Swaggy Boy Band

Five personalities, five separate inspirations, one set of New Hands.

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Photographer, Stephen Hargreaves.

The boys of New Hands can agree on two things: they all like The Strokes (because what band doesn’t?) and they are a swaggy boy band. With a voice like The National, Kanye West inspired rhythms and just a little bit of Joy Divison, it’s hard to pigeonhole their sound. Lucky for them, that’s exactly what they want. Hailing from Hamilton the five guys behind New Hands, Evan Bond, Gordy Bond, Ben Munoz, Spence Newell and Pat O’Brien, are branching out and reaching into the Toronto music scene. They will make you dance and damn, can they make a haiku.

Meredith Gillies: How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you?
Ben Munoz: I would say electronic and dance, but we still have a rock format with guitars, bass, and drums.
Evan Bond: We like real instruments. We love synths and all that and we use a lot of computers but …
BM: Well, synth is a real instrument.
EB: No, I know, but we love real instruments.

MG: How did you guys form New Hands?
BM: We were The Social Workers [before], the lamest, immature … whatever. We were just a high school band then we decided to take it seriously about…
EB: Probably last summer. When we recorded This I’ve Heard, we said ‘OK, we want to be a real band. We’re putting a lot of money into this, and a lot of time so we want a name that we don’t hate and we want an identity that isn’t just a high school band’ so that’s when we came up with the name and really became New Hands. We started to become self-aware and conscious of what we were doing.

MG: How did you come up with the name New Hands?
Gordy Bond: We were pouring through well over a thousand names but a lot of them were really awful and inappropriate for anyone other than the people in the studio. New Hands is kind of a separated part of a lyric, the words are in close proximity of themselves.
Spence Newell: The lyric was ‘new pair of hands’ and Gordy said, ‘Oh, New Hands.”

GB: Kind of an ambiguous name that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.

MG: Do you consider yourself a Hamilton band?
EB: We don’t want to have an association with any place necessarily, not that it’s a bad thing.
SN: We don’t want it to be like Hamilton is our only place. I’m fine with saying that our origins are Hamilton, but I wouldn’t want it so that we get pigeonholed in Hamilton, as lovely of a city as it is. And I say that without sarcasm too.
EB: We’re really trying to start to branch out and get into Toronto.

MG: What’s your favourite part about being in a band?
EB: I think I love live [shows] equally as recording. But the best part of recording is when we’re all in the studio working on something. When we’re all in there, we’ll go to Giant Tiger, buy way too much junk food and just sit there and watch each other do our parts. I always think of it as a beautiful day where we’re all sitting in the studio.

MG: What’s next for you other than recording right now?
EB: We’re in the studio until–
BM: January.
EB: We’re in there for a long time but basically we’re just trying to play as much as we can. Obviously with recording, money is a big factor; we do have to get money so shows help with that. The main thing is trying to branch out from Hamilton.

MG: If you could describe your band in 3 words what would they be?
SN: Can I make a haiku is that okay?

MG: You’re the only people who have ever written me a haiku.
SN: This isn’t your run of the mill haiku.
Electronica. Sentimentalization. Penta-syllabic.
EB: In layman’s terms, it’s swaggy boy band.