Husbands

Earlier this summer, I was lucky enough to catch a blistering Husbands set at the Blue Note Lounge. Wil Norton and Danny Davis front the rock outfit and looked to be having just as much fun as the crowd. Take all the surfiest moments of Weezer's "Blue Album" and you might get close to the sound of Oklahoma City's most exciting live band of the year. They only have a few shows under their belt, but I promise you won't leave disappointed. - Nathan Poppe, NewsOK.com

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s the saying, isn’t it? The fabled tradition that ‘distance x time = increased adoration’ has as many exceptions as it does examples, but for indie-pop duo Husbands, it seems to prove true. With one half of the duo based in Oklahoma City and the other in Washington DC, this is a project in which the members are separated by some 1300 miles.


The duo have just released Golden Year, a record cobbled together by Danny and Will sending each other half-finished song ideas, allowing the other member to add their personality to the song before zipping it up and sending it back. With this process repeating itself half a dozen times or so for each track before settling on something each member loved, Golden Year took shape over the first half of this year.

The result is anything but scrappy, with the record possessing a remarkable structure and togetherness, considering the circumstances it was made in. “There’s something special about having a friend who you can deeply trust creatively”, says Will, and it shows across Golden Year. Never once does it sound like two ideas being forced into an uncomfortable straight jacket of sound – these are beautiful, tailored garments, made with a common purpose in mind.

Standout moments come in the form of ‘Stay Gold’ and ‘G.O.A.T’. The former manages to sound both darkly claustrophobic and casually summery at the same time, as if The National has been raised on the Californian coast. The latter showcases Will’s vocal range on a mid-tempo, melancholy masterpiece, on which an interesting rhythm section propels a blissful verse.

Get to know Husbands. 2015 could well be their golden year. - When the Gramophone Rings

25. Rachel Brashear - Variations on a Theme
24. Desi and Cody - Skyline
23. Helen Kelter Skelter - Helousia
22. Aqueduct - Simpleanimal
21. Jacob Tovar and the Saddle Tramps - Three Good Reasons
20. John Calvin Abney - Gold/Silver
19. Nuns - Melanie Bryn
18. Red City Radio - Rest Easy
17. Kaitlin Butts - Wild Rose
16. Beau Jennings - A Little Bit Higher Now
15. Limber Limbs - You Know It
14. Other Lives - 2 Pyramids
13. Samantha Crain - Outside the Pale
12. Sex Snobs - Burnt Around the Edge / Pop Songs and Other Ways to Die
11. Deerpeople - The Wetness
10. Prettyboy - The Best Man
9. Chase Kerby - Wishing Well
8. JD McPherson - Head Over Heels
7. John Moreland - Cherokee
6. Tallows - Shrink
5. Grooms - Doctor M
4. Allie Lauren - Spitfire
3. Sports - You Are The Right One
2. Elms - Savages
1. Husbands - Phoenix - Oklahoma Rock Show, 12.17.15

Call me a sucker for bedroom projects. Go ahead. While I’m waiting, I’ll enjoy this highly listenable, breezy piece of summer perfection. I don’t think there’s a pool hangout on this continent that wouldn’t benefit from this glistening, thoughtful collection of tunes. Husbands is the umbrella your summer cocktail has been missing.

Wil Norton and Danny Davis, marry me. - NewsOK

Over the glorious open skies of a boundless world wide web, Husbands have charged through a steady stream of glimmering, alluring indie-pop songs, unfettered by the gaping physical distance between its two figureheads. Danny Davis and Wil Norton live over a thousand miles apart, but the Oklahoma City natives’ creative chemistry isn’t weakened by the separation as Norton works towards a Ph.D. in Washington, D.C. Instead, the two embrace what free time they have, using the power of Dropbox to write songs at a rate that would make most musical projects jealous, and at a quality that would paint even more green with envy.

Since forming in 2013, the prolific pair have long put out songs as standalone singles once they were finished with them, which probably makes Golden Year — due July 2 — their first true LP, if you’re keeping count. Conceived to be performed as a four-piece band back here in Oklahoma (before life, sadly, got in the way), Norton describes it as Husbands’ most cohesive release to date — a notion reinforced with an early listen. More personal and frequently meta elements (music about writing music becoming an infinite loop of infectious joyousness) manifest themselves in polite post-punk guitar riffs sunbathing in airy vocal effects and lo-fi surfy hooks, like a Captured Tracks artist armed with a sunny Southern California smirk instead of a glum Brooklyn gaze. It’s stripped down and simplified in regard to the loop-heavy construction of the Afrobeat-tinged Achin’, but it carries much of the same tropical warmth all the same.

