The day the world shut down, at least in New York, Garcia Peoples were about to take the stage at Union Pool, a tiny club in Brooklyn. The New Jersey-bred six-piece’s second-ever West Coast tour was on the horizon, another chance to show the other side of the country what they had been working toward over the last several years: developing a blistering live show; getting weird in the studio but with very deliberate methods; and embracing a form of psychedelic-improvisation that recalls the rawness of the ‘60s Nuggets-era more than the modern jamband scene.

“Our booking agent told us everything’s canceled—all music’s canceled for the next while,” Garcia Peoples guitarist Tom Malach recalls. “We went onstage right after we found out and it was the last time for a while. That was pretty deep.” 

Like every other musician and band with big plans for 2020, Garcia Peoples didn’t really know what to do with themselves for the next few months. Their day jobs kept them busy but taking a few months off felt like a kick in the teeth—potentially slowing the momentum they’d built over the last several years to a crawl. One Step Behind, their third album, arrived in 2019, with just three songs on it—the title track clocks in at a monster 32 minutes, showing off the band’s progression from late ‘60s Haight-Ashbury psychedelia to full-on, drone-rock assaults. The New York indie-jam scene was quickly evolving into something new, and Garcia Peoples were laying down some unique footing. People were taking notice.

That night at Union Pool, though, was a blistering one. The band started off with a heavy improvisation they simply call “D jam;” it winds through nearly 10 minutes of intertwined drums and guitar, starting off with jazzy overtones before melding into a driving, euphoric crescendo that finds the group playing off each other in a back-and-forth onstage conversation. There are no vocals; at around five minutes, they abruptly slow things down to a meandering pace, as if they’re delaying the inevitable—that this could be their last time on a stage for a while. For the next hour plus, they played with an intensity that’s come to define the buzz around their live performances, closing the night with “Show Your Troubles Out,” a prophetic number from their 2018 debut, Cosmic Cash.

“We had a bunch of really cool things lined up,” Garcia Peoples guitarist Danny Arakaki adds. “There was a lull when everything got shut down. It was a bit like picking the pieces up again. In our minds, we thought we’d be back to square one.”

With the plug pulled abruptly on the band’s plans, there wasn’t much to do but wait things out. But, as luck would have it, an old connection ended up helping them through the darkness. A few years ago, they met Marc Razo— bassist for improvisationally fueled indie outfit Endless Boogie—who invited them to help him provide a live soundtrack for a series of movies by filmmaker, visual artist and surfing aficionado Thomas Campbell.

That connection with Razo led the band to Matt Sweeney, the celebrated guitar player known for his work with Chavez and Superwolves—his duo with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy—as well as the likes of Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and Cat Power. And, the meeting turned out to be exactly what Garcia Peoples needed to make the most of their time off the road.

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Malach and Arakaki started playing together in high school, and the modern[1]day Garcia Peoples formed in earnest around 2016. The band started out as a four-piece outfit, with Malach and Arakaki sharing guitar duties, Arakaki’s brother Cesar on the drums and Derek Spaldo on bass. They’ve since filled out their lineup, adding bassist Andy Cush and keyboardist Pat Gubler, of the indie-rock outfit P.G. Six, to their roster. (Spaldo has also swapped instruments to become their third guitarist.)

Since then, with a strong work ethic— they all still have day jobs—Garcia Peoples have devoted a ton of time to making the band an improvisational force on stage. Usually, when an artist is several years into a musical project that isn’t their full-time focus, it naturally hits a wall. Time gets tougher to find, other demands get more stringent, and creative moments tend to become few and far between. 

Yet, the members of Garcia Peoples seem to be on the opposite trajectory. Since their 2018 debut Cosmic Cash, they’ve recorded and released several studio and live albums, proving their ability to both write tight, single-length tunes and deliver incredibly complex compositions that wind through numerous dissonant sounds and unconventional structures. And, though they’ve long been compared to Live/Dead-era Grateful Dead, a closer listen also reveals some early Velvet Underground, as well as hints of the Kinks and The Animals. But these are all faint reference points: Garcia Peoples’ evolution is something that’s becoming wholly unique to them.

“We have a better sense of each other’s musical personality now than when I first started playing with them,” Cush says. “We try to be really attentive listeners to what our bandmates are doing. When that goes well, it becomes this conversation we can have with whatever we’re playing. It feels like a real special thing.”

