Darlingside, a vocally focused band, is currently on their United States tour and will soon be visiting Providence, Rhode Island on Dec. 9.
The band got their start when they all met in their college acapella group. When they graduated college, the four members started to realize that becoming an official band was a shared passion and decided to take the challenge on. They started out by performing more progressive rock songs and slowly made their way back to their roots. Now they perform with mostly vocals and folk type music.
“We ended up going in a more folky direction with it and really wanting the vocals to be forward,” David Senft, one of the members of the band, said. “The one mic thing has been our approach for the last five years and that’s always been about putting the vocals first and having it feel like guys in a room singing together and then you put a mic in front of them. Rather than guys spread out around the stage singing into their own microphones.”
Along with the feeling of all of the members singing together, the band members collaborate on every song written and everyone is able to have their own input on each song. This allows the group to ensure that every member has their own voice behind their songs and agrees with every single word that they put out into the world.
“We never really premeditate what we are going to write about,” Senft said. “People bring ideas to the table and we do writing exercises together and we kind of let things happen organically. We talk a ton, we are extremely slow. We have days where we only talk about a single line or a single word in a song and make sure we are all on the same page with what we want.”
Their new album, “Extralife” was just released in February of this year and their consensus of the new album was geared towards existentialism due to the 2016 election. At the time of writing this album, each band member was feeling a lot of personal emotions about politics and other current events occurring. They each let their emotions lead the way and wrote what the group was feeling at the current time.
“We were feeling all kinds of things about that and we were feeling all kinds personally. We were driving through forest fires in California and thinking about the environment. We never really had a goal. We talk and we write and so where things go.”
Overall Senft and the band really enjoy being able to share their passion, emotions and personal lyrics to the world. They gradually grew a bigger fan base over the years and the crowds they perform in front of now, give them a great amount of energy and Senft personally loves to see the connection he makes with his audience.