Check Out Interesting Hobbies Club’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Interesting Hobbies Club.

Hi Interesting, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
In 2019, three of us (Jules Caspole, Max Young, Alex Prichett) met at Occidental College and started an indie rock band called Zero Degree. We spent the year recording music and playing shows at local venues until the pandemic stopped all of our momentum. That summer, we changed our name to Interesting Hobbies Club and released our debut album The State of Being Here. We added our lead guitarist Chris Wells in 2022, and released our second album Spring Cleaning. After recording and mixing endlessly in our DIY garage studio over the past four years, in March 2026 we finally released our third album Argonaut.
To this date, we have never signed with a manager, a record label, a booking agent, or anything in between (not that we’re against it at all…). As a DIY band, everything we make is recorded and mixed in our lead singers’ parent’s garage that over the past few years we have converted into a music studio. All of our promotion and marketing is filmed by ourselves, mostly in our garage and backyard.
Over the past seven years, we have been fortunate enough to play at so many cool venues in the area like Permanent Records, Oblivion, Old Towne Pub, and The Silverlake Lounge. We are so lucky to have found so many great friends and collaborators in the local music scene. Right now, we are on a short hiatus from shows to focus on recording new music for 2027.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
As any musician will tell you, independent or not, nothing is ever as simple as it appears. As college students, finding the time to practice was easy. We would sneak in on weeknights and cram our amps into a tiny drum practice room in the music wing of Occidental College. It was far from the most professional setup, but it afforded us the time and space to practice and improve together as a band. The problems started once we graduated and had to enter the sometimes-grueling world of the 9 to 5.

Our band is composed of an electrician, a music teacher, a Trader Joe’s worker, and a chemist. As you might imagine, these schedules often conflict with each other. This makes scheduling gigs difficult, and scheduling practices with each other nearly impossible. Our solution has been to book overnight sessions in Pirate Studios from 10:30pm to 2am the day before shows. It’s not ideal, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We have learned to rely on our years of experience collaborating and performing with each other rather than weeks’ worth of preparation for any one show.

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 are a DIY rock band. We record and mix everything ourselves, which allows us a great deal of creative freedom in what we do. There is no record label to prevent us from taking five years to create an ambitious 17-track double album, or to force us to adhere to any industry standard of what rock music is ‘supposed’ to sound like. Our work is unequivocally our own ideas.

On the flip side of independence is a lack of guidance and structure. None of us had ever marketed music before, and there is no big record label budget behind anything that we do. However, this means that every single person that has come to see us play live was there because our music had positively impacted them in some way.

One of my most proud moments of the past year was selling out a Saturday night show at Permanent Records Roadhouse in Glassell Park with local artists Bandie and Blonde Goth. It was unbelievably special to get to share the music we wrote together with over a hundred people in the audience that night.

Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Find art that you like and believe in, and go support it!! This means going to shows (even alone), buying merch, and talking to artists after their shows. This goes a long way towards building connections, because people will remember and appreciate that you came to support their art.

Even if you can find just one artist that you resonate with, an amazing thing about a local music scene is that each artist or band will have other bands that they like to perform with. Now each show you attend, you will have a few more bands to go check out again next time they play! Pretty soon you will start to see a lot of the same faces at these shows.

Just remember that everyone at these shows is here because they resonated with the same kind of music as you. When you’re talking to people, keep it kind and collaborative instead of transactional. Most people in the audience at local shows will be musicians of some kind and very excited to talk about the projects they are working on. Keep doing this, and you will inevitably discover great friends and cool music.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.interestinghobbiesclub.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/interestinghobbiesclub/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interestinghobbiesclubband/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA6q_6SznICBKquJRQ6gEow
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5AytOAhqMA8ZNcxdRsugJ4?si=enqeFgW5REOQw1_4AgS9SA

Image Credits
Nancy Soriano-Villa
Madi Hartzell
Laura Prichett
Rick Perez