The band’s secret sauce seems to be a willingness to play right from the get-go. It’s not unusual to show up and start off with a 10-plus minute jam, complete with peaks and valleys. As any of their performances captured on YouTube quickly prove, the members of this band know how to connect to one another during a jam. It’s a very specific skill set; the music leads the way, a guiding force that bands them together in a present moment. 

A month before the world unknowingly would go into lockdown, Garcia Peoples met up with Sweeney at Strange Weather studios in Brooklyn for a couple of days— just enough time to come away with an impactful recording session that would make up their new album, Dodging Dues. 

“It was pretty amazing,” Malach says. “We’ve been such huge fans of Matt’s for the longest time [and we still can’t believe that] he was willing to work with us. The results are fantastic. There’s definitely Matt Sweeney directed moves on that album. He changes the feel of certain sections in order to make it more pulsating. He plays on it as well—he has an amazing guitar solo on the song ‘Stray Cats.’”

That quick session not only ended up yielding 75% of Dodging Dues, but it also opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the band. “We were the least prepared,” Malach says. “We were writing lyrics and writings songs in the studio, and were like, ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there.’ Now, it’s very put together. Dodging Dues was flying by the seat of our pants. The songs have that energy. On a lot of the takes, we have that momentum vibe.”

Another first: They added more songwriters to the mix. Cush wrote some lyrics and Gubler contributed the album’s opening number “False Company,” a pounding rock song that sounds like it was plucked straight out of the backlot set of Dazed and Confused. 

The album is short in length—a total of just over 34 minutes—and the jams are put aside in favor of a series of more compact songs. It’s a hallmark of Garcia Peoples’ studio albums, where they are focused on creating an album experience that harkens back to the notion of listening to a whole LP at once. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t moments which point toward the band’s improv-heavy live shows. The songs “Cold Dice,” “Tough Freaks” and “Stray Cats” all segue seamlessly into each other and guitar solos still pop up here and there. But, mostly, the musicians focus on creating a collective energy. 

“It’s having that energy where sometimes you play songs for the first time it’s like, ‘Ah, fuck!’ It has that inherent ‘a-ha’ quality to it. A lot of the takes happened with that momentum behind them,” Malach says.

Following the Dodging Dues sessions— which wrapped up in October 2020—the group spent time looking for a label. Guitarist Chris Forsyth, who traffics in the same experimental scene, passed along a copy to Mike Quinn, who runs No Quarter Records. It felt like a perfect match. 

“It blew me away,” Quinn says. “I had been a fan for a while, but I really got knocked back a step when I first heard it—just massive growth in songwriting, harmonies and playing. I acted quickly and got on the phone with Danny and Tom a few days later.” 

After New York’s lockdown restrictions started to ease, the band couldn’t stay away from each other too long and they resumed rehearsals as early as the summer of 2020. But those dark times were filled with new music, and if there’s one thread for Garcia Peoples’ longevity and prolific streaks, then it’s their desire to play with each other as much as possible. Hearing them speak about music and playing together, it sounds akin to childlike discovery.

“We were tired of playing the same old stuff, so we had a bunch of energetic practices when we got back to it,” Malach says. “We were playing this new stuff we were stoked about. Those songs saved us a bit.”

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Garcia Peoples’ proper return to touring began during the fall of 2021, with a run of club shows throughout the Midwest, as well as a month-long residency at the Sultan Room in Brooklyn. (As they inched back into the live[1]performance world, they also hosted some socially distant shows on the roof of the Sultan Room and took part in a few sound bath gigs at New York’s Judson Memorial Church.) Songs from their 2020 release Nightcap at Wits’ End, like “Gliding Through” and “Reckoning” have started to become vehicles for jamming, and the material from Dodging Dues is already starting to stretch out a bit; during a rooftop show from early summer 2021, their “Cold Dice/Tough Freaks/Stray Cats” jam stretched to about 16 minutes.

“There’s a lot more space when we play live, when we improvise,” Arakaki says. “It’s not as straightforward as on the records. It comes naturally, live, right now. That’s where our comfort zone is—when we kick into a song, we hit a part that starts grooving and we lock into that.” 

“We know each other’s playing a lot better,” Malach adds. “We can anticipate things, and when people pull in a certain direction, we can follow. It’s really fun. Trying to figure out new ways to do things and new ways to improvise—it’s something we talk about a lot. Now, we’re finally getting to a lot of that and it sounds very cool.”