‘We can see the light on the other side’: A-Go-Go balances promise, turbulence on debut album

A couple of years ago, while living together in a campus rental dubbed “The Blue House” – a name given it owing to the blue trim painted throughout – the members of A-Go-Go began writing the songs that would become their debut album, Today, Today. At the time, the musicians were still shaking off the stasis of the early pandemic, while simultaneously grappling with the heavy questions that began to surface and take hold as their college years started to wind down.

“We were all of a similar age, all living together and dealing with the same bullshit,” said singer/guitarist Case Koerner, who joined singer/bassist Niko Francis for an early February interview. (The band’s lineup is rounded out by singer/guitarist Henry Schuellerman, drummer Jack Smithberger and multi-instrumentalist Colin Palmieri.) “You’re dealing with new love experiences, and then late love in college and the possibility of moving away. So, we’re all facing these same questions: Do you love this person? Are you gonna move away? How are you going to get a job? Who are you? I feel like we all had these same prompts and all of us responded simultaneously, and that’s what this album is. It’s our 22-year-old experience living in this fucking house on this street in Ohio.”

Despite these sometimes-heavy considerations, the roots-tinged indie-rock songs populating Today, Today almost universally crackle with life – a reality Francis and Koerner attributed to some combination of emerging from lockdown and a natural desire to meet downtrodden words with upbeat melodies. Francis, for one, described those post-vaccine months as vibrating with a renewed sense of possibility, bands that had spent the bulk of the pandemic woodshedding in campus abodes such as Spartan House on Indianola Avenue, including Villagerrr, champing at the bit to finally get out and perform for a crowd.

“Once the restrictions were lifted … everybody started a project and it was like go, go, go, go,” said Francis, who will join his bandmates in celebrating the release of Today, Today at Ace of Cups on Saturday, Feb. 8, supported by Spacekid and Rug. “The second it was possible to play shows, people were hitting the ground running, just ready to rumble. … And I don’t know if times have gotten much easier, but it’s always been cathartic to play music in a world that is confusing and scary but also beautiful at the same time.”

The constant tug between these accumulated hurts and a belief in better days to come makes its presence felt throughout the album, songs like “Find a Way” centering on the idea of picking up the pieces and soldiering onward in spite of any lingering pain. At times, this idea echoes in the music itself. Witness “Comedown,” which captures the feel of the weather finally breaking, its downcast first half giving way to a surging back end. “You’re always running from the things that let you down,” Francis sings atop dancing riffs and urgent drums as the track passes the two-minute mark. “Keep moving forward with your eyes glued to the ground.”

“With a lot of the songs where the themes are about heartbreak or recovery, we wrote upbeat music to go along with it,” Francis said. “It’s almost reclaiming those emotions, in a way, or at least working past them. It feels fun to almost taunt those emotions, like, ‘Oh, I might be sad, but I’m not going to be singing woe is me!”

The members of A-Go-Go- met early in their years at Ohio State, initially bonding over shared loves of skateboarding and music. After a handful of months, they decided to start a band of their own, first leaning into house shows and single releases as a means to better establish a sense of footing. “Every single we put out was experimenting with a slightly different vibe, playing around with different instruments,” said Francis, whose musical interests gravitate toward rootsier artists such as Townes Van Zandt, Tobacco City and Jeffrey Silverstein. “We used that time to explore a lot of different sonic space.”

In this stretch, the friends were also able to develop a shared musical language, filtering their varied interests into something more cohesive and wholly their own. “As we grow and mature, it’s just become more and more collaborative,” said Koerner, a Deadhead at heart who also has a deep fondness for Jimi Hendrix and similarly psychedelic ’60s rockers.

Though only a couple of years have passed since the members of A-Go-Go began writing the songs for Today, Today, both Koerner and Francis allowed that they now exist at some degree of distance from the coming-of-age turmoil so entwined in the record.

“It feels different playing these songs now, but in a fun way, where you’re looking back on these feelings and looking back on yourself from a couple of years ago and being like, ‘Everything shaped up fine and it’s going to be okay moving forward,’” Francis said. “A lot of those really heavy questions we were grappling with then, we don’t know the answers to all of them, but I’d say a lot of those questions have been answered. And now we can see the light on the other side.”