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In a post-pandemic world, it’s difficult to catch band members in the same place at the same time. Day jobs and family responsibilities must be respected alongside pickup gigs, side hustles, and rare bouts of downtime.
For instance, when I was finally able to nail down an interview with Katy Ohsiek and Wil Bakula—the creative core of jazz post-pop ensemble foamboy—it was only possible in a narrow window of time and through a smartphone call merged from their respective homes.
This is the new normal for foamboy. Though the project has its roots in a musical collective that the pair started in Salem while attending Willamette University, the band truly began during the pandemic. By that point, Ohsiek was in grad school in Corvallis and Bakula had relocated to Portland.
“We weren’t really seeing each other,” Ohsiek says. “Most of [My Sober Daydream, foamboy’s 2021 debut] got written via email.”
The situation has improved tremendously since those early days. Ohsiek finally made their way to Portland and foamboy is now a proper band, with the addition of five instrumentalists who fleshed out the music onstage and helped record the group’s forthcoming LP. Given their dynamic live shows and pitch-perfect recordings, it’s no wonder they’ve been named one of Portland’s Best New Bands by a jury of their peers.
Getting to that point was possible due to a process of elimination. When Ohsiek and Bakula first started writing together under the name Chromatic Colors, no genre was out of bounds for them.
“It was very much whatever we wanted to do,” Bakula says. “Jazz to pop to Latin to indie to rock.” But as the membership of that early ensemble was winnowed down to just he and Ohsiek, the music grew more cohesive.
“Instead of writing a bunch of stuff and saying yes to everything, I continued to write but then edited,” Bakula remembers. “It was kicking everything to the wind if it didn’t work or if it felt slightly off. Like, ‘Nope, doesn’t work. Next idea.’”
Inspired by vintage R&B, disco-pop groups like the Whispers (and modern jazz-adjacent artists like Erykah Badu and Robert Glasper), foamboy started trucking in sleek, sensual grooves perfect for dance floor trances or bedroom intimacy. Ohsiek slips their voice through each track like a sheet of form-fitting satin.
But dusting each track like a thin layer of ash are lyrics of personal anguish and discontent. When writing Sober, Ohsiek felt isolated from their creative partner and the world during the pandemic. Their torment comes through on the otherwise sultry “Hate Me Too” (“If I were you, I’d hate me too,” they sing) and opening track “Better” (“Fucking crawl out of your sheets/You got to get up today”).
“My lyrical style is very much what’s going on right now,” Ohsiek says. “Since I started writing songs when I was 16, it’s been an important element of my emotional catharsis and process. At that time, Wil and I weren’t living in the same town, and I was trying to find my career. I didn’t intend to tackle any big issues. It just tends to happen.”
According to Ohsiek, foamboy’s next album tells more of a story—and not a pleasant one: “It’s all about a horrible relationship I was in in grad school. Will-they-won’t-they weirdness that lasted for two years and then a shitty breakup.” They’ve set that table with the first single from the record, “Song About You,” in which Ohsiek jumps octaves to match the highs and lows of a tempestuous romance while the rest of foamboy burbles underneath like an outtake from Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters.
As foamboy looks to take the next big steps toward growing a global fan base, they are faced with the rickety state of the independent music industry and how to move forward without upending their daily lives.
“We’re in that weird zone of really wanting to tour and hoping that it can happen,” Ohsiek says. “We went to South by Southwest this year and it was so frickin’ fun. We just want to play and share our band with as many people as possible.”
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