Sub-Radio bandmates (left to right), Michael Pereira, John Fengya, Matt Prodanovich, Kyle Cochran and (front) Adam Bradley.
The indie pop band Sub-Radio is headed for the Carolinas. The first appearance is Saturday, October 12 at 7:00 p.m. in Greenville, South Carolina at the Radio Room. The following night they’ll play at Boatyard Lake Norman in Cornelius, located about 20 minutes from Center City Charlotte, but still inside Mecklenburg County.
In case you’re not familiar with the band, you should be. Lead vocalist Adam Bradley identifies as part of the queer community and confirms his fellow bandmates, Kyle Cochran, John Fengya, Michael Pereira and Matt Prodanovich are all staunch LGBTQ+ allies.
The members of the band met in 2008 while attending high school in Sterling, Virginia. They independently released their debut album, “Same Train/Different Station” in 2016. Two EPs would follow, “Head First” in 2018, and “Dog Years” in 2019 (most of their earlier material is available on Spotify).
That led to a concert tour that included more than 30 dates across the United States that same year.
“We started the project quite seriously” says Bradley. “We released music every year, and we were doing our best to do the DIY thing. We all quit our full-time jobs and went on a big national tour in 2019. It was really fun and it gave us some experience, but we lost so much money because, you know, we weren’t selling tickets. We didn’t really have a fan base. We just booked shows and went and played them.”
In 2020 came “Thoughts Lights Colors Sounds,” which featured the lead single “Disco” and captured a nominal amount of attention. But then, along came COVID-19 and a pandemic that would change everything.
“That affected everybody in different ways,” recalls Bradley. “For us, it meant we had to reevaluate. [Were] we even a band anymore? What we ended up doing was getting on social media with marathon of live streaming shows on Tiktok and Reddit during 2020 and 2021. That exposed us to millions of people, and that is where the fan base comes from now. That’s also what got us into doing this goofy social media stuff. We realized a strength and a skill of ours is comedy, so we started making these parody videos, like “Stacy’s Dad.” It turned out the stuff was not just funny, but people really liked it for being funny and that started selling tickets to our shows.”
David Aaron Moore: So let’s back up a little bit. Tell me about you.
Adam Bradley: I grew up in Northern Virginia, went to the same middle school and high school as most of the other guys.
DAM: And you guys are all still based in the same area?
AB: Yeah, we’re right outside the DC Beltway.
DAM: Wow. So you have a history of music, friendship, and a long time connection. That’s cool.
AB: Yeah. Most of us went to the same middle school, high school, etc, here in Virginia, right up by Dulles, and we stuck together through college. After college, we committed to doing [music] for real. So we have known each other since we were, like 14, pretty much the whole time. We’ve been playing together since eighth grade, but the band, as it is now, we launched that in 2016.
DAM: I get that you all met in school, but how did you come together. I mean, musically?
AB: So Matt, our guitar player, has always kind of been the mastermind. To this day, he is kind of, you know, like the behind the scenes CEO. When we were in high school, he just sort of collected each of us as he saw that we had specific talents. He was in guitar class with John. He saw that John was a virtuoso guitar player, so he said to him, “you want to be in a band?” And he saw me singing in the talent show, so he was like, “Oh, he’s a good singer. You want to be in a band?” So we just kind of collected each other over the course of high school. And then we spent basically a decade doing the weekend warrior stuff, playing cover sets and bars and playing beer festivals and just like whatever, whoever would book us playing in our little suburban venue out here in Virginia. And that was the band for a long time. It was something I did on the weekends, and we all worked it around our nine to five jobs after college. Just in the last few years has it become a real career pursuit.
DAM: So the earlier music was a good deal more serious and “we’re a band” kind of sound when you first started playing together. Discovering your comedic side was a stroke of genius. Do you want to continue exploring your sound in different directions?
