Audio By Carbonatix
It’s hard to be a band in Miami. In fact, it’s hard to be anything other than a rapper or a hip-hop crew in Miami. Because that’s what this city caters to, at least for right now. But one band is trying to help change that — one mixtape at a time.
Twelve’Len, a three-man indie pop outfit started by 20-somethings Zach Fogarty, Vares Joseph, and John Falco, makes music about relationships and girls while strumming guitars and banging drums. The trio is decidedly not hip-hop. And yet that’s how the group was billed when it started out.
“The only blogs that talked about us were hip-hop blogs,” says drummer Falco. “And all the shows we got booked were rap shows.”
The Miami music scene, he and his bandmates realized, didn’t know what to do with them, because Twelve’Len doesn’t fit into any one particular genre. (On their website, they describe themselves as “a different kind of indie band for the Miami scene.”)
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“Most of the major music areas in Miami are really segregated,” Falco says. “Like, the EDM scene and the rock scene and the rap scene are completely different worlds.”
As for rock and pop, two categories that Twelve’Len fit into, well, there’s not a big scene for either of those genres in Miami. To book shows, they had to work their hip-hop connections or appeal to punk venues to get an in. They had to prove that they had the chops to execute a show and the fans to back them up. It was a lot of work, said singer Vares Joseph, but in the end, they succeeded.
This summer, Twelve’Len will release its new album, Pink, a project that Joseph promises will make “describing us much easier.” The overall sound of the album will be similar to Silver, but amped up. It will be easily classifiable as indie pop and closer to the signature sound that the frontman and his crew have been seeking.
=””>“It’s kind of like a more mature, developed version of what you’ve already heard,” Fogarty says. “It sounds more like a band and everyone kind of comes together in it.”
And you know what they say: third time’s the charm.
