Ian Marmande and Jacob Rhodes had been friends since childhood before Louisiana State University put them in the same orbit as Hayden Field and Chase Perkins, and the four spent their college years playing marathon cover sets at bars and frat parties around Baton Rouge just to get stage time.
That bar-band apprenticeship shows up directly in their sound — early-2000s garage rock in the vein of the Strokes, Kings of Leon, and Cage the Elephant, played with more ferocity than the college-circuit setting usually calls for.
Their first hard-ticketed headline show in 2024 pulled a crowd of 800, and Leeward Drive, their debut EP, arrived with "The Fence" produced by Cage the Elephant's own Brad Shultz — a direct co-sign from one of the bands that shaped them, on the same record that introduced them beyond Louisiana.