KINDRED has the guts to call itself a boy band. With charming stage antics and whimsical technicolor visuals, the group pays homage to the pop music that they grew up with but spins it to make their sound distinctly of the present. It’s thanks partly to how they are disarmingly relatable, like anyone else could live out their pop star dreams too.
Before the group formed in 2021, each member of KINDRED was an independent musician operating in different, yet connected networks of the music scene like BuwanBuwan Collective, Club Matryoshka, and other fluid electronic, hip-hop, experimental, and bedroom producer circles. Now signed to Island Records, the group still keeps their underground roots, while aiming for the stars–like Sharon Cuneta, who they recently collaborated with.
The motley crew of nouvul (Jorge Wieneke), Fern. (Fern Tan), PIKUNIN (Luis Montales), dot.jaime (Jaime San Juan), Slomo Says (Moses Webb), VINCED (Vincent Dalida), Punzi (Justin Punzalan), and Cavill (Obi Intia) have crafted an eclectic debut album in “Subset,” which was released last week. It’s a lovingly crafted mixtape of each member’s interests, inclinations, and idiosyncrasies, with a little bit of something for anyone interested in pop music and the boy band as a beloved cultural archetype.
We hopped on a video call with KINDRED to dive into \”Subset,” learning to dance as a non-dancer, and more. This interview has been edited for clarity.
‘4’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:be3b3a95-0293-4cdd-9f5f-5128608c120b’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘From L-R: (top) Vinced, Fern., Pikunin, Cavill, (bottom) Punzi,
KINDRED plays around with the idea of the boy band. Even before K-Pop, we thought of boy bands as something formulated in focus group discussions or in record label meeting rooms. We assume that their identities have been created to appeal to an audience. But KINDRED seems to have autonomy over its music, performances, and even creative direction. Why identify as a boy band in the first place?
nouvul: I can’t speak for the group personally, but these are things we’ve discussed in the creation of the project. We wanted to dismantle ideas of labels. The idea of what a boy band is, we wanted to blur the lines of what it means, or by pushing the form.
I grew up with the idea of boy bands being romanticized because I grew up on MTV. Backstreet Boys, Boyz II Men, NSYNC, those are icons for me. And then the rise of the K-pop fandom and having boy groups there showed me how effective it is to seed an idea.
The conscious idea of making something to challenge that form or put ourselves next to that is the bigger idea of the project: to sort of reshape or reframe what it is to be a boy band in the Philippines. Do we abide by the beauty standards? Do we abide by the same musical standards? Do we create our own name, or do we allow people to live vicariously through us na we’re regular people — kind of — that want to do music on our own terms while taking that form?
‘ ’56’: ’embed’: ‘