Grooms

Brooklyn band Grooms formed when Travis Johnson, Emily Ambruso, and Gabriel Wurzel changed their band's name from Muggabears in the spring of 2009. Starting with the standard vocals/guitar/bass/drums lineup and adding bursts of reverb and distortion, Grooms' music contains Polvo-esque jagged frenzy, the winding guitar lines of Pavement, and Sonic Youth's washes of noise — often all within the same song. In October of 2009 the band released its first album, Rejoicer, a ten-song full-length, on the effects pedal company Death by Audio's record label (in whose factory Johnson worked, and in whose next-door music venue Ambruso used to work). In 2010 Grooms played the South by Southwest music festival in March, and in June drummer Wurzel left, replaced by Jim Sykes (Marnie Stern, Parts & Labor). Grooms also switched to the Kanine record label which re-released Rejoicer. The band's second, more textural full-length Prom was recorded at several different studio and home-recording locations throughout the East Coast and was released in July of 2011. They followed in 2013 with Infinity Caller, again switching labels to work with Western Vinyl and tending more towards the band's slack-jawed indie pop elements than the shoegaze tones they explored on Prom. Fourth album Comb The Feelings Through Your Hair arrived in early 2015.