Continuing our mission to introduce you to bands you may not have heard of yet, today we bring you Era 9…
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
We are Era 9 from Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
How did you meet?
We have Laurie and Lalla on lead vocals, Jona on guitar, Joe on bass, and Marco on drums. Jona, Marco and Joe met in high school, all sharing the same passion for music, and that progressed to the start of a band, and led us to where we are today. Lalla was in a “rival” band from our city, so we all knew of each other in the Montreal music scene. Joe and Jona had actually seen Laurie perform with her old band years before she joined Era 9, through mutual friends.
How long have you been playing as a band?
Era 9 has been around for about 7 years and has gone through many changes in members and sound as well since then. The official new line-up and sound has been around for almost a year now, and we are ready to show the world.
Before you get sick of being asked… where does the band name come from?
The number 9 represents liberty and positivity. We are a new era of music that isn’t just for one person, we cater to all who opens themselves to it! We value creative freedom in music and we promote open mindedness and imagination. Hence, Era 9.
What are your influences?
We love and appreciate all genres of music, from Skrillex, Diplo, Drake, and The Weeknd, to 30 Seconds To Mars, Linkin Park, Twenty One Pilots, Portishead, Tesseract, Periphery, Volumes, and a lot of other heavy stuff.
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
Growing up in Montreal, QC, Canada, a multicultural city that is big on hip-hop and EDM; and having roots of rock music, we wanted to combine all the genres that we love. That’s how we came up with TrapRock, combing hard rock, EDM-trap drops, with pop and hip-hop vocal melodies. It’s more of genres of music that inspire us most, rather than just bands. The core of our music will be hard rock, with heavy riffs, but we enjoy changing up the basic usual structure of songs to an EDM/trap type of structure.
Do you have any particular lyrical themes?
What inspires us most lyrically is usually how we’re feeling and what we’re going through in the moment. Whether it’s struggles, love, heartbreak, anger, or society, etc., we all have emotions and stories to tell.
What’s your live show like? How many shows have you played?
We’ve probably played a little over 250 shows. We can definitely say we give the party-starting, give-no-fucks approach to our live shows. People from different scenes come together and party hard to our genre-bending sound. Whether it’d be by moshing with the rockers, dancing with the girls or straight up vibing with the hip-hop crowd. Our music touches each end of the spectrum with heavy guitar breakdowns and trap drops, accompanied by epic EDM buildups and big bass, all meshed with melodic vocals. Our stage presence is very energetic and audience engaging. We tapped into our DIY skills to prepare a visually compelling experience. We have our independently sequenced light and smoke show along with back drop video projections as we perform. You wanna be there.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
We can’t think of any wild things we’ve done at one of our shows, but a horrible thing we’ve experienced would have to be while on tour, getting ready to hit the stage for our first show of the tour. We set up and our drummer realized that somebody spilled water all over our laptop! As we’ve said, our music is very EDM/hip-hop based, with a lot of background tracks that we absolutely need in order to perform and showcase our original style of music. We couldn’t perform, and since then, we’ve prepared ourselves for the worst case scenario with backup laptops, and have an acoustic set ready for when something like this goes wrong. You learn a lot from problems and experiences like this.
What kit do you use / guitars do you play / etc.?
Sonor drum set, with Saluda cymbals, Ibanez 7 string guitars and 5 string bass, and made in our Province of Quebec, Godin guitars and basses as well.
If you were second on a three-band bill, which band would you love to be supporting and which band would you choose to open for you? A chance to plug someone you’ve toured with, or a mate’s band we’ve not heard of before!
Because we love all styles of music and like to merge hip-hop and EDM/trap with rock, we’d like to mix up our show and throw a party rather than just a concert. We’d have rap groups Migos or Rae Sremmurd open the show, and we would be supporting act to Skrillex/Jack U.
What are your plans for 2017?
We’ve been writing new material and gearing up to tour and take over the world in 2017. Make sure to follow us on all social networks and join 9gAng now on our website to receive updates on upcoming tours, and release dates of our new album called Gravity. Thanks for having us!
Era 9: official | facebook | twitter | instagram | youtube | soundcloud
