Four-piece slacker group, Otis Shanty, crafts quilted songs from their sunroom in the Prospect Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts. 

​

The group formed on one of many retreats to the Berkshires, while attending school together in the farmlands of Upstate, New York. The band’s surroundings have always shaped their sound. Demands for multi-hour sets at parties, lackadaisical weekend rehearsals, and disparate lives on a remote campus gave the band’s songwriting an explorative, jam-band tinge. Singer, Sadye Bobette’s cool vocals, however, grounded the songs with a heavy air that settled the various seasons, climates and moods of guitar, synth, and bass work. 

​

Moving to the city after school, Otis Shanty established a new sound, seeking infrastructure in place of anchorage, by building on the projects of contemporaries like Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, Real Estate and yesterday’s writers Yo La Tengo and The Velvet Underground.

​

Bobbette’s utterly personal lyrics, forgo a definite “I,” to provide a familiar comfort for listeners also yearning for some kind of reassurance, stability, radical change, or acquiescence to the mundanity of the present. Guitarist Ryan DiLello provides circular parts around Bobbette’s lyrics. DiLello’s playing flows from moments of trance-inducing, folky mellowness to incendiary, fuzzed-out solos. Bassist Julian Snyder provides code compliant, fire-walling and studding to the band’s improvised buildings, until he lights fires of his own. Drummer Jono Quinn takes a minimal but assertive approach, dictating feels and opening windows with an addictive smoothness, (hood)winks a plenty. 

The band is slated to release a double-EP to their neighborhood in the fall of 2023.