Best of What's Next: Moonlight Bride

Photo by Julia Davis

Hometown: Chattanooga, Tenn.
Album: Myths
Band Members: Tyke Calfee (bass), Justin Grasham (guitar), Matt Livingston (drums), Justin Wilcox (keyboards, guitar, vocals)
For Fans Of: Arcade Fire, Joy Division, Pulp

Outside of Greyfriar’s Coffee in downtown Chattanooga, Tenn., the late-November sky is blue, the leaves orange and the pedestrians are shedding their outermost layers. Inside, three-fourths of local band Moonlight Bride sit around a low table, sleepy, drinking iced coffee. This is the kind of town where the mercury pushing 70 the day before Thanksgiving isn’t uncommon. But making decent rock music? That’s another matter.

Blues legend Bessie Smith was born here and R&B superstar Usher grew up in town, but despite its thriving local-arts scene and proximity to musical hotbeds in Nashville, Atlanta, Memphis and Chapel Hill, Chattanooga has never developed a music scene to speak of. Most rock bands either decamp to bigger cities, or linger and burn out. But Moonlight Bride took a less likely third route—keep it local and thrive.

After about a year of constant live gigs, the band retreated to a warehouse practice space to hash out every last detail of its first LP, Myths. Released in October, the album comprises 10 dark, interwoven songs bound by the brooding guitar work of newest member Justin Grasham and lead singer Justin Wilcox’s tremulous, bare-souled vocals, which are as haunted and alluring as the caves that riddle the rocky hills of the band’s hometown.

It’s a debut any local scene would be proud to claim, though only the faintest clues link it to Chattanooga. Wilcox sings about the church like it’s an ex-lover, hinting at a fallout common even in the buckle of the Bible Belt. And then there’s the cicadas. Drummer Matt Livingston and bassist Tyke Calfee captured the insects’ deafening drone—familiar to anyone who’s spent a summer evening in the South—last July, in the woods behinds Wilcox’s house, then used the recording to piece together Myths’ second and third tracks.

“Those kinds of sounds—that’s just something you grow up with and you love,” Calfee says. “Sometimes you take it for granted.” And sometimes, all the beauty in the world is right in your back yard.