Acid Dad

Founded in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg area, Acid Dad give a psychedelic makeover to the sound and attitude of contemporary garage rock, playing up the music’s trippier aspects. Their songs are built around straightforward melodic structures, but with echo and reverb adding texture to the guitars as the musicians explore the sonic spaces around them. The band’s work was a lean mixture of trippy guitars and garage-punk drive on their self-titled debut album in 2018, while 2021′s Take It from the Dead was a more exploratory project with more ambitious guitar interplay.
Acid Dad was formed in 2014 by guitarist Vaughn Hunt and drummer Kevin Walker. The two had been playing together in a band but were looking for a chance to make music that better reflected their own ambitions. While attending a drag show called Bath Salts at a bar called Don Pedro, Hunt and Walker met Danny Gomez, a like-minded guitarist who soon joined the nascent group’s lineup. The band played their first show under the name Twincest on Halloween in 2014, and had posted original music online within a month. The group had trouble hanging on to bass players from the start, and less than a year after playing their first show, Sean Fahey had become their sixth bass player. By this time, Acid Dad had made a name for themselves in New York City with near-constant gigging, and in February 2016 they released an EP, Let’s Plan a Robbery. The project was recorded in a makeshift studio in upstate New York, assembled by the band in a cabin owned by Walker’s grandfather. To spread the news about the release, Acid Dad hit the road, playing 50 shows across the United States in two-and-a-half months.
By the end of 2017, Gomez had left Acid Dad, and Fahey had moved from bass to guitar, while JP Basileo took over on bass. Surprisingly, Basielo was still in the group by the time they released their first full-length album, Acid Dad, through Greenway Records in March 2018. The same year, the band also issued a limited-edition single, “Living with a Creature,” a one-sided release with artwork etched on the flip side. By 2020, Vaughn Hunt and Sean Fahey were both playing guitar in Acid Dad, while Trevor Mustoe was behind the drum kit. That year, they set about establishing their own recording studio in Queens, New York, and learned how to build their own guitars, while also delving into video art. Acid Dad’s new creative surroundings led to the band writing and recording a second album, Take It from the Dead, which Greenway released in June 2021. ~ Mark Deming