Fend

Fend is trying to tell you something. It might be a secret, it might be familiar wisdom. It could even be everything. The Minneapolis quartet, featuring guitarist/vocalist Josie Villano, guitarist John O’Brien, bassist/vocalist Kate Malanaphy, and drummer Abe Anderson, has covered miles of ground over two EPs and two years. Songs are about cats, but they’re also about rising to the love we receive and overcoming the fear that we’re undeserving. Songs are about partners and friends and whiskey-free Cokes, but they’re also about breaking through the suffocating ice of time’s passage and breathing in the frozen air — alive, questioning, and smiling despite it.

It’s fitting that the band’s debut single was “Team Up,” because that’s what Fend is. All four members came from varied, overlapping corners of Minneapolis and multiple bands/projects between them. Villano and O’Brien have played together for years, with pop deconstructionists Early Eyes and the short-lived power-emo trio Marie Finch. Malanaphy has released incredible solo music, on top of co-piloting prairie rock sweethearts Keep for Cheap. Anderson has the longest CV — from touring punk bands to gently experimental solo songs to weirdo skramz to producing, mixing, and contributing to dozens of albums from bands all over. You take these four, mix them with a Mentos of Villano’s lyrics, and you’ll receive a Fend-flavored geyser in the face.

The Mend and True Sequel were quickly released after the band’s formation in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The soil is rich with rustling indie rock on both EPs, obscure sounds bleeding into the groundwater, establishing them as both a studio and live band. The embellishments are curious, never driving but always enhancing, stained-glass filters for the potent songs at the core. A veneer of ramshackle wisdom betrays the spirit simmering beneath the lid. Villano and Malanaphy’s screams and harmonies are confessional, refracted through impressionistic lyrics, sometimes so disarmingly direct that you don’t realize that they ring true. There is no pretension in Fend’s music. They feel just as stuck and lost in the hard times, blind and forgetful when it seems easy; just as funny and wide-eyed as an old friend after trading hits of a joint. Listening to Fend’s discography front-to-back will leave you charmed, hopeful, and ready to let some love in.

Disc (2024) is the band’s statement of purpose. Each strain of curiosity is amplified and rendered in gorgeous Technicolor. Villano’s songwriting dials into even more abstract feelings with even more specific moments. They cover an incredible range with few words, abandoning any need for overt complexity and embracing the subtext of familiar conversations. When you’re amongst friends, not everything needs to be spelled out word by word but it’s still felt just as deeply. Lead single “Wet Garden” is Fend in miniature — head-banging riffs, sweethearted lyrics, love for routine, and an ability to exist in present space, despite the anxious sword of Damocles hanging over all of us. Songs like “Michigan Beer” and “Mama” have been honed by dozens of gigs, from strum to scream, piercing the heart of what makes life worth living. The band turns on pins and needles, dancing in a camel’s eye, galloping between hushed porch-front folk and a wildfire of ascendant guitars to harmony-drenched wave-less emo.

From the end-of-Daylight-Savings ode and opener “1:59 AM” to feline sequel and closer “Crimini 2 (Window People),” Fend empties their proverbial pockets and acts irrationally truthful, letting palpable honesty dampen the truth’s bruises. Swaths of fuzz dance around trumpet and plinking orchestration only to be interrupted by 2013’s finest twinkle riff. Only four music lifers, melding their minds together in an indie rock Jimmy Neutron brain blast, could bring intricate emotions together in such a rich tapestry. Something as slight as the hush in how Villano sings “there is no need to / feel sad” on “Michigan Beer” resonates with a neutron star’s glowing heart. Deep in this heart, you have a friend. Fend will meet you where you’re at.

[Bio by Aly Eleanor]