Best of What's Next: Skybox

Hometown: Chicago
Album: Morning After Cuts
Band Members: Tim Ellis (guitar, vocals) Christian Fields (keyboard, sampler, guitar) Mike Holtz (drums) Sean Brennan (bass)
For Fans Of: Discovery, Of Montreal, The Shins

Skybox keyboardist/guitarist Christian Fields and singer Tim Ellis have known each other since birth and have been playing music together for almost as long. When they moved to Chicago from Phoenix, Ariz. a few years ago, they added drummer Mike Holtz to the mix and picked up bassist Sean Brennan, and soon after dropped their debut LP Arco Iris in 2006. Earlier this year, they released their second album, Morning After Cuts, and have been touring in support of the record pretty much ever since, including a recent stop at Lollapallooza in their adopted hometown. “We’re basically just trying to stay on the road and play as many places as we possibly can,” Ellis says. “It’s just a matter of getting [the record] in as many people’s ears as possible, and traveling around, and having fun.”

Having fun isn’t hard for the quartet, as evidenced by tracks like “In a Dream,” ran instant groover with peaking melodies and a hooky chorus thrown between memorable lines like “you fucked with the sunshine / you left it in the water.” (A recent remix by fellow Chicagoans The Hood Internet rendered it almost unbearably danceable.) Cuts’ touchstones are culled from all over, Ellis says: “I’d been listening to a lot of Genesis lately, and Christian likes Dirty Projectors and ELO, so you can hear a lot of those influences. Mike likes everything, and Sean just likes to party.”

Chicago has proven to be a nurturing environment for the band—Ellis calls it “a nice, built-in community”—but they won’t be home much once a West Coast tour begins in September. Beyond the fall, the band hopes to write and record more music, but they have an eye on quality over quantity. “We definitely would love to create something unique and important, musically, to do something that not a lot of people have done before,” Ellis says, “and to push the boundaries of pop music and expand that into something that people remember.”