INOHA are Finding Their Feet and Pushing Their Sound Forward.
Earlier in the day, one of the band had driven from San Antonio to Austin to collect vinyl copies of their new album. There was a tour about to begin, and the records needed to be there.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS COURTESY OF INOHA
It is the sort of practical detail that rarely makes it into the story of a band whose music has suddenly found an enormous audience, although it says something useful about where INOHA are now. The songs can travel around the world without them, but somebody still has to collect the boxes.
Their second album, This Might Be Useful, arrives in the wake of “Seventh Heaven,” a song whose success inevitably changed the conversations surrounding the San Antonio four-piece. Its popularity introduced the band to people far beyond Texas and, with that, introduced a question they had never particularly needed to ask before: should they try to do it again?
“There’s always the thoughts that come through your head after a song goes viral where it’s like, I have to do that again,” Christian Young explains. They considered the expectation, but attempting to recreate a particular result seemed a poor reason to make another record. If another song as successful as “Seventh Heaven” emerges naturally, wonderful, but repeating it has never been their goal.
The more interesting change happened inside the band. INOHA had developed a habit of responding to each other’s musical ideas with such immediate enthusiasm that the original idea sometimes struggled to survive the attention. Someone would bring in a riff or an unfinished song and four imaginations would begin working on it at once. Ricky Juarez, the band’s drummer, describes the excitement as “almost like a nuclear reaction,” with everyone eager to add something of their own.
“That’s very good,” he says, “but it kind of needs a leash.”
So, for this album, they tried giving each other a little more time. Young describes bringing more developed individual ideas into the room and allowing those first versions to be heard before the full band started changing them.
It wasn’t about protecting a song from collaboration. It was about making sure everyone understood what they were collaborating on. Juarez says the pause gave each idea a chance to develop before anyone began trimming it or adding the bells and whistles.
That adjustment has consequences you can hear. This Might Be Useful doesn’t hold tightly to one arrangement or genre, moving between the band’s familiar guitar-driven immediacy and songs whose rhythms or structures suggest different influences. Young says they stopped asking whether an idea sounded sufficiently like indie rock. A song might lean toward city pop; another might acquire the more direct momentum of pop punk. They followed the person who brought it in, at least long enough to discover where it wanted to go.
“Between Us” makes an especially persuasive case for the approach. Longer and more spacious than much of their work, it lets its hooks return and expand instead of hurrying through them. Juarez remembers thinking about Michael Jackson, particularly “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” while approaching its rhythmic character. It is an unexpected reference for anyone who imagines INOHA operating within a narrow indie-rock vocabulary, but the band seem increasingly uninterested in explaining why their tastes should fit inside one.
It wasn’t about protecting a song from collaboration. It was about making sure everyone understood what they were collaborating on. Juarez says the pause gave each idea a chance to develop before anyone began trimming it or adding the bells and whistles.
That adjustment has consequences you can hear. This Might Be Useful doesn’t hold tightly to one arrangement or genre, moving between the band’s familiar guitar-driven immediacy and songs whose rhythms or structures suggest different influences. Young says they stopped asking whether an idea sounded sufficiently like indie rock. A song might lean toward city pop; another might acquire the more direct momentum of pop punk. They followed the person who brought it in, at least long enough to discover where it wanted to go.
“Between Us” makes an especially persuasive case for the approach. Longer and more spacious than much of their work, it lets its hooks return and expand instead of hurrying through them. Juarez remembers thinking about Michael Jackson, particularly “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” while approaching its rhythmic character. It is an unexpected reference for anyone who imagines INOHA operating within a narrow indie-rock vocabulary, but the band seem increasingly uninterested in explaining why their tastes should fit inside one.
Young describes This Might Be Useful as their most musically varied release. What unites the songs isn’t a rule about how they must sound. It is the fact that four people have taken time to hear what one another were attempting. After “Seventh Heaven,” that choice also became an answer to the pressure of pleasing an audience whose expectations had already been set.
The album’s title suggests another kind of pressure. Across these songs, people struggle with jobs, relationships, expectations and the exhausting knowledge that they could probably be doing better at something. INOHA are good at making such thoughts sound enjoyable, a habit Young calls their love of the “happy sad.” He points back to “Get You Out,” from their first album, as an example of attaching upbeat music to a distinctly unhappy state of mind.
“Everything Is Nothing” pushes the method further. Its narrator is wasting time, hating his job and measuring his life against absurd figures such as Bruce Wayne and Jackie Chan. The joke is obvious, but so is the recognizable little humiliation underneath it: looking at other people’s lives until your own begins to seem like a disappointment. Young talks about the song as optimistic nihilism, a way of recognizing the cycle without resigning yourself to it.
Juarez remembers Young putting the idea neatly. Instead of “nothing matters, why try,” the perspective becomes “nothing matters, why not?” Juarez also recalls struggling to settle on the right drum part because the lyrics were simultaneously bleak, funny and oddly encouraging. Making the rhythm move without forcing the song into one emotional register became part of the challenge.
That interest in how people get through things runs into the album’s relationship songs. “Bend,” “Checking Out” and “Are We Cool” share a concern with communication falling apart, although each approaches it from a different perspective. Young explains that the circumstances aren’t all autobiographical. Keanu might bring him a riff and the beginnings of an emotional idea, and Young would imagine the person who could inhabit the song. Conversations with friends, stories he’d heard and things he’d observed could all become material.
“I love being able to try and put my head, or my shoes, or get into someone else’s shoes,” he says. “Are We Cool,” which he sings, comes closest to his own experience, but he doesn’t claim to have lived every situation he writes about. Sometimes he tells a friend afterwards that a particular song grew out of something they’d discussed. There is affection in that practice, a willingness to pay attention to what somebody else is carrying without turning every lyric into a confession.
That thought finds its fullest expression in “Burden,” the album’s closing track. After so much frustration and self-questioning, it turns toward the possibility of helping somebody else put some of their weight down. Young says the band debated the running order; “Between Us” was an early candidate for the final position. Juarez remembers Gavin suggesting “Burden” instead. Its broad guitar parts and gradual emotional release made the choice feel right, and the lyrics seemed to answer the album without insisting that any of its problems could be solved as neatly as a chorus.
The band are particularly eager to find out how that song works in front of people. Live reactions have become important to INOHA, not simply as a measure of whether the record is succeeding but as the next stage in understanding what these songs can do.
They are taking them out from San Antonio, a city all four still speak about as home rather than a place to outgrow. Young says they were born and raised there and enjoy introducing themselves on the road as “some San Antonio dudes.”
He has also noticed more local indie bands finding the confidence to make music in a city long associated with heavier rock and metal. If INOHA’s success has helped widen that space a little, he sounds pleased.
There is a lovely practicality to the way Young and Juarez talk about all of this. They have learned that a great idea sometimes needs protection from three other great ideas, and that a popular song need not become an instruction manual. Soon they will be in front of crowds hearing the new material for the first time. For now, the vinyl has been collected, the tour is nearly underway, and INOHA have made an album that allows them to surprise themselves again.
