The Nameless Band From My Hometown

By Kendra Banach

It was a mild night in my small Jersey hometown in 2016. The night had already crept in quietly by the end of the two-minute walk from my house to the train tracks, but the sky was washed in a warm yellow from the old lamp posts near the station. There I met my friends Danny and Mike to shoot a stop-motion short film for a class Danny was taking at college. We chatted nervously about the safety of shooting on the active tracks for a bit before my intended co-star finally hit the scene. A baby-faced high schooler named David, though the boys introduced him by a nickname that I never caught on to using. He had a silly sort of lively energy that made us fast friends.

Only a handful of years later I learned that David, Danny, and Mike were starting a band, which at the time, and for the next several years, was to be called Vincent & The Noise. Vincent being David’s middle name, and the rest of the boys being lovingly lumped into “the noise.” Later joined by out-of-towner Dylan.

Seeing as I grew up with most of the band, I tried to stay engaged with the projects they were producing. Songs like “(Summer’s Gonna) Leave You Lonely” and especially “Bats in the Attic” went triple platinum in my car.

By early 2021 I became a “rockstar girlfriend” myself to a tall and poetic guitarist of another Jersey-grown DIY band. Taking the role quite seriously, I managed to help Vincent & The Noise book a gig alongside my boyfriend’s band at a local venue. My worlds collided for one incredible night at the Redhouse in Boonton (RIP), a basement-esque dive with the signature of every band that has played there on a well-loved chalk wall. In his classic fashion, David managed to get banned altogether from the venue and, fortunately, unbanned within a mere few hours because, as the owner had stated, David had “won him over.” The energy was electric and thoroughly served the essence of Redhouse in its metaphorical final hours.

Time has flown by in the years since. Mike had moved on to his career and some seriously impressive theater work, and within that time, Dylan—who until this interview I never got the pleasure of meeting—became a more solid figure in the band's image.

I continued admiring their work from afar until one day I saw a post from my old friend Dave that… Vincent & The Noise had disbanded.

Not to fear, though, David assured the fans. This is simply a rebrand for the group. A lot has progressed over recent years, and they are onto a new chapter. This is when I decided it was time to get back in touch with my favorite local group and see what the future holds for them. Before digging in, I would like to note that long-time and trusted drummer Danny could not make our meeting, but the remaining members acknowledged that they would be remiss to underplay his role in the life of the band; therefore, shoutout to Danny.

Despite our locality, I met with the dynamic duo behind the now-nameless band over Zoom. Prior to sitting down with Dylan and David, my take on their creative pursuits was solely through the lens of my friendship with David, so I was eager to get an insider look at their musical reinvention. But first, we had to go way back to when the two of them met.

Back in 2018, still in the midst of their high school careers, the two met through mutual friends, sneaking a joint in between the native Jersey woods and bonding over their shared love of music and distaste for public school. A fast friendship sparked among shared teenage mutiny. Soon after connecting, David found inspiration in Dylan’s house upstate, where he would later find himself, along with Danny and Mike, holed up during the heat of the pandemic summer to create the band's second EP.

“He had this magical house that he lived in with this beautiful, really fucking cool room with knick-knacks and a Beatles poster. It was just the chillest vibe. We tried to bottle up that room and put it into a record”.

In the earlier days of V&TN, the boys found inspiration in a diverse group of artists ranging from classic icons such as The Beatles, CSNY, Oasis, Radiohead, and Elliot Smith to more contemporary groups like Vampire Weekend, Father John Misty, and a neotraditional folk duo called The Milk Carton Kids [that I may or may not have had to Google to verify their existence].

The band’s sound up until this point matched their genre-hopping taste. David admits part of the reason for their rebranding was that they didn’t feel their sound was very cohesive. “There’s a fuckton of singles. We never actually made a full-length album on purpose because we didn’t want it to be our defining statement yet”.

As the boys shift onto new footing, so will their sound. “We are essentially moving away from the high school angst,” Dylan tells me. “We just wanted to start off with a more cohesive sound with a more uplifting, optimistic approach.”.

“It’s a new band.” David affirms, “We are ending one book and opening a new one.”.

Though the rebranding marks a transformative era on the band’s timeline, I suspected this metamorphosis began much earlier. To get more insight into my theory, I asked the duo how Vincent and The Noise changed when Dylan first joined.

“I wouldn’t know,” Dylan jested, as if his addition to the band was so natural that he himself was unaware of this metamorphosis happening before him.

David shed some light on the change from his perspective. “When the band started, it was just me in my room writing songs and trying to produce them. Then when Dylan was there, he became a bit of a muse. His bass playing and his voice changed the way I wrote because I wrote with him in mind”.

Their second EP, the one written during their stay upstate, David admits, “felt like a marriage of our ideas.”.

Since the marriage of their creative lives has solidified, the two seem even further reassured of a lasting future in music. When asked if they plan to do music forever, David promises, “I’m a lifer; I’m going to do this till I fucking die.”.

”He’ll probably die writing the last words to a song, then they’ll have to AI him—do the whole AI Beatles thing”. Dylan turns to his counterpart. “So maybe just finish the song, then die. Can you try to do that?”

David comes back without missing a beat. “That’s the goal, but no one ever does, brother.”

Despite their levity, it’s clear that the connection between these two is not only one of similar music taste and writing style but also of worldview. One look at the band’s social presence lets the audience know that these boys are not just some small-town kids making meaningless noise (no pun intended) from their parent’s basement, but rather some small-town kids looking to change the world with their art. Their mission is not one that is brand new or uniquely invented, but one inspired by the creative changemakers that came before them.

”We are in one of the most tumultuous times." David observes, “I don’t care how big this gets or where it goes, which is why we are doing it the way we want to. For us, music is a bit of a calling to bring joy and love back to a society that doesn’t believe in it as much anymore because things are so stressful. If we can even, on a scale of ten to twenty people, be the ones in their lives with a song of hope and inspiration that no one can tell came from a time of strife, I think that to us is more important these days than mirroring our own personal strife and addressing it directly”.

The pair credits some of their iconic faves for this method of activism. “Like the Beatles,” David states.

”And Woodstock” Dylan adds, “Woodstock only happened because they thought they were going to explode every five seconds.”.

While the pair isn’t shy about speaking directly on current events and can often be seen advocating for the justice of marginalized groups both online and in their communities, they find that, at least in the creative space, their message is one of love.

David sums up their mission simply: “I think love is perseverance. We want to make music that inspires hope”.

Looking back on my teenage years with this band, I feel a sort of closure filling in the gaps of their journey I always felt adjacent to. In a way, our respective lives, while still neighbors more or less of the time, mirrored each other in a lot of ways. I too went from making horror films on the train tracks with my friends to reconciling with real-life horrors through my own art. Unexpectedly, a cold winter night on Zoom provided me with a new resolution to continue collaborating with the people in my community who also want to make change in the world, and I have no doubt that reviving my connection with this nameless band from my hometown was the best first step.