It’s quite a trip for a local indie band when 80,000 individual people tell you they “♥️ur vibe,” but it’s quite another when “the major-est of major labels” start reaching out to you in response to just a 30-second clip of your music.
Viewed either cynically or reductively, one could say that all it took for the Ann Arbor synth-pop band known as Same Eyes to reach 1.7 million views and 500,000 plus streams was one simple, yet effective video of them performing their song “Desperate Others” live inside the cool, cozy climes of Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti. But that discounts the more than five years’ worth of work that they’ve been putting in to not only crafting sleek, danceable synth-centric arrangements that impeccably hit that Goldilocks-sweet spot of revivalism (’80s-tinged), nostalgia (chill-wave-tinged) and uncannily modernistic, not to mention strengthening their stage presence and expanding, even diversifying, the live incarnations of their songs.
“I just hated the whole self-promotional aspect of it all,” admits Same Eyes singer/co-founder Alex Hughes. “It did so much for us as far as building our listener-base and following, but it kept coming back to this feeling of that’s not how it’s supposed to happen. I watched so many of my favorite bands tour so relentlessly and loved their music so much that, to me, it felt sacrilegious for us to suddenly have all this exposure.”
“It was overwhelming,” says Same Eyes drummer and its other co-founder, Chad Pratt. “It was that cliche of being careful what you wish for — for us, it was seemingly coming true, but I wasn’t sure if we were ready or knew what we wanted from any of it. It was really stressful, actually. And, we didn’t feel comfortable with a lot of the people we were talking to and weren’t sure what to sign or who to sign with.”
Pratt’s on the other side of 40 now, but Hughes is still just 26; the former has been in several noteworthy bands from the mid-aughts into the teens, a few of which signed to indie labels like Ghostly International and Fred Thomas’ Life Like, while the latter had a good singing voice, he’d mostly played guitar in high school bands. They fatefully met when Pratt’s day job as a house painter brought him into the domicile of Hughes’ parents, just as the young wunderkind was starting college. They began a friendship that evolved into Pratt sending the Hughes electro-heavy demos awaiting lyrics and vocals — they’d swap those demos until reaching a finished, polished track. Thus, Same Eyes was essentially born.
Their debut album, 2021’s Parties To End, was mastered by Warren Defever (Third Man) and featured contributions from Fred Thomas and Dykehouse and Serge Van Der Voo on bass. Over the next couple of years, they started performing live, eventually adding Jordan Collingridge (of ZZvava) on guitar; Hughes successfully overcame his considerable stage fright, and now, when you see the viral video, it looks as though he’s entirely in his element as a proverbial front man — with Pratt, meanwhile, providing live drums set to a click track.
They expressed how important it was to distinguish the live set from the recordings, with Collingridge and Van Der Voo tilting it into more of a brisker and burlier rock sound. Pratt praised both of them, modestly, as being “far more superior, by light years better musicians … than Alex or I.”
But let’s get back to that viral “moment,” starting last June when Hughes’ then-girlfriend, Lily, offered to try to give them a boost by posting for the band’s accounts on TikTok and Instagram. It obviously worked. Obviously, social media can be this ominous vacuum that can both surge our dopamine and trigger our anxieties, which is exactly the contemplative rollercoaster that the band went on when they found themselves at a high-stakes crossroads as far as where their future could, or perhaps should, lead them.
“Bonkers,” Pratt reiterated. “If you could think of any major label right now, it’s likely that one of them probably reached out to us over this. I had to get counsel from my friend (and Ghostly International founder) Sam Valenti, who, at the time, told us to just take the ride, take all the calls, and just be cool and be ourselves. But we actually had to get a lawyer just to start fielding all the calls, just so that we could know what we were doing. It was a bit of a shit show.”
“I didn’t know, at the time, what thousands of ‘views’ really equated to,” Hughes admits, “but the day it started to take off, when I got home, suddenly people like Fred Durst and Wayne Coyne are DM-ing us!?! Wayne Coyne? Someone I’ve seen x-number of times in concert? It was a really crazy day that turned into a crazy month.”
Hughes said it came at a point when he’d settled into a mindset of unshakeable devotion to Same Eyes as a band, no matter how little amount of recognition, if any at all, they ever received — then to go from that sense of purpose and security to suddenly the wild, moon-promising temptations of major labels? Well, it was a trip.
“We went to a Ghostly Showcase at Spot Lite during Movement,” Pratt says, “and everyone there was asking us how’d we do it … how did we crack the code?
“Honestly, I think 'Desperate Others' was just a really great song that broke through, and I think people liked the story of us as an unsigned indie band from Michigan; it’s a relatable underdog story, but I think it led people to listen to the rest of our stuff and [wonder why] a band with this many good songs somehow doesn’t have gazillion followers already.
“We ended up not signing with anybody,” Pratt says, “because nothing that was offered felt right for us.”
“It puts everything into perspective,” Hughes said after the band sobered from the social media surge. “People love to hop on board to what they think is gonna be the next hot new thing, but you’re still one band in a sea of a million great bands. You can have these viral moments of exposure, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to put the work in — there’s always work to be done.”
“And when you do get successful,” Pratt says, “it means you probably have been putting more work in.”
Certainly, Same Eyes has been hard at work. They released their second full-length LP, Desperate Others, in March of 2022, and released several singles throughout the forthcoming years, along with a compilation, The Slow Decline, last summer. They recently released a new single and have plans to release yet another full-length album, Love Comes Crashing, by or before the end of March 2025 — with artwork and titling of the album credited to Fred Thomas.
After a year of having so many “eyes” on them, Same Eyes’ resolve, work ethic, and creative chemistry as a quartet with Collingridge and Van Der Voo have only strengthened. Given the tenuous nature of the life of an indie band and the insidious temptations lying in wait out there in the social media world, this feels like a victory.
“We’ve put three years’ worth of work into the songs (on the forthcoming album),” Hughes says. “We know what we want now, and we have the ability to put out whatever we want, whenever we want.”
Pratt adds, “We’re growing, and we know we can figure this out — we can get back to just being ourselves, without anyone else telling us what to do.”
Now you should see for yourself, and hear for yourself: Same Eyes are on Spotify right now, waiting for your ears. But you can see them live Saturday, Jan. 4 in Hamtramck.
Same Eyes plays Jan 4 at Ziggy’s and Jan 10 at the New Dodge Lounge.
