Rising Stars: Meet Bathroom Of The Future of Metro Detroit

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bathroom Of The Future

Hi Bathroom of, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Bathroom of the Future formed in late 2014, and at the time there were only three of us (Tim David on guitar/vocals, Sean Farquhar on bass, and James Layle on drums). Each of us had met in Port Huron, and while not all of us were living there at the time, we’d all long hoped to play music together, as the three of us had long been in and around the local music scene but had all been involved in other projects. (Sean was actually in the midst of learning how to play bass when the band started; Tim would drive to his house with a small practice guitar amp and teach him how to play Ramones and Misfits covers until he’d gotten ahold of the basics.)

Our first few shows took place in spring/summer 2015 and mostly consisted of us playing with our friends’ bands at small dive bars, and whatever out-of-town bands we could wrangle, and we spent the next couple of years flailing around Metro Detroit in the same fashion any band does when they’re trying to find their feet.

A few years in, after a lot of efforts to get our name out there (mostly through a ton of shows, some very small tours, and recording and releasing as much as we could), things started to tick upwards for us. We found ourselves suddenly getting the chance to play at a lot of venues we really liked, alongside a lot of bands we absolutely loved growing up and/or still listened to at the time such as Piebald, Punchline, the Ataris, Pkew Pkew Pkew, Smoking Popes, and Cybertronic Spree (the latter three of which we would wind up remaining friends with to this day).

Suddenly we started seeing more than just the same five friends and partners at all of our shows, suddenly we kept getting more opportunities to play shows…and then suddenly 2020 happened. We tried our best to turn that into a positive by writing a bunch of songs (including the two that people tend to tell us they like best) and even taking the opportunity to add our fourth full-time member Brendan Kuras, who we’d known and worked with for a long time, but took the opportunity to join us as keyboards (after Tim lost his mind during the pandemic and decided to start writing synth parts for our new songs that, at the time, we had no way to replicate live.)

Brendan has become a lot of people’s favorite member of Bathroom of the Future, including the other three members, but don’t tell him we said that.

Ever since, though, we’ve been lucky enough to meet more bands we grew up admiring, release more music, and get the opportunity to play on even bigger stages at festivals and comic conventions (because the people at comic conventions like hearing music about old video games, who’d have thought?), and while we don’t know when it might be time to call it quits, the Bathroom Boys are all still very excited to see what else we can get up to.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Absolutely not, although we wouldn’t say we had it any worse than a lot of other bands. Even once we started playing shows at slightly bigger bars in Detroit (or thereabouts), it could still be hard at times to get noticed or stand out in any way, and a lot of the issues we had with getting heard more often was more about finding a niche and befriending enough like-minded people in a way that helped us blend into a lot more music scenes than we might’ve been able to otherwise, had we gotten pigeonholed as a more traditional ‘punk band’.

Similar, distance and real life has occasionally posed problems too. We’re all…maybe a little older than your average DIY musician, and as a result it can occasionally be difficult to find times where we’re all available to practice, balance the PTO we need to use for touring, or even make sure we all have the same day off to play a potential show. We’ve absolutely been able to make it work better than a lot of other bands can so we can’t complain too much, but it’s still occasionally stressful trying to find a couple Sundays a month to get together for practice.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We’ve long described ourselves as “nerd rock for punks, or punk rock for nerds”. While we all have fairly diverse musical tastes, we’ve long found common middle ground in any music that offers melody, emotional honesty, and straightforward catchiness, and that creates sort of a weird Venn diagram that helps us to sound like we do.

Of course, above and beyond the musical connections is a shared love for a lot of the same video games, movies, and other pop culture ephemera we’ve all been exposed to over the years, and that sneaks into a lot of our lyrics. Some of our most popular songs include lyrical references to Street Fighter, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Star Wars, and it’s allowed us to stand out a bit amongst our peers. This has allowed us both the opportunity to play at major conventions across America, as well as the chance to open for bands that cover similar subject matter even if we don’t sound too similar, genre-wise. (No matter who we share a stage with, it is always nice to have the chance to hear someone say “I loved the song about Calvin & Hobbes” after your set.)

Who else deserves credit in your story?
Honestly, even as much as we pride ourselves on being pretty DIY about everything, there’s 0 chance we’d be where we are now without all the friends we’ve made along the way, and we’d be remiss without thanking them.

Our partners have all been incredibly understanding about the importance the band plays in our lives, the friends we’ve made along the way go well and above just being ‘fans’ to being people we’re genuinely happy to know, the promoters who have taken a chance on booking us deserve our thanks for giving us opportunities we may never have had otherwise (opportunities we like to think we’ve made the most of), the recording engineers we’ve worked with along the way have made us sound our best (and have helped us through our various insecurities about things like singing during the process), and the other bands we’ve played with have been nothing but kind over the years, and we couldn’t have been happier to share a stage with them, become their friends, and/or even tour with them along the way.

Special mention needs to go to Brendan, who started off by helping us record some early work and booking us at the venue he ran, and wound up becoming a full-time member because he’s an incredibly talented musician, and we all just like him so much. He really reinvigorated us at a point where we could use it, and the time he’s been a member of the band has perhaps been our most productive, successful, and fun.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://bathroomofthefuture.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/bathroomofthefuture
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bathroomofthefuture
• Twitter: https://x.com/botf_band
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bathroomofthefuture
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bathroomofthefuture
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2wCq8ds4mVPIJ60MkJy6CB