AB: We’re in the process of rolling out a full length album over the next year. We’re about to put out our first single. All of that is like, real music that we spend time and emotion and effort on. But as far as, like bringing people into the fold and like introducing them to us, we do lean on the funny, because we’re just guys having fun. We truly never expected or even really wanted to be social media people. But it is what has introduced us to an audience, and there’s really no other way I could have imagined it happening. We’re doing it because it’s effective. I guess it’s a marketing tool. But that’s good, though. The whole parody universe for us started with “Stacy’s Mom.” In our version, it’s “Stacy’s Dad.” It was originally by Fountains of Wayne and their sound on that album really influenced us kind of backwards, so we started with that one, and we thought, okay, if this video doesn’t fucking go viral, then we don’t know what we’re doing anymore, we’re just going to give up. And it did, and people really liked the format.
DAM: Do you think you’re always going to keep an element of comedy in your performance and presentation?
AB: Yeah, I hope that at the very least we keep an element like the sort of light-hearted aspect of our performance that we’ve had for a while. I really like that. I like that we don’t claim to be doing too much, even with the original music. It’s a low barrier to entry. Everyone is welcome. We’re having fun. I really enjoy what we’re doing now.
DAM: I wanna’ talk about your musical influences, but I want to ask you about a parody clip I just saw. It was the Whitney Houston song, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Your version, “I Don’t Wanna Dance with Nobody.” Funny as hell! What made you choose that song?
AB: So we just started thinking of, okay, what other parody songs could we do? And we sort of landed on, well, if you’re going to do them, you might as well do them with the biggest songs on earth that everyone already knows. And so that, frankly, that’s how we landed on doing a Whitney Houston song everybody knows. “I Want to Dance with Somebody” is like one of the most popular songs of all time.
DAM: Did you actually create the music that for that one or was it an instrumental mix?
AB: Kyle Cochran made it, because he’s talented enough to do that. I know well, and often, that’s what people are doing for these parodies, and that’s what we were doing. “I’ll just find an instrumental on YouTube, and we’ll use that.” But we found that we were getting copyright struck all the time, and our videos were getting taken down. So we said, “Alright, we’ll make our own track.” And Kyle made that one so well. We still got a copyright strike even though we made the track. It stayed up long enough that it got all the views, and then it got, you know, then they turned the sound off on Tiktok.
DAM: It’s still up on YouTube! But let’s get back to some of your own personal musical influences.
AB: It’s funny, the band has a very, very wide variety of musical taste within it, among the five of us. I am listening to a lot of left of center pop stuff. I’m seeing Mitski this weekend at a venue near here. She is playing with one of my favorite bands of all time. It’s called Always. They’re a band from Canada. So I am into sort of indie indie pop, indie rock, etc. It’s kind of the sound that we’re making now. But for this [new] record, we have really been leaning into ’90s alt rock, early aughts alt rock, kind of stuff that we grew up listening to, like Third Eye Blind, Fall Out Boy. Artists in that ’95 to 2005 period. So we got way heavier with the guitars. We were doing a lot of synth stuff before this, like ’80s, like Walk the Moon kind of stuff. And we have sort of pivoted from that to be a guitar band. So we got a little bit heavier with the sound, and I think a little bit lighter with the lyrics on this album, which is, I think, a fun contrast. But influence, as far as influences go, we’ve always been influenced by 1975, Walk the Moon and 21 pilots Sort of Alt, indie, pop rock legends at this point.
DAM: One of our staff members, when we initially talked about doing the interview, said that you guys were kind of like a 21st century version of Weird Al Yankovic.
AB: I loved Weird Al growing up. And I think that’s, I mean, if you’re doing this kind of thing, that’s exactly who you want to be, because, he is the king of parodies. That’s high praise. And honestly, isn’t it is nice to be recognized for this stuff having actual quality, even though it is, like, goofy shit that we’re not gonna record and release on Spotify or anything. It’s just fun stuff we do on on Tiktok.
DAM: I think we’re living in a world right now, where we need as much laughter as we can get, you know? And I think that started back during the Trump era, and then the pandemic. Until recently, with the changing political landscape, there just wasn’t a lot of positivity going around for a lot of us.
AB: Absolutely. So many people who come to shows, who DM us on Instagram saying, “thank you for doing those live streams, thank you for posting these dumb ass videos. Because, I would not have made it through 2020 if it were not for you guys.” And I mean, we wouldn’t have either. Frankly, we kind of posted through it. So it’s really special to hear that. The whole aim of this album coming up is channeling positivity and optimism. I don’t feel like me, or anyone I speak to in my life has felt optimistic in a while. And that’s kind of sad. It shouldn’t be that way, so we’re trying to do our part to bring that back.
