The Kerrys Are Making Sparkly Music For Your Ears
A band fueled by Smash Bros, Mariah Carey, & city walks.
In early 2020, José Flores and Mauricio Carrillo were in their final years at Seattle Pacific University when everything went sideways and fell still. “In that weird purgatory phase at the start of the pandemic, SPU essentially gave us a huge break where we just didn’t do anything while teachers prepped to start using Zoom,” says José.
While some took up knitting and others tried coaxing life into reluctant sourdough starters, José and Mauricio took up their own daily practice. “It was kind of to keep ourselves sane in the beginning, just walking to Kerry Park every day. Our routine for a month and a half was just to wake up, get really baked, go for a walk, and then come back to our apartment and work on music for the rest of the day.” Which turned out to be an effective use of time. “All of the songs that we’ve released since came from that,” says Mauricio, “and there are still a lot of demos from back then we haven’t done anything with yet.”
Once they had something to share, they roped in the band’s third member, Sebastian Salazar. “I’d known them through church is all,” he says, “so I was like, ‘man, these guys are gonna be squares’. But we kicked it. They showed me some demos, pitched me the idea of the band, and I was like, ok, this is actually kinda cool.” At 19, Sebastian is the youngest of the group, but like the others, he’s no stranger to music. He also makes up one-half of Seattle’s experimental hardcore band, The Human Missile Crisis, as their drummer. The band was a finalist for Sound Off! in 2020.
Like most plans made between acquaintances, they took a while to come to fruition. The boys wouldn’t see each other again for another three months, but by the time they did, they’d added another member, Aiden Jansen, into the mix. “After that we kinda got the wheels rolling again,” says Seb. The Kerrys released their first single “Close (Spend the Night)” on New Year’s of 2021. They’ve since followed up with two others, “Cool” and “Solecito.”
The four now live together in Wallingford. When I meet them at their place, the three founding members of The Kerrys sit in a room with assorted seating. The TV glows with Smash Bros on pause. Instruments line the walls. A roommate (Aiden) sleeps soundly upstairs. This is the quintessential home of the twenty-somethings in a band in all its glory.
During the production of their first EP (amongst other things), it has been home base. Between living apart and the ups and downs of quarantine, much of their earlier music had required that they collaborate in a kind of stitching style. “Before we lived with each other, it was a lot of sending stuff back and forth because we couldn’t just show whatever on a guitar whenever we wanted,” Sebastian explains. For those first few months, songs were primarily pieced together from voice notes and messages. “Most of our ideas kinda relied on that for a long time. Now we can show each other ideas whenever we have them, jam on stuff, and come up with songs that way, which is super new to us.”
What started as a trio just over a year ago has quickly snowballed into a seven-piece outfit of miscellaneous musicians, with the more recent additions being Bryce Bunbury, Rylan Fischer, and Owen Sweeney. With its rapid growth, the group has become something of an ongoing experiment, with each member contributing in a number of ways. “When you have more heads come together, everyone has someone new to bring to the table and it just changes everything.” It’s contributed to a shift both in the way they write and in the overall dynamic of their sound. “Like Bryce and Owen have added a lot of depth to what we do,” José tells me. “When you listen to early stuff of ours it’s a lot of high-end and super melodic stuff—which isn’t bad, but also like, things need balance. They joined and our music basically went through puberty.”
New artists are often reluctant to box themselves into a genre, but The Kerrys are content with calling themselves a pop band, knowing that the label offers all the ambiguity and wiggle room they might need. It’s a comfortable space to explore what they refer to as sparkly music for your ears. “I just tell people it’s pop,” says José. “Anything can be pop, you know? It gives you freedom.”
“Our vibes are sort of like if you listened to The Neptunes and The Strokes fused together, with some Spanish lyrics inspired by 60’s Mexican music,” says Sebastian. But they have a laundry list of other genres and artists that have been baked into the mix—sources of inspiration ranging from 70’s Soul, Mexican Indie Pop, and Reggaeton (though Mauricio seems to be alone in that endorsement) to artists like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Mariah Carey. “Oh yeah, we went through a big phase with Mariah Carey…” he says. “I feel like that’s the coolest part of it. We just kind of get to share our interests with each other and kind like, create our own baby with our ideas and inspirations.” Consequentially, their music, and the way they make it, is changing all the time.
The band’s inception may have been as inspired by the monotony of the pandemic as it was by weed. But these days, the problem of endless expendable time is no longer an issue. On top of a healthy dedication to Smash Bros, they also have, you know, obligations. “Oh, yeah. I work from home and like, have a career I guess,” José laughs. “Everybody else has jobs that we do to support music. For us, that is the end goal, but we obviously are conscious of the fact that we have to do shit to support that.” That being said, it can be difficult to coordinate a group of seven musicians with mostly unrelated schedules.
This year, The Kerrys hope to break into Seattle’s live music scene. But already, they’ve found that much of doing so is a game of knowing someone who knows someone who kinda sorta also knows someone. “It can be kind of gatekeepy here,” says José. “Some venues only like to book the acts they know or artists that they’re friends with.” Folding into the mix can be a challenge for newcomers. The highs and lows of Covid have only complicated that, as venues open and close doors, and well-established local acts also attempt to return from their obligatorily year off the grid. “It’ll happen soon though,” says Mauricio. “We’ve been rehearsing, so once we book something, we’ll be ready.”
The Kerrys Recommend
The boys of The Kerrys have music going pretty much non-stop. At any given time, they might be listening to some compilation of Gwen Stefani, The Strokes, The Neptunes, Mariah Carey. They’ve also bonded over a mutual love of Pharrel, D’Angelo, Brockhampton, all of which were on repeat as they wrote their latest single, “Solecito”.