This Saturday night at The Camel, New York-based band Diet Cig will make their Richmond debut.
This Saturday night at The Camel, New York-based band Diet Cig will make their Richmond debut. Last weekend kicked off the band’s east coast “Tiny Tour”, with friends PWR BTTM as support.
The duo, made up of vocalist-guitarist Alex Luciano and drummer Noah Bowman, met in New Paltz (about 80 miles north of New York City) at a party Bowman’s other band was playing. Luciano drunkenly asked for a lighter during his set, they struck up a friendship later that night, he gave her a tattoo the next day and logically decided they should make great music together.
Diet Cig’s debut EP Over Easy is well, an easy listen in that it’s short, catchy, exuberantly funand incredibly charming. Self-described as “Slop Pop,” the EP was quickly recorded on Halloween last year and released on Father/Daughter Records the following February to positive reviews. Having a strong female lead, the band does cite acts like Hop Along and Best Coast as big influences.
“I hadn’t been in any bands before, while Noah has been in a lot,” said front-woman Luciano.
The band’s success was even a surprise to them.
“Honestly we didn’t think this record would be anything; we just did it for fun.”
“It seems effortless,” Bowman concedes as he’s the vet of the group. He’s been in bands since he was around thirteen onward. From booking shows, breaking down in vans and trying to find a place to crash, he’s not a stranger to seeing the ups and downs of being in a band firsthand over the years.
“With this Diet Cig thing, it seems like we put it out there and everybody wants us to come,” he said.
Their first video “Scene Sick” also came early in the year and is already nearing 100,000 views on YouTube. The video features the band in various locations around their hometown while Luciano dances alongside Bowman who barely registers her. Eventually he gives into her fun and joins in on her silly dancing.
“It was kind of exhausting because of the amount of times I had to dance for two and a half minutes that day was a feat,” she half-jokes.
The song is a perfect example of the band’s dreamy lo-fi sound punk-pop, that gets in, does its job and gets out quickly. Diet Cig’s songs tend to hover around the two-minute mark and never overstay their welcome.
With any new band fresh on the scene the question of the name is always to rise and Luciano observes that it’s actually a good description for the band.
“I feel like we’re addictive…but not bad for you.,” she said “It leaves you wanting another one.” But, Luciano assures us that, “We probably won’t give you cancer.”
Strong word-of-mouth online, a few tours and even some plays of “Harvard” on Sirius XM’s independent flavored XMU channel have given this up and coming band some decent amount of big exposure.
“People started sending us pictures of our names on the car radio and stuff and we were like ‘what!’ it was very cool. We didn’t know it would be played that much,” states Luciano. Unfortunately the band hasn’t actually heard their song played on the radio yet themselves, as they don’t have the service.
“Harvard” is the first song the band ever wrote together and is the one that’s actually about a relationship. That relationship in question is a playful take on Luciano’s reaction to an ex-boyfriend who is now dating a fellow Ivy-Leaguer and just how obvious that is. It’s a lot funnier than jilted and displays Luciano’s personality matching and complimenting the band’s approachable sound.
“It’s fun, we’re just doing it cause we like making music together,” she said.
The pair is currently writing more songs for a future full-length to flesh out their sound and Luciano hopes to expand the band into something “more complicated, interesting sonically, and a bit more personal.”
“I’m really excited to share these new songs we’ve been working on,” she said. A future 7” with two brand new songs is scheduled to be released sometime in August that will hopefully give some indication to where the band is headed.
“We’re definitely changing it up now that we have a little attention, it’s kind of like everybody’s waiting to see what we do next and we’re trying to maintain the fun-ness of it and growing as a band.”
Diet Cig hopes to continue on their path and will be doing a coast-to-coast tour later this fall. The band is uber excited to perform in Richmond for the first time and warns us that “between us and the PWR BTTMs, we’re going to give you the most sexually and dancingly charged night of your life.” So be ready.
Doors open at 7:30pm. Tickets are $10.
