Emma Swales
The music industry has become a very competitive and oversaturated field in recent years now that everyone has access to various forms of technology to easily produce music. It can be hard to get a foot in the door and a solid career as a musician, but this wasn’t the case for indie artist Scott Hermo.
While attending college in Nashville, Tenn. in 2015, Hermo decided to get some friends together and turn his ideas and inspirations into fully recorded songs. What was just a fun project for a group of college students turned into Boyscott, a popular new indie band with a successful debut album.
Boyscott’s melodic sound takes its listeners to a dream-like state with its mellow guitar riffs and soothing vocals. The band takes a unique spin on the typical definition of indie rock by generating warm and sunny music that will instantly remind you of summer.
The Boyscott lineup has always had a revolving door of members, but Hermo continued to carry the band’s name and found new friends to fill in along the way. The current lineup consists of Scott Hermo on guitar and vocals, Emma Willer on guitar and vocals, Davey Alaimo on bass and Noah Dardaris playing the drums.
“In the beginning of it all, there were a lot of people kind of coming and going,” said Hermo. “I was a student, and I was friends with students, so it was really whoever was around and was interested at the time. Some people fell in love with the music stuff, some people got sick of it, but it wasn’t until later that we started to get a core group of people together.”
Boyscott released its first album, “Goose Bumps” in the fall of 2015. Soon after, the band started to gain popularity and for the first time, began playing live shows in different cities.
“We started to get asked to play some shows and that was really cool because at the time we were like, ‘oh I forgot we could actually do that,’” said Hermo. “Since then, it’s been one step after another. We could do a tour of shows, a bigger tour and we can also make merchandise. Just the whole thing.”
“Goose Bumps” has racked up millions of streams and Boyscott continues to play countless shows all over the country. They have also released a new single this August titled “After Dark.”
In support of this new single, Boyscott is currently on tour across the US and Canada. Once the tour wraps up in late October, the band will head back to the studio to work on some new music.
“We have got an album in the works,” said Hermo. “I always kind of knew I had to tweak some stuff so I’m going to spend the next 3 months just tidying that up and then hopefully we will release some more singles at some point early next year.”
Boyscott proceeds to grow and get bigger than Hermo ever imagined. What started out as just a no-pressure fun project, turned into an accomplished indie band that effortlessly made its way into the music scene.
“It’s been recently that I’ve decided that, oh wow I’m fully doing this,” said Hermo. “Because even when we were recording the first record, I didn’t actually consider that it would become a band or something like that.
“I guess within the past five years we have been touring pretty regularly and I’m starting to realize this is working out,” continued Hermo. “It was never really fully a plan but, I think in the back of my head I always hoped it would work out.”