That timeless charm can be heard in their new single “Stay Gold.” Give the energetic offering a listen below. - Oxford Karma

HUSBANDS is truly a band of the 21st century. Danny and Wil are a pair of friends who have been making pop music via internet exchange while life pulls them in various directions. Wil sheds quite a bright and personal light on their band formation and music creation on this page that is worth a read. “Stay Gold” is the beginning of an album of the same name that starts a concerted effort in a specific direction: delicious, jangly pop that can be conveyed live as well as it can recorded. Packed tightly, the sunshine-filled layers of the tune charge forward with the same hopeful urgency. Bits of synth and soft vocals harmonize and accent the lackadaisical melody in passing verses and an elevated chorus. It’s quintessential summer pop that glistens with the promise of more lovely things to come. Golden Year is out July 2nd. - Swell Tone Music

Husbands only exist on the Internet because that’s how long distance works.

“Grad school is a very anxiety-ridden time,” says Wil Norton, 28, who moved to D.C. in pursuit of his Master’s degree in English. His bandmate Danny Davis, 25, lives in Oklahoma City, closer to where their project first started at Oklahoma Christian University.

husbands-stay-gold“A lot of Saturdays we’d just sit around and record for 12 to 14 hours a day,” says Norton, recalling the duo’s fraternity days, when songwriting happened on the side. “We wanted to keep that up when I moved.”

They’ve kept it up via Dropbox. With the exception of two tracks, the surf-pop pair’s debut album — Golden Year, out July 2 — was written and produced via screens. Without a mutual location, Husbands had to focus on a mutual feeling, like the nostalgia of “Stay Gold.” (The title alludes to “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” a line from S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders.)

“This song is about trying to be sweet to my wife in the quietness of the house after our friends leave from a late night of hanging out playing Settlers of Catan,” says the song’s description on Bandcamp. The rest, Davis says, is riffing on that feeling.

That feeling sounds like a couple of Oklahomans dreaming of coastline, reminiscent of their influences Youth Lagoon and Beach Fossils.

“I feel like I write music that I can ideally drift to on an air mattress in a pool,” says Norton. Davis agrees. “I like to think of it as kind of sunburnt music.” - WAMU 88.5 Bandwidth.fm, 7.14.16

Ah the temerity of summer, constantly teasing us with all of its excessive sense of wonderment before burying it under a crushing blanket of weather and circumstance, leaving only just enough light for us to yearn for its reappearance all over again.

Taking that sense of sauntering frustration and shaping it in to three-and-a-half of minutes of hazy dream pop is DC/Oklahoma duo Husbands who have shared ‘Stay Gold’ from their new record, just in time for it to worm its way in as the down-trodden anthem of the current season. Like a soundtrack to every wasted opportunity that slipped away this year, the track uses downtrodden vocals to set the tone; weaving them in and out of a rolling guitar line that provides the track’s dancing spine.

As always, with tracks of this ilk, it’s difficult to really pinpoint why it captivates as much as it does but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding and, as the track quietly unrolls like a single lit road in to the dark of night, with all the disparate magic that holds, you’ll be left wondering how you made it so far through this dulled Summer without ‘Stay Gold’ by your side. Check it out below and stream the whole record here. - Gold Flake Paint (UK)

And it’s all done in a way that sounds devoid of polish or stuffy flamboyance.

The project is the brainchild of Wil Norton and Danny Davis, two Oklahoma Christian University graduates who bonded over Super Smash Bros. and a common musical thread — though their histories wouldn’t suggest the latter.

Norton, 26, cut his teeth playing guitar for defunct local act The Non through high school and college. Davis, 24, started with piano lessons in his youth, dabbling in pop-punk and folk music in his adolescent years. But regardless of how they arrived, their creative visions now glide along same trajectory.

“I’d go over to his apartment and we’d spend all of Saturday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. just working on music. It was one of those things that was really easy for us and felt natural,” Norton said. “We both have increasingly gravitated toward a pop sensibility, so it was easy for us to be on the same page.”

After releasing a prolific run of singles for free this past summer — one each week from April 15 to July 30 — Norton relocated from Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C. to pursue a master’s in English literature at Georgetown University, rendering the songwriting vessel to an email-only format. Fortunately, sharing files back and forth each week was already the duo’s preferred methodology.

