As The Radio Relics greet each other outside of Astor Place Hairstylists ahead of headlining a charity show, high-fiving and lugging guitars and gear into the venue, it’s easy to notice the group’s sense of community. The band found its start when lead singer and guitarist Isaac Viorst and drummer Matthew Ashman met as 9-year-olds at Bach to Rock, a music school in Bethesda, Maryland, which had an after-school program that grouped together kids who wanted to be in a band. Viorst and Ashman — now Clive Davis sophomores — started working together with other students through the program, but began branching out as a duo. They’ve been playing together for 10 years.

“You could legally be called married if you’ve been living together for 10 years,” Ashman said. “We haven’t been living together for 10 years, but we’re ‘band married,’ I suppose.”

The Radio Relics is not the same band that was playing hometown backyard shows in D.C. last year. Now, as NYU students finding a place in the New York City music scene, the band members can be found performing anywhere from Washington Square Park to Nublu Classic, and are already booking shows for January. This past September, they released their first album, “Out There,” and already have new material they have been experimenting with to hopefully be released in the new year.

The bandmates’ early influences were full of dad rock like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, and now look to the intricate guitar work of artists like Steve Lacy.

“We try to make wrong chords sound right, we try to make wrong time signatures feel good,” Viorst said. “The Relics are like rock and pop, but with crazy theory and cool production.”

Before finding an indie rock sound, the two used to spend hours in Ashman’s basement playing music and recording with his father’s old music equipment. They started playing house shows, and ended up writing and creating a home-recording of their entire debut album by the end of high school.

This recording would serve as the foundation for the eventual release of “Out There,” which was also influenced by bass player and Steinhardt sophomore Jonah Bierman, who Ashman and Viorst met while attending the NYU Tisch Summer High School Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music program in 2022. 

Before joining The Radio Relics last fall, Bierman was in another band, but he would call on Viorst and Ashman whenever he needed another band to perform with in the D.C. area –– where, as it happens, he was also from.

Ironically enough, the Radio Relics’ second guitarist, Steinhardt junior Max Mendelsohn, is not only also from D.C., but unknowingly competed against Viorst and Ashman in Bach to Rock’s annual Battle of the Bands from 2015 to 2018. 

Mendelsohn even attended the same after school music program as Viorst and Ashman, but it was not until they got to know each other at NYU that they realized the unknown connection. Bierman got to know Mendelsohn through NYU’s concert committee club, Program Board, where they act as co-chairs of the New Music Committee. Mendelsohn joined The Radio Relics this fall after the band decided that it wanted to pursue a fuller sound for its music. 

“It’s hard to sound full with one guitar and no other harmony instrument,” Mendelsohn said. “He reached out for me to play and I was like, ‘Yeah!’”

Drawing on their studies at Clive Davis and the Music Business major at Steinhardt, the band members worked to produce and polish their debut album, “Out There.”

This past summer, the band got publicity by attending and playing every show it could in the Washington D.C. area, from backyard shows that pissed off the neighbors to The Pocket in D.C. With a new album out and a solidified core group, Viorst, Ashman, Bierman and Mendelsohn are moving forward in a city that motivates them.

“I don’t want it to seem like we’re a business or an entity that is really cookie-cutter,” Ashman added. “I want to focus more on having fun reels that are really just us as a band showing that we’re not just a band that was put together, we are a group of brothers.”

Contact Caia Cupolo at [email protected].