The indie shoegaze band doesn't subscribe to the flashy, virality-obsessed brand of musicianship that has emerged in the past few years. They’re quite defiant of any metric-centric mentality and see any bit of measured “success” as a bonus.
The band is a collective of friends assembled over the past few years in the Denton music scene. Connor Caldwell provides vocals and plays guitar. Sam Farr plays drums and produces for the band. Carter Lacy plays guitar and piano, sometimes. Dom Kozacek plays bass.
For New Avenues, all that really matters is the music they make together as a group. One of their songs, “Taking Flight,” has amassed over 20,000 streams on Spotify. Objectively, this is an impressive feat, but for the band, this is nothing more than a sweet perk.
“We just put out what we like, and if someone listens to it, that’s awesome,” Caldwell says.
As the lead vocalist and guitarist of the band, Caldwell can be partially credited for the band’s inception. He and his bandmates, however, emphasize that New Avenues is a collaborative project.
“We’re more of a collective. It's not just one person doing it," Caldwell says. "We all have these ideas that we bring to the table and then we’ll take it all to the studio and the rest is history."
This aspect of the group sets the band apart from the member's other projects. Their creative process is much more free-flowing and spontaneous and encourages creative input.
“New Avenues has had the most collaborative process I’ve ever had in a band writing,” Farr says. “Because in other bands, for example, in one that I led myself and was the lead singer for, I was the main writer, and not just the main writer but the only writer.”
Each member is involved in the entirety of the creative process for the most part, whether it's songwriting or instrumental arrangement in the studio.
“[We are all] very direct on how we approach stuff. I don’t think anybody has too big of an ego either," Lacy says. "Our only interest is bringing the best out of each other and being the best band we can be."
The group’s most recent collaboration is the single "Turnover." It fits right into the band’s sunshiney shoegaze with its hazy yet polished vocals, happy guitar chords and contemplative lyrics. This particular song, however, is more of Farr’s creation at its core.
“['Turnover'] started with me and Connor jamming," Farr says. "I brought my friend Maya in and she helped me write the vocals.”
With the input from the rest of the band, Farr experimented in the studio with the drum sound.
“[We used] both live drums and electronic drums," he says. "[I] mixed them and put them left and right. It ended up sounding really cool to me.”
A Collective of Lovely People
One thing that's been valuable to the group is the opportunity to share the stage with artists they look up to. Since New Avenues came to be in 2019, they have opened for bands Sleeping Jesus, Winona Forever and French Cassettes. They've also performed with Avon Park, a Memphis-based indie-rock group headed by one of Caldwell’s childhood friends, who is also named Connor. Last spring, both bands embarked on a double-header tour. “We did that first tour and that gave me the appetite to do more,” Caldwell says.
The band has a string of new singles in the works and the members have high hopes of hopping on the road again soon — potentially later this year for a short and sweet Texas run, as well as a longer tour adventure in 2025. Though this past tour was Caldwell’s first experience traveling with a band, Lacy and Farr are seasoned tour-trippers and enforcers of the strict “socks stay on” policy that is important on the road.
Aside from the novelty of exploring new places with bandmates, going on tour is even more special when friends are along for the ride. With the individual members of the band being quite entrenched in the Denton music scene, they feel that they're bringing a piece of Denton with them to every new place.
“That’s like the most exciting aspect for me, getting to share Denton and our little area with other people,” Caldwell says.
Farr adds: “‘Cause you can take the band out of Denton, but you can’t take Denton out of the band.”
New Avenues is now a thriving part of the growing organism that is the Denton music scene. Though Caldwell and Lacy met previously at an internship, it is thanks to the music scene in Little D that New Avenues is stacked with its current mix of talented musicians today. Caldwell invited Lacy, Farr and Kozacek to hop on his New Avenues sets, and the band was set.
The members feel fortunate that the scene brought them together and that they’re able to cross paths with other incredible musicians in the scene.
“I don’t want to name specific bands because I’ll leave some out but some of the groups I’ve gone to see over the past four, five years are some of my favorite bands, period," Lacy says. "They are bands that I would obsess over even if I never knew them. I think about that a lot. I don’t know what we did to deserve it, but it keeps happening. We keep meeting cool people.”
