Strangers You Know

Music evolves. It’s constantly changing shape and turning into something new and better. With Strangers You Know, there’s a continuous evolution of sound. With their new EP due out in early 2016, you can hear that music evolving. The sound is in motion and the band invites you to move with it. But first, let’s go back a few years.

We all start out as strangers before we meet and that’s exactly how the band formed. Grady Lee snuck into Coachella - Kids, we do not condone this sort of behavior even if it gets you into a sold out music festival where you meet your future bandmate and embark on a musical journey that brings you two EPs and a full-length recording that showcases your ability to meld together sounds that surpass genres. Anyway, Adam Haagen was at said music festival with some friends who just happened to be pretty girls and Grady wandered over. If it weren’t for the stealth behavior on Grady’s part and the pretty girls, he and Adam may never have met. They went their separate ways after this chance encounter at one of the nation’s biggest music fests only to find themselves at the right time and the right place four months later. This allowed Grady and Adam to go from strangers to musical brothers in arms.

They formed a connection over synths, beats, guitars, lyrics and melody leading to their first EP, Something to Someone. Released in 2014, the title is a remark on sentimentality and a snapshot of where they were as artists at the time. Everything means something to someone and when these songs where recorded they represented feelings and emotions that were present at that moment.

“Right now, we’re just synthesizing our favorite things,” says Adam referring to the evolution of Strangers You Know’s sound. What followed Something to Someone was 2015’s What Happened. Listening to this full-length album, you get a sense of where the music is going and how layered it is. What Happened is theatrical. There’s never a dull moment in the sound. Everything comes together with no gaps. It’s rich and eclectic. It’s a collaboration of two musical minds one from Santa Barbara (Grady) and the other from West LA (Adam). But the music isn’t about California; it’s about amalgamating their influences that range from folk to rock to pop to electronica. Strangers You Know’s sound represents everything that they’re feeling in the moment.

With their new EP, Grady and Adam continue to evolve. With every release, a new sound emerges. It’s a new version of the band – with the same members of course - that follows the trajectory of their music. In the studio Adam and Grady work in tandem. Sure there are disputes about where a certain melody may go or if a lyric is right for a particular song but in the end, everything comes together perfectly.

In an industry where image is key and rehashing the same sounds over and over again is the only way get ahead, Strangers You Know take a different approach. “It’s not this giant group of pop ideology of other people telling us what we need to be,” Grady says of their dynamic. Strangers You Know do everything themselves from the songwriting to the recording. It’s their music and no matter how much it grows and shifts it will always belong to them. But more importantly, it belongs to the listener. With Strangers You Know the one constant you can count on is that their music will endlessly evolve into something for not just someone but for everyone.