The warm glow of Racing Mount Pleasant

Racing Mount Pleasant are the type of band most comfortable in lived-in spaces, having spent their earliest days spilling into tight corners of houses across Ann Arbor. Onstage at The Majestic in Detroit, it’s the opposite, staring out at 1,100 faces for their biggest show to date, opening for Geese’s Getting Killed tour. In between songs, vocalist/guitarist Sam DuBose jokes that no matter where you’re standing in the crowd, one of their family members is close by. As they play through a blaze of new material, he grows somber again, singing of memory, heartbreak, and longing in lavish detail. While Racing Mount Pleasant are a seven-piece, onstage, they essentially stand in a straight line, conveying that there’s no real hierarchy to their group. Rather, they function as a finely tuned union, always an arm’s length away from another member. They’ve exchanged low ceilings for blinding stage lights, but they still hold on to that intimacy whenever they play, translating it for sold-out rooms like this one. Part of their move to Chicago, made official a month before this performance, sates a desire for the changes they’re already starting to feel, for pockets of community where strangers become peers.

An hour-and-a-half before they take the stage, the band fill me in on the specifics. “We got pretty buff,” alto saxophonist Connor Hoyt jokes, shuttling boxes full of gear from Detroit and Ann Arbor hundreds of miles west toward the promise of a new city. Behind him, the line wraps around The Majestic, buzzing and infinite. It’s an abyss of baggy pants and weed smoke perfuming the air, but trying to get inside the venue is a struggle. The security is so tight — people have been queued up for hours — that we opt to sit crossed-legged in the parking lot near the side doors, rather than backstage. Speaking with them feels bright and familiar from the jump, and the way that we’re huddled together is not unlike the glow of warmth that floods their music. At one point, bassist Tyler Thenstedt gets up to flip on the light of their van so that we can continue to see each other’s faces in the dusk.

Read more: 25 of the most exciting rising artists to watch in 2025

“I feel like I have, lowkey, tried to plant a seed for a while of, ‘We should move to Chicago. I want to be in Chicago. We have a place in the music scene in Chicago,’” Thenstedt says, who grew up in the area and saw its potential for their post-college chapter. “It’s an easy place to call home.” It’s already paying off. Outside of the band, Thenstedt and string player Kaysen Chown have started to perform with singer-songwriter Samuel Aaron, whose minimalist bedroom pop wades through a similar tenderness. “That’s opened doors to a whole other scene, and it’s just endless,” Chown says. “Wherever you look, there’s a niche that you can fall into in Chicago.” 

The number of members in Racing Mount Pleasant mirrors the size of their songs — grand and striking but also openhearted and close-knit. In a throng of shortened attention spans and bloated radio music, the band paint a gorgeous landscape of chamber pop, jazz, and folk, where moments of quiet build into transcendent choruses that serve as a reminder that getting lost in a six-minute song remains meaningful. The collective came to life during a 2019 freshman orientation at the University of Michigan, where three of the members, Hoyt, DuBose, and trumpeter Callum Roberts, met and expressed interest in forming a band within the first half-hour. Slowly, more people entered the fold — Chown, Thenstedt, tenor saxophonist Sam Uribe, and drummer Casey Cheatham — until they became a formidable septet whose ambitions were high from the start, cramming into living rooms to construct swells of sound.

For the last half of a decade, living rooms and basements, anywhere they could basically squeeze into, have nurtured Racing Mount Pleasant’s climb from college DIY kids into bona fide indie up-and-comers. Then, they were known as Kingfisher, playing to clusters of young people who found sanctuary in their slow-building cacophony, stacking parts on parts until they arrived at a climax that made all the anticipation — velvety brass, foggy samples, lovesick earnestness — worth it. Every time they picked up their instruments, they worked a miracle, making tiny rooms sound epic. They’d hang string lights and do projections whenever they could, sometimes balancing on stools during their earliest gigs. At one point, the band played on a couch while the audience members pulled up lawn chairs.

“A lot of it was our friends’ houses, and we always would show up way too early, and we’ve got to get the basement just right,” DuBose remembers, smiling. 

“Clean up the friend’s nasty basement,” Hoyt laughs.

“Only 30 people could fit in, but we’d still, for no reason, be hyperfixated,” DuBose adds. “I’m like, ‘Where’s the couch going to go?’ The earlier shows were just wholesome.”

It was post-COVID, sometime between 2021 and 2022, when their local scene began to reopen its doors, longing to connect after a period of isolation. “That’s when we started playing live shows, and there were these rooms that were so alive,” recalls Uribe, who went to high school in Ann Arbor, hearing lore of Alex G and Car Seat Headrest rolling through the DIY circuit. “There was so much weight from what we were doing, and it felt so nerve-racking. Those were some of the most special shows, when there was this energy of everybody wanting to be out again and feeling this connection with more than just three people.

