Speed is the word that first comes to mind when thinking about Seratones.
In the almost two years the band has been together, they’ve signed to a record label, recently played with Houndmouth and will open for St. Paul and The Broken Bones later this fall. They have also been featured on NPR, Stereogum and Paste Magazine. In a way, their music reflects the speed of their rapid progression on the music scene, as it can instantly go from a heavy punk riff to a soulful chorus, all in the same song.
The four-piece group is made up of singer and guitarist AJ Haynes, drummer Jesse Gabriel, guitarist Connor Davis and bassist Adam Davis. The band hails from Shreveport, Louisiana, where the members lived and knew each other for around a decade, working on a few projects on and off, before starting Seratones.
“Connor and Jesse and I had been working on a new project, writing songs and working on new material. We used to play in a cover band together and we just got tired of playing covers. We started trying some different sounds,” Haynes said. “Then our friend Adam moved back to Shreveport from Alice, Oregon to join us when we were just writing songs together since, about a little over a year.”
Seratones signed with Oxford-based record label Fat Possum Records, which has been home to bands such as The Black Keys, Youth Lagoon, Modest Mouse and Andrew Bird.
“We were playing a show in Hot Springs, Arkansas with NERVES,” Haynes said. “The lead singer of that band works at Fat Possum and Deg Bonillo, the guy from NERVES, told the guys at Fat Possum about us and they checked us out.”
Since the band is relatively new, their sounds and styles aren’t completely set in stone yet. Haynes said they are still experimenting and finding their sound, which has influences from blues, soul and punk, as Haynes originally met the other members of the band going to punk shows in Shreveport.
“We’re still working through some things,” he said. “It’s all about discovery and capturing moments and trying to tell a story.”
The band currently has three songs out, including “Necromancer,” which has already been released digitally and will be released on vinyl along with a new song on Oct. 16. They’re also planning their first full-length album.
“We’ll be releasing a single later this month. It’s the other side of the 7-inch that just came out and the name of the song is ‘Take It Easy,’” Haynes said. “We’re working on an album now. Hopefully, it’ll be ready to go by the end of this year, but we’re just working on it piece by piece, making it right.”
Haynes explained how the band went about working together to write a new Seratones track, saying that the process could vary for each song they created.
“A song wants what a song wants at the end of the day, and that’s what we try to stay true to,” Haynes said. “We’ve been doing collaborative writing, start with a riff or start with an idea or a sound and build from there. Everyone gives each other feedback on what they’re doing, but we’ve been almost playing with each other for so long that a lot of things happen quite naturally. We’re kind of a first thought best thought idea, and go from there.”
In Spanish, ‘cera’ means wax, which is where Haynes got the inspiration for the band name. It eventually evolved into Seratones, which Adam Davis, Gabriel and Conner Davis liked due to its similarity to serotonin, a chemical in the body that is thought to positively affect one’s mood.
“The guys were like ‘The C looks stupid, so change it to an S,’ so we were Seratones,” Haynes said.
