Featured Artist Friday: The Off Days

In this week’s Featured Artist Friday we take a look at The Off Days, a veritable super group formed with members of "How it Got Burned," "The Land Before Tim" and "Foreign Sunsets." The group is made up of four members; vocalist and guitarist Paul Atangan, guitarist Cody Michaels, bassist and vocalist Ulysses Robledo, and drummer Nate Nager.

This new collective is quickly establishing themselves as real players in the Chicago music scene, with a fast paced style coupled with evocative lyrics, "The Off Days" are definitely a band that should be on every music fans radar.

“We all get along really well,” said Robledo. “We all have different projects that we work on when were not together, each with a different sound, but I think that's what makes it easy to work with each other; we respect the process and work required of being in a band.”

The band’s writing process is usually organic. Coming from a jam session where the band is just having fun with the music, someone will start to sing, or bring up an idea and the words flow from there. Each member of the band are apart of another band outside of Off Days, so the musical creativity flows from each member of the band.

“We really just show up to practice and run through our set list to make sure that our sound is tight,” said Robledo. “That way we can fix anything that might not fit or that sounds off, then we just start playing a few notes and jam out or someone brings a couple lyrics that they wrote and we go from there.”

Seeing music created so organically in a freeform setting is definitely refreshing to see, and hear. The Off Days borrow from other genres to blend a unique sound some influences of the band according to Robledo are; Joyce Manor, The Strokes, Brand New and The Orwells, but we listen to Kendrick Lamar, Oceanics and Portugal The Man.

The Off Days’ goals are really quite admirable, of course there's the dream of success but their overall goal is to be a band that you can listen to when you're feeling any kind of emotion. The Off Days have a plethora of songs that can fit in with any listener’s situation.

“We want to become one of those staple bands that you listen to when you’re mad, sad, happy or just wanting to relax,” said Robledo. “I think that is what makes a really good musician; you can write music that can reach people at any emotion or any moment in their life.”

The Off Days will be performing next Friday, September 29th at The Red Line Tap in Chicago. The band will also be performing in Chicago’s Logan Square at Camp/Us on Friday, October 27th and at The Mutiny on Friday, November 3rd.

We originally were going to cover The Flips this week, but we will instead be covering the Chicago punk band next week. Make sure to follow ODMG’s Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for all of our newest content.