“I played a lot of shows in high school, but I had never had these super intimate moments until I joined this band,” he continues. “I’d never had someone come up to me and be like, ‘You guys made me cry with tears.’ There’s a lot of weight under that. This is exciting, but also it’s reaching people in this very intense way.”

Their sense of grandeur has only grown more ambitious the longer that they’ve existed as a band. Their self-titled album under their new moniker, released earlier this year via R&R, expanded their scope, offering up a sleeker, more mature, and painstakingly intricate version of their house show days. DuBose’s vocals oscillate between heartsick and booming. It’s all undergirded by sublime chemistry that reflects a group of college friends sharing a home together, dialing their sound when it’s time and kicking back once they have nothing left to give. What’s most remarkable, though, is the pristine attention to detail, rendered by their own hand. Outside of The Majestic, the band acknowledge themselves as perfectionists in quick consensus (impressive for a group of seven) that’s followed by laughter, a feat all the more serious when you consider how deeply DIY they are.

Watching their shakily filmed vlogs from 2023, the effect is staggering. They’re nearly piled on top of each other, listening and reacting in real time. Sometimes they’re rehearsing in a circle in a messy basement, barely fitting in the frame. Then the scene pivots to show off their makeshift recording setup, using found mattresses to create an isolation booth and propping a bean bag chair up against a window to “mitigate some of the street noise” (“It’s kinda working actually,” Uribe remarks at the time). Consider that the band recorded much of the album in the attic of a joint home in Detroit and small DIY studios, sneaking into churches at night to get the acoustics. If they had the resources, they’d hire a whole string section and a recording engineer, writing out the parts exactly how they wanted them played. They’d be done in one or two days. Instead, their process requires “more.” More time, more energy, more adventurous thinking.

“The amount of times Sam Uribe has recorded me playing the same violin part and just saying, ‘OK, let’s double it again. Let’s double it again.’ Then we have an orchestra,” Chown laughs.

“We’ll get to one part in the song, and there might be three good ideas happening at once,” Roberts says. “Maybe there’ll be two super hip saxophone parts. Then there’ll be some really cool electric part, and they’ll slightly not quite work together. A lot of the process is being like, ‘Well, what can we take out from this one and put into this thing and make it so that those ideas can become one part?’ Sometimes it feels like those tile puzzles. You might have the face, but the nose is upside down.” For a band that do everything themselves, there’s immense joy in hearing them try to wring the most out of every song, challenging themselves until they’ve exhausted all of their ideas. It takes the music to a higher place.

“[We’ve] learned during recording and post-recording stages that each of our seven people’s definition of perfect is different,” Thenstedt says. “With this next record, we want to play with where the lines are. I think that we all agree on when something natural happens that feels so good, that is perfection, even if it’s not necessarily perfect. Because when we’re aiming for individual perfection, Cal might play something that I’m like, ‘Dude, yes.’ And he might be like, ‘No, I hated that. That was a terrible line…’ Not everyone’s gonna think that this [album] is as good as it ever could be. There’s always more you can do.”

So where do they compromise? “We’re still figuring that out,” DuBose laughs. “It also took us three or four years to make the thing. At a certain point, when we were living in Detroit and recording in the attic, it was like we’ve spent so much time already on it, it has to be perfect, or else it was a waste of those years. There was a lot of checking and double-checking and triple-checking. Going into the next album, we want it to take a way shorter amount of time so that it can be a lot more spontaneous and not dying over every single part, which I am excited for.”

For a while now, Racing Mount Pleasant’s music has moved through time, evoking the type of imagery akin to flipping through a scrapbook. Sometimes the songs hit like the gut drop of revisiting your hometown and nothing’s the same, others like a warm rush of a forgotten anecdote. Even their name addresses memory, drawn from a highway exit sign near Chicago called “Racine Mount Pleasant.” What makes their music so rewarding is that they don’t seek to rewrite them. For the last song of their set at The Majestic, they combine “Snowing, All At Once,” made as Kingfisher for Grip Your Fist, I’m Heaven Bound, with part of “Outlast” from their latest as Racing Mount Pleasant. It’s a melding of past and present, acknowledging where they’ve been and where they’re headed. The crowd’s denser, the sound check more thorough, but they’re still the same group that self-booked their own tours and expanded their parts through countless takes. “We do it ourselves,” Uribe says, beaming with pride. “That is something I want to say with my chest out.”

Source link