Toronto indie band "Good Kid" members Nick Frosst, front right, and Jacob Tsafatinos, front left, pose with bandmates, rear left to right, David Wood, Jon Kereliuk and Michael Kozakov in Toronto on Friday, May 10, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
TORONTO – Many aspiring musicians have heard it: “Don’t quit your day job.” In the case of indie rock act Good Kid, the famous idiom is coming from inside the band.
For nearly a decade, all five musicians in the Toronto outfit have stayed the course of the millennial hustle by chasing two vastly different careers.
By day, they’ve been successful computer programmers at various technology companies. By night, they fill concert halls across North America as one of Canada’s burgeoning young music acts.
It’s an arrangement that would confound many Canadian musicians who’ve toiled away at diners or factories to finance their dreams. Ask the guys in Good Kid and they insist there’s logic behind their unusual double lives.
“It’s actually super cathartic to have a few moments every week where I’m not thinking about tech,” explains Nick Frosst, the band’s lead singer.
“You’re not rattling around in your brain all the time.”
His fellow band members agree. Playing in Good Kid is the creative outlet they all needed to balance out the corporate world. But there’s an elephant in the room early in this conversation.
While Good Kid has managed to hold down their office jobs up to this point, their music careers are pulling them in another direction.
Earlier this year, the band scored their first Juno Award nomination for breakthrough group, one of their clearest signs of exponential growth. They walked the red carpet in Halifax with awe and excitement and then returned to less glamorous lines of work.
Good Kid plays one of their biggest stages yet at Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival in August before they embark on their first U.K. and Europe headlining tour.
Eventually, it seems like something has to give in this intricate balance of priorities.
When he’s not on stage vocalist Frosst is co-founder of Cohere, a Toronto artificial intelligence company that creates programming tools for the business community. Jacob Tsafatinos, one of the Good Kid’s two guitarists, is a software engineer at Uber.
A few hours before a recent Good Kid concert in Toronto, the two slip into the back corner of a neighbouring cocktail bar to dissect their complicated lives.
“My theory is that it’s good to not only focus on music,” Tsafatinos explains. “Doing more than one thing is healthy, right?”
Both thin-framed men, who are in their early 30s, look quite ordinary.
Frosst is draped in a slightly oversized navy sweater with black glasses that occasionally slip down his nose when he speaks. Tsafatinos sports curls that cascade over his forehead, and a red-and-white T-shirt that declares a love of pizza.
In the bigger picture, they contend, most of Good Kid’s accomplishments now are strictly bonus points for a group of guys who never saw this coming.
When the band formed nine years ago, the computer science majors at the University of Toronto weren’t seeking any sizable success. They saw playing music as a healthy distraction from their lives behind keyboards.
In their downtime, they poked around online communities with like-minded people interested in anime lore and internet memes. But like many in their professional field, even small ideas carried a vision. Good Kid was no exception.
Their 2015 debut single “Nomu” captured the attention of some Reddit users, and it wasn’t long before their subsequent tracks were being used in YouTube videos of gamers playing “Fortnite.”
The band’s decision to remove copyright stipulations from their music meant anyone could use it in videos without fear of YouTube takedown notices. It gave them unparalleled exposure to new listeners.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Good Kid’s music started to spread online even faster as more people spent time behind their computers. When restrictions lifted, the band – rounded out by drummer Jon Kereliuk, bassist Michael Kozakov and guitarist David Wood – started thinking seriously about their first concert tour.
Good Kid’s sound evokes a bygone era when 2000s garage rock brushed up against the melodies of Top 40 pop.
Their recent single “Break” meets at the intersection of both genres with Frosst singing with the theatricality and earnestness of early Panic! At the Disco. “Bubbly” begins with the cracking open of a soda can before it charges into a guitar arrangement that recalls the Strokes.
But it’s Good Kid’s jangly rendition of “From the Start,” a jazz track originally by Grammy-winning Icelandic singer Laufey, that is by far their most popular song.
Nearly every one of Good Kid’s tracks carries a relentlessly optimistic tone on the surface, while heavy metaphors sung by Frosst betray murkier depths of anxiety and directionless youthful despair.
Those perspectives are precious, especially now, Tsafatinos explains. He’s seen how success taints other bands, and they intend to hang onto “normal life” for as long as they can.
When they’re home in Toronto, Good Kid sticks to a structured schedule with practice every Tuesday and Thursday around 6:30 p.m. On the road, their employers’ remote work policies allow them to attend virtual meetings from cafes across the continent.
“I think great music comes from people living realistic experiences, being surrounded by more average people,” Tsafatinos adds.
“All my favourite albums typically are the first couple that artists write. Then at some point, I find … it’s a little less relatable.”
Staying connected with their fans certainly has seemed to help. The group emphasizes how their professional experience has made them “data-driven,” another way of suggesting they pay attention to their likes, views and comments.
Early on, they introduced an animated character named Nomu Kid who was received so warmly that he eventually became the band’s mascot, inspired their 8-bit video game “Ghost King’s Revenge,” and led them to introduce more characters within the Good Kid universe.
“People these days … (enjoy) playing little games, finding secrets hidden in the videos or making art that represents their enjoyment of the music,” Frosst says.
“Our fans have taught us that if we’re receptive, they’re in.”
And so Good Kid intends to stick with whatever works, at least until it doesn’t. Eventually, that could mean returning to the question of whether a successful band can also hold second jobs. For now, it’s a discussion they’ve largely put aside.
“Maybe one day we’ll get to this point where some of us ““ or all of us ““ make this decision. But I don’t think we’re there yet,” concludes Tsafatinos.
“When we get there we’ll figure it out.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 14, 2024.
