends and bandmates Bobby Lord and Jake Anderson, they have culled together the disparate influences of the '60s British Invasion, Laurel Canyon folk, '90s Powerpop, and the Indie Rock that they grew up with into a sound that is vaguely familiar while somehow paradoxically original.
As members of west suburban Chicago's guitar-pop upstarts SurroundSound, Lord and Anderson spent their high school years headlining shows and opening for local luminaries such as The Smoking Popes, Local H and Troubled Hubble. After four years and two full-length records (the second of which remains unreleased) SurroundSound went on a hiatus as its members scurried off to various Chicago universities. The band's sole songwriter, Lord, a sound engineering student at Columbia College, continued to write and demo songs for an intended future project while occasionally recording and performing with other live acts. Anderson, who is a year younger than the rest of his bandmates and their galaxy of friends, remained at home in the suburbs. Isolated from his community, Jake found solace in an acoustic guitar and the GarageBand software of his father's Mac. After a year in exile, Anderson moved to Chicago to share an apartment in Logan Square with his older brother and Lord. With over a year's worth of demos and over a hundred songs between them, Lord and Anderson were both eager to find an outlet for their music; it was obvious that they would have to go back to square one. Envisioning a group that could combine Lord's polished hook-infused pop with Anderson's earnestly organic singer/songwriter romanticism, they created a band called Future Monarchs.
Soon after forming the band, Lord introduced the demos to Columbia College sound recording professor Josh Shapera, who immediately expressed interest in their work. Shapera agreed to record Future Monarchs' music in his studio and enlisted the help of his friend and Wilco member Pat Sansone as co-producer. The result was a 6-song EP entitled Weird Weather. To fill out their live roster, Future Monarchs recruited former SurroundSound guitarist and Light Pollution bassist Justin Park on bass, Dorian Minor's Billy Klein on drums, and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Sager on keys, guitar and percussion, with Lord and Anderson sharing guitar and vocal duties. After several shows in the Chicago area the band paused while Lord served as bassist for Brendan Benson's European tour in the spring. With Lord back in Chicago, they are scheduled to re-enter the studio, again with the help of Josh Shapera and Pat Sansone, in December 2012 to record their debut full-length.
