It’s hardly stopped raining when I arrive at Goodale Park, the 174-year-old space just south of Columbus’ noisy downtown, where the first night of the 53rd annual Community Festival is already underway. According to a program I grab upon entrance, ComFest—as the three-day affair is better known—is a “Party With a Purpose,” and an admirable one at that: It’s an explicitly anti-fascist, volunteer-run, community-nurturing, hippie-dippy antidote to conservative traffic. Weaving through a blur of tie-dye clad attendees, I clock countless things to do, buy, hear, see: a Grateful Dead tribute band at the gazebo; rows upon rows of artisan booths selling everything from non-alcoholic beer to hand-painted magnets; an air of fried Twinkies and plantains. It would all be a little overwhelming, frankly, if I weren’t here with a pointed objective: talk to Golomb, alt-rock up-and-comers quickly nabbing favor in the Arch City.
After taking directions from a shaggy-haired volunteer hanging out by the Bozo Stage, I find Golomb singer/lyricist/guitarist Mickey Shuman and singer/bassist Xenia Shuman (the pair have been married now for a year and a half) hanging out by the Goodale Stage before their set. Mickey offers an elbow bump, as his hands are juggling drinks; Xenia and I exchange an obligatory handshake but immediately laugh off the gesture’s formality. Several minutes later, drummer Hawken Holm (and Xenia’s younger brother) arrives, meeting me with a fist bump. He’d come to Goodale directly from his self-started sneaker and luxury goods boutique, 614 Sole, where he says a difficult customer had kept him at the store later than anticipated. We kill time by reminiscing about past ComFests and snickering at some guy in the distance riding a hoverboard-like vehicle as slowly as humanly possible.
While the band has received recognition for “Real Power” and “Staring,” early singles released in advance of their sophomore album, The Beat Goes On (out this Friday via No Quarter), the buzz isn’t new to locals. The stage’s lawn space quickly fills with a crowd; a kid in the front row is having a hell of a time playing with the bubbles flurrying forth from the front of the stage. Mickey sees that the child gets some earplugs in-between songs: “You’ll be stoked in 20 years.” After Golomb’s set wraps, the band and I reconvene by the side of the stage and, after some wandering around the park, find a damp picnic table to settle down at, tucked away from the noise and crowds—or so we thought.
“You guys kick ass,” a tipsy, middle-aged man says to the band less than ten minutes into the interview, before stumbling over to ask for a light. It’s far from the only interruption—by the time our interview wraps, the sun has set, and I’ve lost count of how many fans and friends have stopped by our table. Among them are two of Golomb’s earliest supporters, Melanie Bleavens Holm and David Holm—Xenia and Holm’s parents. Seizing the opportunity, I ask if they have a comment for Paste. “Always let your children play the instruments that are laying around the house,” Mr. Holm advises, “even if it sounds terrible.”
Since Xenia and Holm’s parents have played in Columbus bands for decades, it almost goes without saying that the siblings’ musical inclinations were introduced early. Xenia is an old pro at the family band thing; in high school, she played alongside her dad in Cherry Chrome, a dreamy alt-rock quartet she fronted. Holm, on the other hand, was resistant to the guitar lessons his and Xenia’s dad offered—Call of Duty was calling his name more loudly—but he’s always taken naturally to the kit. (Picking up on a fidgety young Holm’s sense for rhythm, an elementary school teacher even nicknamed him “‘Little Drummer Boy.’”) Like Xenia, Mickey tenured in several bands in high school, but he took to music a bit later than his bandmates, starting out making beats on a computer he bought with gift money from his Bar Mitzvah before picking up the guitar as a freshman. The six-string seemed to have been calling his name for a long time, though. The first song he remembers resonating with him was “Kalien the Alien,” a Beatlesque ditty about an extraterrestrial who travels in a guitar-shaped spaceship by Mr. Ray, the spiky-haired children’s performer. To three-year-old Mickey, the whole production was, naturally, riveting stuff: “It blew my mind a little bit,” he smiles, prompting a giggle from Xenia.
Mickey and Xenia met in high school at Kafe Kerouac, a beloved café, bookstore, occasional music venue, and regular first date setting—the Shumans are no exception to this rule—just north of Ohio State’s main campus. The café isn’t just significant to their romantic relationship, but also to their musical partnership: Here, they performed together for the first time, when Xenia joined Mickey’s former punk band Inner Mikey to sing harmonies on a cover of X’s “The Once Over Twice.” It doesn’t surprise me that the couple’s been singing together for so long—their harmonies are as seamless as the ones you’d find in Pixies and Yo La Tengo songs. The blend of their voices lends intensity and tenderness to Golomb’s music—especially their love songs—and composes an immediately distinctive layer in the band’s densely textured soundscapes. “I put Mickey through harmony boot camp early on, because I had been put through harmony boot camp early on in my musical endeavors, by a friend of mine,” Xenia says. “I feel like that really unlocked my understanding of how songs could be. Now, we don’t really have any songs where we aren’t harmonizing with each other.”