“It was the natural progression of our tastes,” Davis said. “It’s probably something that just came about organically. The production value of how we were recording songs probably influenced how it ended up sounding.”

The resulting sound is as endearing as the creative process. But while the two share an affinity for the lo-fi aesthetic, the stylistic choice wasn’t really a choice at all. Without the best studio equipment to polish their songs, resorting to a digital spit-shine was as much a necessity as it was a conscious decision.

“It’s probably a blessing and a curse. I’m sure the production dudes at ACM (Academy of Contemporary Music at
the University of Central Oklahoma) can probably spot all sorts of flaws
in my technique,” Davis said. “Over-compressing our songs is a big part
of our sound. It can help to identify and separate us in good and bad
ways, depending on who you’re asking.”

Fortunately, the self-imposed, deadline-driven process has yielded an enduringly bountiful and imaginative songwriting output.

And they aren’t showing any signs of slowing down, even at over 1000 miles apart.

“With The Non, we were really trying hard to push the envelope. Over the course of college, I kind of chilled out a little bit. I became less interested in showing off and more interested in writing songs,” Norton said. “There are a lot more options using a computer as your format for making music as opposed to four guys sitting in a room, working on a song together. I think there’s a little more charm in doing it this way.” - Oklahoma Gazette, 10.29.13

Husbands‘ members send song parts via email. Couple that with skyscraper artwork, shoegaze nods, and “Tokyo”‘s title and there’s a definite Lost In Translation vibe to the Oklahoma City band’s latest effort. Nothing gets sucked into the online bubble here, though. The song is all about longing, and it’s conveyed through brutal truths and riffs that walk among giants. - Portals

Wil Norton and Danny Davis — the remarkably consistent/prolific surf-pop duo known as Husbands — have released yet another pair of singles through their Bandcamp. “GOAT” and “Some Surf” are, if my math is correct, Husbands’ 31st and 32nd songs released since April 2013. Not bad for a couple of married dudes who live over 1,300 miles apart.

Here’s what current Husband and former The Non guitarist Norton had to say about the tracks:

“We’ve written a number of NBA/OKC related songs, including a song about when Serge went down in the Western Conference Finals. Neither of these songs are about the NBA. However, the GOAT diction makes it into one of Danny’s songs here. I’m not sure who the GOAT is in this song, though. ‘Some Surf’ was one of the five songs we recorded — at least in part — last November in Nashville, and I’m really happy we shaped it up into publishable form.”

Check out the highly publishable new singles below, and try not to think about the possibility of the Thunder missing the playoffs while you listen. Also, if you haven’t familiarized yourself with Husbands’ discography, now’s as good a time as any. - Oxford Karma

2. Husbands — "Singles"

While OKC natives Wil Norton and Danny Davis have yet to put out an album, EP or cohesive release of any sort, this list would be remiss to not include their bedroom beach-pop project Husbands. The duo eschewed a traditional release model by posting a song a week to their Bandcamp page, which now features 16 of the most alluring and enveloping pop songs put out by anyone — local or otherwise — this year, leaving those fortunate enough to have followed them awash in reverb-doused melody. - Oklahoma Gazette

A long distance music affair: Georgetown U/Oklahoma City bedroom band Husbands record and release their first album, "Golden Year"

Husbands is a dreamy bedroom-pop duo made up of two married guys (though not to each other) Wil Norton and Danny Davis. They met at undergrad in Oklahoma City while Norton was playing in instrumental prog-rock band "The Non" and Davis was recording songs with Beach Boys inspired vocal harmonies. The two started a project that would later succeed in transcending state boundaries when Norton moved to DC to attend Georgetown for an MA in Literature. Not only has the band's production survived, but flourished! On July 2nd they released their first full, 8 track album, "Golden Year". They've noted that this particular record was made with the intention of playing live shows, which for the duo meant less experimenting with Animal Collective reminesent sampling, but also gaining the discipline necessary for writing tighter, catchier tunes. We're excited to hear their future work, which will without doubt further perfect combining both of these songwriting methods. Golden Year melts seamlessly with warm and drowned guitars, sad surfy vocals, bright synths and samples, and hip shaking percussion. These songs derive strength from the duo's ability to add layer over layer (sent over dropbox) without overdoing it and washing out the core of the song. Give the lyrics a look-see when listening, there are some real gems. Husbands is proud, excited, and fast at work on their next two albums already. So go to Bandcamp, enjoy your new summer jams! We'll likely have some more good news from Husbands in time for fall or winter.

- Leora Mandel - The Deli (NYC)