Following the band’s victory in BandWagon’s Battle of the Bands in the spring, Hand Turkey is set to release another album this month, celebrating with a release show at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox in Denver on August 15.
Funk pop fusion outfit Hand Turkey brings groove-centric, high-energy recordings and performances. The seven-piece ensemble just won BandWagon’s Battle of the Bands in the spring, and with a new album set for release later this month, the band aims to continue the hot streak.
Hand Turkey recently caught up with BandWagon about its writing and recording process for the upcoming album, dubbed Fridge Art Vol. 2, which is set for independent release on August 15. The band shared its first single from the album, “Tunnel Vision,” in July, and vocalist Andy Seracuse tells me how the band shifted to a more community-oriented, human-centric recording approach for the album.
While previous releases Time and Time Again and the Fridge Art Vol. 1 EP were recorded one track at a time, Seracuse says this album was intentionally recorded all together to capture the more human elements of the sound.
“We thought a lot about the state of the music industry right now, with AI music, and the way that is a problem for musicians, and the fact that music-making feels like something that should fundamentally be a community-building experience,” Seracuse said. “[We] tried to bring that ideology into this process of recording this record, so that we had all of our favorite musicians in a room together making this, making the stuff once in the same room, so that we could try to capture the feeling of that in the space.”
Although some of Hand Turkey’s earlier releases may have a very polished sound, Fridge Art Vol. 2 aims to make something authentic and raw. Eric Ellis, who is both the band’s guitarist and a luthier who makes many of their instruments, says this also calls back to many admirable early records that were recorded live in a room with the musicians performing together.
“All the great records from the 70s are just great people playing in a space, and it sounds kind of sloppy, and it’s sick,” Ellis said. “Not that our record sounds sloppy, but it doesn’t sound like, you know, Dua Lipa.”
“There’s a great Jack Stratton quote where he’s like, ‘Right now, anyone can make a perfect record, but it takes real musicians to make a human-feeling record,'” Ellis said.
Saxophonist Amy Keisling says that while older releases had the band layering horn parts performed by the same few band members on separate tracks, Fridge Art Vol. 2 features an entire horn section recording live together.
“For this upcoming album, we had five different horn players in the same room playing an arrangement, like Eric said, doing all that arrangement up front, which was really fun, both to arrange and then to play,” Keisling said. “I’d say a lot more fun to record than just doing one line after another.”
The band also wrote most of the album in smaller groups, each contributing a few initial demos, an approach that likely adds to the human element of the songs on Fridge Art Vol. 2.
The band half-jokingly tells me that the only writing rule on Fridge Art Vol. 2 was that the songs contributed couldn’t be about a relationship, unlike Time and Time Again, which was made up mostly of songs about relationships and breakups. Ellis said each smaller writing group brought demos on separate unique themes they related to, and when it all came together a lot of the songs ended up being about transitioning out of school and into the harsh realities of the adult world.
“It’s not a cohesive concept album, like all the songs sound very different,” Ellis said. “And with this one, we sort of extrapolated that into [this approach where] there are seven groups of three that made demos, so you really get the voices and stuff of each of those individual writing groups.”
The band started in 2020, and they tell me the lineup fluctuated quite a bit early on, starting with Ellis, drummer Nicky Podrez, and bassist Stephen Garrison, who all played different instruments together in a former ska band. The crew would go on to range from a four-piece to a nine-piece with a few different lineups along the way, ultimately settling on the current seven-piece outfit with the addition of Seracuse on vocals, Keisling on sax, trumpeter Jack Derbique, and pianist Tyler Treadway.
Hand Turkey’s music is a little bit hard to pin down, falling somewhere between powerful, groove-heavy funk and R&B, soulful jazz with melodic pop sensibilities, and animated showtunes. The band says its sound is inspired by a range of influences, though they “don’t fit into any of those things remotely well,” according to Garrison.
When asked directly, they describe their sound as having groove-oriented, Vulfpeck-like songs with Couch-like pop melodies, and horn arrangements that aim somewhere near Cory Wong and Snarky Puppy.
“It’s always the hardest question to answer,” Treadway said. “Before we play, when we’re getting set up, somebody always asks, ‘What kind of music do you play?'”
“You could go on like you just did, Stephen, for like two minutes, and maybe capture what we do, but it’s fun to just try and relegate it to three words.”
Treadway said he regularly goes with funk, pop, or simply fusion lately, though he admits that it “depends on the day.”
Still, fitting within certain genre lines seems far from a priority to Hand Turkey, as the band laughs and riffs on the call about how they expect to be described.
Instead, the band’s true priority lies in the joy of crafting the art itself, a theme that they say is reflected in both Fridge Art Vol. 2 and its predecessor EP, as well as the name “Hand Turkey.”
Seracuse likens the band’s writing approach on Fridge Art Vol. 2 to the casual nature of hanging a piece of art on the fridge.
“We like making it. We think it’s really cool. We want to show it to you, but it’s not the focus. [The focus] is on making something that we enjoy making, and we hope that you would dig what the product is,” he said.
“The end goal is to put it up on the fridge, so that we can all be happy that we’re looking at the thing we made.”
Hand Turkey is set to release Fridge Art Vol. 2 independently on August 15, and the band will play an album release party the same night at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox in Denver, with support from Stovetop Gemini. You can get tickets to the show here.