In 2018, Mickey and Xenia formed the first iteration of Golomb, fleshing out the lineup with their then-housemate (and Mickey’s former Stems bandmate) Zach Pennington on drums. Beginning that summer, the trio was a regular presence in the local house show circuit until Mickey and Xenia moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2019, when Mickey got a job working for the clothing brand Online Ceramics. Though brief, their time on the West Coast left a lasting impact. “It was really cool, ’cause we were, like, 20, and everyone [around us] was, like, 30. So they took us in and showed us how life could be set up around your artistic endeavors,” Xenia says. “Out there, people were just doing what they were interested in doing. I feel like that was really formative, at that age, to see people pursuing their dreams and doing what they wanted to do, being artists.”
Less than six months after the Shumans’ move, COVID-19 hit and sent them right back to Columbus, where they moved in with Xenia’s parents and Holm. Uprooted from Los Angeles’ music scene suddenly, the couple wasn’t thrilled. But with time, they reaped the benefits of their relocation. In March 2020, recording engineer Keith Hanlon co-founded Secret Studio, which offered an analog recording class. Having already known Xenia from recording Cherry Chrome, he contacted her to see if she could bring a band into the studio to record a song for the class to reference. “I was like, ‘Yeah, we have a band! We could do that, sure,’” Xenia says. “But Hawken hadn’t actually started playing drums with us yet at that point, so Mickey and I were kind of just like, ‘Hey, we need you to come learn this song, because we’re gonna record this song.’ And then we all started playing together.” With that, Golomb became a bonafide family band.
If Xenia and Hawken’s folks can take credit for providing Golomb a place to stay and a drummer, Mickey’s mom deserves some for the band’s very sick name, which is a nod to her maiden name. The band was also named for the homophone “golem,” an anthropomorphized figure in Jewish folklore generally created from clay or mud. The band was not, however, named for the homophone you might’ve thought of: “Gollum,” of Lord of the Rings fame.
“We get asked if it’s about Sméagol very often,” Holm says dryly.
Xenia jumps in: “We should start saying that—‘Is that Gollum from Lord of the Rings?’ Like, ‘Actually, it’s Sméagol.’”
Second cousins are strangely interwoven in Golomb’s ever-developing lore. The day of our conversation, Mickey received an Instagram message from a new fan who reached out because his mother’s maiden name is Golomb. Mickey says after they realized their families had roots in Pittsburgh. “We figured out I’ve met my second cousin once removed because of the band name.” Golomb’s music may never have reached this relative if not for the support of another of Mickey’s second cousins once removed—the Kentucky-based guitarist Nathan Salsburg, who (along with his wife, folk singer-songwriter Joan Shelley) releases music on the esteemed Philadelphia-based indie label No Quarter. Salsburg facilitated contact between Golomb and label head Mike Quinn years ago, before Golomb released their eponymous debut album back in 2021. Although Quinn enjoyed it and last year’s Love EP, The Beat Goes On is the first Golomb record No Quarter has been able to release: “Timing and quality lined up,” Mickey elaborates.
Golomb was a solid debut; entries like the trancelike reverie “One Thousand Million” and the Xenia-led, post-punk-ish scorcher “Western Threshold” hold up as some of the band’s best songs. However, for the uninitiated, The Beat Goes On is a perfect entry point into Golomb’s catalog. The band comes to life when a needle drops on the title track—a power-pop dynamo supercharged with muscular power chords, the steady heartbeat of Holm’s drumming, and those instantly gratifying Mickey-Xenia harmonies. Insistent, propulsive, and packed with hooks slashing through fogs of feedback, the following ten songs maintain the opening salvo’s momentum; every pummeling wall of sound seems to seep through the speakers, overtaking the senses. Hell, “Real Power”—the album’s anthemic lead single, and (for my money) one of the best rock songs of the year—makes me want to break into a run, and I hate running. It’s hard to imagine a song like that appearing on Golomb, which smeared at the edges even at its most energetic. The band’s pivot toward a poppier sound was more instinctual than intentional; as Xenia puts it, it was something they were “leaning into.” However, it seems inevitable that The Beat Goes On ended up being their most accessible record to date, considering the goal they did enter the studio with last October: make a classic. “We kept thinking about what that means to us, and this timeless quality we were trying to achieve,” Xenia explains.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what, exactly, makes an album a “classic,” but The Beat Goes On has that je ne sais quoi. It doesn’t hurt that it embraces some of music’s most enduring tropes: there’s the evergreen title; there’s the sex, drugs, and rock and roll philosophy interwoven throughout; there are allusions to icons like the Doors and Iggy Pop. But make no mistake: the album isn’t hokey, nor posturing; it’s too swaggering and self-assured to be a pastiche. Instead, it feels like the sort of record the eternally-cooler-than-thou older sibling you may or may not have would pass down to you (a là that one scene in Almost Famous). In other words, it has an “it” factor, which seems to have been inherited from the ageless alternative legends who’ve long inspired Golomb’s work: “Play Music” slinks and struts like it was raised on Lou Reed’s monotone monologues; “Real Power” and the sweltering, slow-burning “Dog” alchemize the quiet-loud formula Pixies perfected; there are traces of my bloody valentine and early Smashing Pumpkins in the bloodline of the the shimmering, shoegazey standout “Staring.”
