Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Neighbourly is the New Music Monday highlight!
Neighbourly is a four-piece psych-fusion band from right here in Victoria who have been active for the last two years and prior to that played together in a different project called Speak Easy.
Ollie Sandberg, Latham Reader, Lauren Giorgio and Scott Sparrow released their first full-length, self-titled album in October, 2023.
For this project, they approach songwriting in a very collaborative—or neighbourly—way, with all members of the band aiding in the writing, production and fleshing out of each song.
“In terms of recording, we don’t really limit ourselves,” Sandberg told Victoria Buzz.
“We kind of leave it open and we’re sort of democratic. With our debut album, there’s eight songs and two songs are written from each of us.”
Since last year, they have been hard at work writing, recording and diversifying their sound, and their latest offering is proof of those efforts.
On March 21st, they released their first recorded music since last year, an EP called Outside 311.
It’s a four-song EP in which Neighbourly wanted to explore a new sound, being influenced by the influx of post-punk, indie music, still rooted in their psychedelic roots.
The second single off Outside 311 was “Small Town Kid,” which is a song that is near and dear to all members of the band who have been transplanted to Victoria from smaller communities.
Sandberg said this track was written by Reader and it is one of the songs that he felt immediately connected with audiences during their live set.
“When he wrote ‘Small Town Kid,’ he was writing a song for those people that moved from small towns, like we have a bunch of friends who moved from Vernon, or just small towns from places in BC, who have moved to Victoria to like, experience a bigger city, but not a huge city,” Sandberg said.
“He said, ‘I kind of want to write their story into a punk song,’ but we can all relate as well, because we’re all small town kids, looking for a gig,” he continued.
Sandberg said he fondly remembers that before Neighbourly even released that song, they played “Small Town Kid” at a show last summer and by the second chorus they had the whole crowd shouting along with the chorus.
“I think it just goes to show how poppy it can be with like, how raw it sounds as well,” Sandberg told Victoria Buzz.
Listen to some previews of Outside 311 below:
Find the new Neighbourly EP in full, along with the rest of their catalogue online via their Bandcamp, Spotify or Apple Music and sign up for their newsletter here.
Sandberg said this latest EP isn’t their last offering of the year either. They will have another EP coming out early this summer.
“Outside 311, that was our take on post-punk and then we have another EP coming out in June that is, just us experimenting with Italian disco music,” Sandberg explained.
“Lauren, over the pandemic actually, was re-learning Italian and we were always interested in recording music in another language and it just kind of fit.”
Coming up, Neighbourly has a couple Vancouver Island shows coming up on April 12th at the Victoria Event Centre (VEC), as well as one in Nanaimo at The Queen’s Theatre on April 13th, both of which will be supported by Surf Hat from Squamish.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Frances Hope releases ‘Breakup Songs’ EP about love and loss
- New Music Monday: HopeCity Waters delves into soulful folk sound on new EP
- New Music Monday: Conjure Hand uses rock and roll to tell stories of the Black experience
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“CFUV has been such an incredible friend to Neighbourly,” Sandberg said.
“They’ve got such a great team in there and they’ve done wonders to help us out with opportunities like opening slots and letting us play at Eventide the last two summers.”
“Literally our debut summer performing shows we opened the finale of Eventide on top of the Yates Street Parkade,” he continued.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Neighbourly in the comments below.