DAM: Let’s talk about the other members of the band. Why don’t you tell me a bit about each of them. Let’s start with John Fengya.
AB: John is the keyboardist and guitarist. He’s just this a virtuosic musician. He has perfect pitch. He can play stuff back to you after hearing it one time. And he’s also just a lovely, a lovely person. He is our like strong, quiet man who doesn’t say a whole lot, but when he does, it’s important. He can play like a dozen instruments, really proficiently. And when we ask him what keys the songs are in he already knows.
DAM: Tell us about Matt Prodanovic.
AB: So Matt really is like the founder of the band. He’s the one who put it together in the first place when we were kids. And he has always sort of been like the business manager and our actual manager when we didn’t have one, doing all the admin stuff, reaching out to labels. He’s a music business guy. It’s what he went to school for, so he’s always been good at the industry stuff, knowing who we need to be connected to and making those connections. He’s the primary songwriter, aside from me, I’m writing lyrics and melodies. He’s writing a lot of music.
DAM: What about Kyle Cochran?
AB: Kyle is. technically, the newest member of the band, but he joined five years ago. He was a college buddy for several of us. He’s a sound engineer, a professional sound engineer, so that’s a fantastic guy to have in a band. He was able to run our sound for us when we were playing those bar shows. He’s the guy who really made it possible to do those online live streams, like he set up the mixer and cabled us in and figured out how we could broadcast an entire live set to Tiktok. He’s also the shit poster in the group, for lack of a better word, he is the he is the meme Lord, the guy who finds all the internet jokes for us to make.
DAM: Share your thoughts on Michael Pereira.
AB: I mean, talk about positive energy. Mike is a perpetual motion machine. He never stops. Mike is like holding down a more or less full time job as a mechanical engineer and also in the band, and just brings constant positivity and energy to the group that is very much needed and appreciated.
DAM: So what’s being on the road like this time around?
AB: Turing, to me, is like one of my favorite things that I’ve been lucky enough to do in my life, because we have been to nearly every big city in America at this point, and medium sized city and small town. We’ve have been to 48 states or something. It’s pretty crazy. I look forward to getting back on the road and seeing these places and seeing these people that we know. At this point we’re not so adventuresome, though. (laughs) After shows we just go to the hotel and go to sleep. A lot of our tour experiences have revolved around our our van breaking down over and over, because that’s life on tour. We tour in this 12-passenger van towing a trailer. The van itself is awesome. We’ve had it since the beginning of the band. His name is Rufus, he’s a GMC Savannah with 185,000 miles on him, so he’s getting up there. Some of the the doors don’t work, and there’s a hole in the back from when we jackknifed the trailer one time. But he works, and he gets us over the Rockies.
DAM: Before we wrap up, let’s get back to the new album. Can you give us a little more insight into what the process was like and the end result?
AB: I mean, it’s like 13 or 14 of my favorite songs we’ve ever made. We got the opportunity earlier this year to record about half the record with producer Neil Avron, who is behind, like all of the biggest sort of pop punk stuff from the aughts and the 2010s, he produced Yellow Card and Fall Out Boy, and anyone else that you’ve heard of in that in that scene. So it’s just kind of a dream. We went out to LA for three weeks and recorded at his house, so this stuff sounds incredible. We’re very excited for people to hear it.
DAM: One of the last things I wanted to touch on, specifically because we are an LGBTQ+ publication, is how you and your band members identify. I’ve read before that you identify as bisexual?
AB: Yes, that’s correct. And it’s just me. But everyone else in the band is a wonderful and supportive ally.
DAM: Do you feel like you have a very large queer fan base?
AB: Yes! We certainly do, and a very rewarding element of the band for me has been connecting with young queer people, a lot of whom have basically only come out to me, like at the merch table. I came out a bit later in my life. I was 27, and really, for no particular reason other than it took me a while. The reaction and response and reception from everyone I know was lovely. I am very lucky in that way, so I feel like, having been blessed with that, I want to give other people the opportunity to come out in a safe and accepting place.
For more details on Sub-Radio visit their website at https://www.sub-radio.com/
Photo Credit: Courtesy Scott Appell Media