Guards

Guards were formed in the summer of 2010, when Richie James Follin (of The Willlowz, Cults) was on a break from touring. He wrote an EP’s worth of material and decided to put it on the internet under the moniker Guards. The next morning the EP was all over the internet thanks to a few tweets from the EP’s guest vocalists Caroline Polachek of Chairlift and Madeline Follin of Cults. The Guards EP garnered much critical praise. NPR stated the band has "a sound deconstructed through the minds of musicians who look more to memories than they do to the future, and in the process find something that sounds like a new discovery.”. Dazed and Confused had this to say about the band, "the songs are uncompromisingly raw harnessing pessimistic heartache to craft tracks about birth, death and any emotional malaise you might experience in between.”. The Guardian simply stated, "It's pretty fucking impressive”. Requests for live performances from Guards followed shortly after and Follin enlisted the help of Loren Humphrey (also of The Willowz) and Kaylie Schiff.

The band released their first full length album “In Guards We Trust" in 2013. The Wall Street Journal touted the record as “one of the years best albums.”, and Pitchfork proclaimed “...slack verses with palm-muted guitars give way to a monster chorus delivered with the confidence that tells you Guards know they have a hit on their hands.” . The NME would refer to the band as “Cali reverb scuzz kings”. Guards toured worldwide the entire year in support of their debut album opening for such acts as Queens of the Stone Age, MGMT, Two Door Cinema Club, Palma Violets, and playing such festivals as Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Primavera Sound. 

The band just scored three short films as of yet to be released for the Every Mother Counts organization are currently working on their second full length album. 

"We wrote "Nothing More" while living in Long Island for the winter. We set up a studio out there in an town called Sagaponak which is basically vacated during the winter season so it had a bit of "The Shining" vibe to it, which we loved. When I wrote the lyrics we were in the middle of a year long battle with our record label to let us out of our record contract so it deals with a lot of my feelings good and bad about the whole experience. Musically, I feel the track is much more pop and groove oriented than anything we have ever really done before. So, you get a heavy contrast between the lyrical subject matter and musical feel of the track. It was really amazing getting to work with Grammy award winner Tchad Blake (Arctic Monkeys, U2, Black Keys) while mixing the song. Personally, it is one of my favorite tracks the band has ever recorded.  

As for the Beck cover, we have always loved Beck since we were little kids and wanted to celebrate his Grammy for Album of the Year by covering one of our favorite songs of his." ––Richie James Follin​