Other tracks conjure records you might not have immediately imagined on Golomb’s shelves. Namely, the twangy closer “Ain’t No Devil (Sweet Release)” emanates a distinctly Stonesy sway, while “Other Side of the Earth” throws an even wilder curveball—a sludgy reggae jam rallying for empathy, it sounds something like what would’ve happened if Sonic Youth covered Bad Brains instead of the Carpenters. Mickey admits that Golomb had some hesitations about including the latter tune on the record, since they’re “all white kids from Ohio.” “But then we realized—we would just play it at our house all the time—and it would always feel good and genuine to us,” he explains, adding that its focus on connection makes it feel like “the lyrical centerpiece” of the album. “It’s like a snap-back-to-reality type of track. All this other stuff is [about] how you can feel good within yourself. But once you feel good within yourself…what’s the point if you’re not spreading that?”
For Golomb, music itself is both a way to feel good and share the sensations that come with it: “I wanna play music that gives you a part of me, I wanna play music that makes me feel so good,” Mickey sings plainly on “Play Music.” It’s a thesis he echoes nearly verbatim when I ask what the band hopes listeners get out of their music: “I just want people to feel good. We’re trying to make feel-good music. We all like music because it feels good.”
Mickey is quicker to explain his lyrics than articulate how exactly they came to be. When I ask if he can describe his writing process, he hesitates before sheepishly smiling, “I’m maybe not the most emotionally forward person…” He pauses, and Xenia’s laughter fills the quiet. “But… I just be thinkin’ about stuff.”
After some thinking—and Xenia’s half-joking proposal to reveal his astrological chart—Mickey takes another stab at it. While he says he doesn’t follow a strict process, he generally begins writing lyrics “from a grounded place,” with the sort of detail you can imagine finding in the archives of someone’s notes app—a scrap of an overheard conversation, a misheard song lyric, an observation of his immediate surroundings—and builds upward from it towards “a spiritual conclusion.” He cites “Real Power” as an example of this trajectory. “I also work in construction-adjacent stuff, and so I probably saw a crane, and I wrote, ‘Crane operator, can you pick me up? The job has got me down, feeling heavy as a ton,’” he says. Ultimately, the crane—a source of machine power—becomes a jumping off point for a search for real power: “By the end, it’s just like, ‘I need to feel devoured,’” Mickey continues, quoting the oddly chant-worthy final verse. “In my mind, that’s as good as it could get.”
There are moments on The Beat Goes On that evoke an out-of-body feeling similar to what Mickey describes—notably, the adrenalized climax in “Real Power,” where Xenia and Hawken’s backing vocals soar like the Beatles’ in “Twist and Shout.” It’s visceral, euphoric, and a little bit spiritual. With that in mind, after muttering an advance apology for corniness, I ask the band if they understand music as a spiritual practice. It’s to my relief that they all answer affirmatively: “Our dynamic, I think, makes it extra special or spiritual in some ways,” Xenia admits. “We’re so connected interpersonally that, when we lock in, it does feel sort of transcendent.”
“We on some death-do-us-part-type shit,” Mickey adds, smiling.
“For real!” Xenia laughs. “I feel like that is a spiritual experience—to be so connected through this thing that’s [been] so spiritual for so many people throughout history. To be connected like that with the people who are the most important in your life…it’s wild. It’s super special.”
It’s the bond between Golomb’s members that has brought them success—a concept they address on the wispy new single, “Be Here Now.” Over a hypnotic, lightly Midwest emo-flavored guitar riff and boom-bap percussion, Mickey and Xenia coo, “Sometimes you just have to think less / It’s best not to get too into success.” They sing the adage like they mean it, their voices feathery and serene. But are Golomb receiving the praise so gracefully in reality?
“Well, we’re letting it go straight to our heads,” says Xenia.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be an asshole,” Hawken (who doesn’t take a beat when asked what he hopes for in the future: “Millions of dollars”) deadpans.
In all seriousness, Golomb’s members have found the uptick in attention to be a double-edged sword. “It’s amazing that we’re getting this opportunity to do this together and do this in a bigger way than we have been able to before,” Xenia says. “And then also, sometimes, [it’s] like, ‘holy fuck, how do we make this work?’” In the future, Golomb hope that balancing band responsibilities, other jobs, and relationships becomes a little bit easier. For now, though, they’re savoring their breakthrough. In the words of Mickey, who’s never one to mince them: “It feels really fucking good.”
Anna Pichler has written for Paste since 2024, and she interned for the music section in the spring of 2025. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English literature at The Ohio State University. Keep up with her work on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social.
