Meet Good Kid, the Programmers-Turned-Indie Rock Band Defining Twitch’s Sound
Photo courtesy of Good Kid
Years ago a friend put me onto this band I’d never heard of. They queued up a song called “Nomu” from a band named Good Kid, who seemed relatively new still and only had two other songs on their Bandcamp, “Atlas” and “Witches.” I clung to them like I’ve clung to very few acts, falling immediately for their upbeat riffs and the balance between Two Door Cinema Club and Panic! At the Disco that the melodies and vocalist Nick Frosst struck. What also stuck with me was their mascot, a kid the band and their fans affectionately dubbed “Nomu Kid,” who comes off like a videogame protagonist. He’s always exuding this pure and infectious sense of joy and is almost always in motion.
Much like their mascot, Good Kid is a band that’s constantly on the move. They’re young, meaning they’re not only in tune with what’s going on around them but also quick-witted enough to be able to respond to it promptly. They develop moves out of thin air where others could not. There’s a kinetic energy behind not just Good Kid’s music, but the choices the band has and continues to make about their direction and where to focus their excitement. That energy has taken them to many places, not the least of which include their own videogame, a fight for the right to stream music on Twitch and being included on an in-game radio station in the biggest game in the world. Would it be a surprise then if the band admitted a lot of these moves were improvisational?
“You might gather this from the conversation, but we’re very all over the place. We jump around from idea to idea. We get bored quickly, we move around, we pitch things, we bring things back. We debate. Like it’s just a constant chaotic state,” Jacob Tsafatinos, a guitarist for the band, tells me. The question I asked pertained to a potential concept album (“I would love to do a concept album, but I think we have to be in the right place for that”), but really so many parts of Good Kid’s approach to music and growth have come together from a frenetic, but constantly creative approach. Their latest song, “Orbit,” Is a great example of this.
Written at least in part three years ago in 2018, “Orbit” was originally a song that, according to the band’s bassist Michael Kozakov, “became very obvious [it was] never gonna be a Good Kid song” when Frosst introduced it to the band. It felt too “spooky” and featured chords too strange for the tone of the band, and while they’re no strangers to “massaging” a song into a Good Kid track, “Orbit” wound up on the cutting room floor for years. Kozakov, from out of nowhere, stripped the chords from that song years later, kept the hook and layed down a bassline and “within one practice” they had a demo that became their latest single, and potentially even the first song off an upcoming EP or album. “Pox,” a mellower song of theirs that’s become a personal favorite, was the first song their vocalist Frosst showed Kozakov when he was a “measly teenager” in university, and actually wrote it even further back in high school. That’s a decade long journey and they just released it last year.
It’s all a part of a process that stresses excitement and iteration more than procedural work. “Early on we realized that the band is a great avenue to explore things that we’re excited about,” said Michael Kozakov, the band’s bassist. Down to even their mascot, everything Good Kid has touched or released has worked as some affirmation of the band’s collective creative energy and interests. They never do a thing they don’t want to do, and only do things the way they want to. Tsafatinos shared that in the time after the release of their second EP, for example, when folks were clamoring for more from the band, an idea came together “ad hoc” to give them exactly that. For about a year, Tsafatinos had been developing a game called Ghost King’s Revenge on his weekends (the whole band is made up of programmers who love games) out of the assets of an earlier 8-bit style music video the band figured they could reuse. He not only built the game, but tied it into “Nomu Kid’’ and used it to build out his lore, revealing he was an AI the band built at college that became sentient, turning him into the proper videogame hero he always appeared to be. All of this was done to coincide with the release of an 8-bit Good Kid album, and to top it all off, they rolled it out by launching an ARG where “Nomu Kid’’ disappeared from the band’s social pages. In the band’s Discord, they released puzzles their fans could solve to piece together where he had disappeared to. It all feeds back into this “burning” desire Kozakov mentioned to develop the character of “Nomu Kid” through artwork, their music and, really, whichever avenues feel creatively potent for them.
Since the band is made up of gamers, it probably comes as little surprise that games, and nerd culture, have constantly found their way into Good Kid and been a constant creative outlet for the band. “Down with the King,” the opening track on their second EP, is a reference to Donkey Kong and literally features a line claiming to be “stuck on 1-1,” the designation for the first level of the first world of a game. These lines have made it in because, according to Kozakov, writing lyrics is “you weaving your personal experiences into [the music].” He continued, “So yeah, you’ll hear music that is like about Donkey Kong, but really it’s about Nick [Frosst] reliving his childhood memories, getting stuck on levels and having that feeling that at any point, it was cool to just call your friend and be like, ‘I’m stuck on a level. Can you come over and help me?”
This personalization feels present in a lot of their songs, but also led to a lot of work which early on held up the release of new music. “At first. what we did was we just would write a song, do the best we possibly can on the production side and then just release it and see how it goes,” Kozakov shared about their intensive songwriting process, which early on meant that releases were far and few between. Some songs, like “Drifting” off their second EP, came together rather quickly; that EP was recorded and released in a relatively shorter span than the first. As recently as their latest single “Orbit,” though, the process can still be a lengthy and sporadic one, but always creatively fulfilling.
A fun thing about being a Good Kid fan for a few years now has been watching the band grow, in particular because it’s been adjacent to things I’m also interested in. A while ago, Good Kid started growing in popularity in part due to Fortnite, of all things. On Twitch and YouTube, players who discovered the band were playing their music while streaming the game to hundreds and even thousands of watchers. The band, all self-admitted gamers who watch Twitch a lot, caught on and participated in the chats of these players, including members of FaZe Clan and the inaugural Fortnite World Champion, Bugha. They retweeted montages people made to their songs and interacted with anyone and everyone who reached out about their music or used it while playing something. As large streamers played more Good Kid music, more people discovered them, streamed or bought their music on Bandcamp, and became fans of the burgeoning indie band. This culminated in a “grassroots” campaign that was also completely unplanned, where Fortnite players started demanding that Epic add Good Kid to their in-game radio earlier this year. In June, as part of an update to the game, Epic proved they were listening and added Good Kid’s song “Witches” to Fortnite Radio.
We’re on Fortnite Radio!!! Big thank you to @hofftv and @epicgames and to the FN community <3 pic.twitter.com/aedtwN3jio