All The Way Home

West 22nd: “Sweet!”

If this intense summer heat is starting to fry your synapses and your mind is in need of a holiday…but you don’t really have time on the calendar or money in the budget for proper R&R, there’s a broad sonic convoy right here in town that’ll take your brain places, for sure. We’re talking about Austin quintet West 22nd. Based on the campus-adjacent coordinates in their handle, you can probably guess where West 22nd got their start. But it’s worth mentioning that the five members have home state backgrounds ranging from Georgia to California, a critical piece of West 22nd’s “cross-country road trip” aesthetic within their indie-folk-rock excursions. For those staying connected with the Live Music Capital from outside the city limits, let West 22nd take you All The Way Home this Friday with their debut EP that shares the title. For the locals, West 22nd commemorates the occasion with a release show 8PM that same evening at Mohawk indoors alongside Daydream Twins, Knox Write, and Sounds by Moonbby. And for everyone, West 22nd simmers and shimmers on All The Way Home‘s latest lead single, “Sweet!”. Simple kick drum and snare rim, easy-strolling bass, and soft-swaying six-string warm this arrangement up before impassioned pipes bring this thing to a peak, but the inter-instrumental energy across this relatively complex song structure is really what escalates “Sweet!” past vapid and saccharine and into satiating and sanguine.