The Promising Young Indie Rock Band’s Members All Bear Ties To Dallas, But The Road To Their Alluring, Reverb-Soaked New Single Was Paved In The Cloud.

Welcome to Song of the Day, where we hip you to all the new local releases you should be caring about. By highlighting one new North Texas-sprung tune every week day, our hope is that you’ll find something new to love about the rich and abundant DFW music scene five days a week.

New Avenues — “Taking Flight”
RIYL: besties 4ever
What else you should know: There was no way New Avenues was letting long distance get in the way of making music.

With its members split between Toronto and Dallas, they’ve traveled back and forth to visit, play and record with one other since their early demo days in 2018. Now, its core members are preparing to release a string of new singles inspired by their efforts to make music together while miles apart.

“Our bread and butter is writing music, making demos and sending them to each other [like], ‘What can we do to make them better?'” guitarist and lead vocalist Connor Caldwell says. “We all live on different sides of the country, but we make it work.”

While guitarist and vocalist Connor Bankey lives in Memphis, the “nucleus” of the collective consists of childhood Caldwell and drummer Chris Rodo, who currently resides in Toronto but lived in Dallas for several years. And though New Avenues definitely considers itself a Dallas-based collective, perhaps an even more apt way of describing them is saying they’re from the cloud. This year, the band is focused on releasing songs they wrote together on FaceTime and finished during visits.

Ultimately, songs will come together to form the band’s upcoming third EP, Driving Far Away. (Ha, get it?) The first single of the bunch, “Taking Flight”, premieres today, and it’s noticeably a different animal from the band’s original “city scum” attitude. Paired with synthesizers, new guitar tones and pleasant vocal harmonies, “Taking Flight” finds New Avenues a band seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. A song that pleas for freedom from a situation that only brings darkness, it also describes the creative process the band went through during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We just started coming up with stuff over FaceTime,” Bankey says. “My inspiration come from [fellow North Texas-based performer] Dayglow. The song ‘Can I Call You Tonight’ was the main thought process, and then from there we just kind of evolved.”

Much like acts such as Dayglow, Minnesota’s Hippo Campus and Virginia’s Turnover, New Avenues’ shoegaze-like vibrations and signature indie-rock guitar riffs give off “main character” vibes. As far for where that character may end up? Well, New Avenues says the rest of Driving Far Away won’t release until 2022, but assures us the collection will feature more metaphors about making this work (and surviving Dallas traffic).

Could that eventually lead to the group finally performing live together? That’s the hope — at some point down the road, anyway.

Cover image via New Avenues’ Facebook page.

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