Talkie

Indie rock four-piece Talkie have a knack for balancing the old and the new.

The San Francisco quartet, currently enjoying some well-earned love on the Spotify Fresh Finds playlist excel at taking up the aesthetics and sounds from different decades and making them their own. For example, take a listen to the band’s 2016 track, “Mountain.” — reminiscent of a Fleetwood Mac B-side. Then there’s the video for their June 2019 release, “Fuzzy Disco,” which balances hyper saturated visuals with reverberating ’80s synths. A preview for the group’s September 2020 release, “Blue Underground,” opens with stop-motion images of ’70s film rolls and early ’60s surf guitars. Coordinated outfits, too, are clearly considered a must.

Talkie’s 2021 video for “Love Me, Baby,” premiering here on SF Weekly, continues the trend. In the clip, the four men explore San Francisco’s iconic Lombard Street in pastel ensembles to the mellow strains of electric and acoustic guitars and Beach Boys harmonies. It’s a sugary love song made for stargazing and wasting time.

Local legend Beau Sorenson of Death Cab for Cutie and Tune-Yards mixed the track, though the band produces all of their own music at their own Bay Area facility “Headfone Audio.”

The song is part of a series of Talkie single releases set for the first half of 2021 as the band aims to make a splash in an otherwise slow year for the local music scene. The band is based in San Francisco and has been making music since 2015.
Learn more about Talkie and stay tuned for upcoming releases on their Bandcamp. - SF Weekly

Falling somewhere between garage and beach rock, “Marcy” is a take on young adulthood and the reflection on simpler times.
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The West Coast has a sound: You’ve heard it before. It’s dripping with calm energy and full of collected confidence. It’s raw, it’s beachy, airy and light. But Talkie takes the sound to a new height.

Atwood Magazine is proud to premiere Talkie’s latest single, “Marcy,” an energetic ode to reminiscing past moments. The single comes as a follow-up to Talkie’s debut album Hablas which was released in 2015.

The rock band is made of members Eric Martin, Christopher Issacs, and Bradly and Matthew Hagmann. Influenced by 60s rock and 90s alternative, the band creates a sound that falls somewhere between garage and beach rock.

“Marcy” doesn’t hold an uncommon sound. It’s a classic indie rock tune, one with a relaxed aura and a whimsically-inviting instrumental arrangement. Though it’s a timeless piece, it holds a power rarely found in radiobait indie-rock tracks. While “Marcy” obeys the common genre guidelines, it stands out because of the depth of its message and the total sound Talkie has crafted.

Vocally, “Marcy” is sensational. Hagmann’s vocal tone creates a soothing, yet compelling and exciting dynamic which has the ability to draw listeners deep into the message being broadcast. The sound is rich, welcoming, and empathetic, all tone variations that lack in music without a meaning. It’s clear to listeners that Talkie is a force of total understanding, and their music isn’t lacking a purpose.

That concept continues when “Marcy” is lyrically evaluated. Inspired by a post-college job hunt, the desperation behind the longing for simplicity is easily relatable.

“Marcy” was written at a point in time shortly after graduating college,” said Brad Hagmann. “I remember thinking the world was pretty open before me -I had a college degree, solid grades, and decent work experience, but I wasn’t able to get a job. For the majority of my life growing-up, I had thought the road before me was pretty simply laid out. I’d work hard, graduate from a good school, work a solid internship, and naturally, land a decent job. Well, as many of my peers also came to find out, things don’t always work out the way you plan. I floundered pretty hard for a while, and found myself looking back on simpler times in my life for comfort.

The tune dives into the concept of reminiscing, quickly transitioning to the existential concept of what will be remembered in our last days. It’s a thought process many young adults have had: how they’ve taken for granted simpler times.

Instrumentally, Marcy is impressive, with guitar riffs and a full-blown mix of garage and beach rock. The band has a vibe like a west coast Twin Peaks, or a raw comparison to indie rock powerhouse Smallpools. Whatever way you spin it, “Marcy” is a fitting debut for new listeners, and will easily find its way into genre-bending playlists. - Atwood Magazine

The new Talkie album wasn’t recorded in a typical studio space. Fundamental Things saw the four members record in the most DIY way possible, wherever they could set up their homemade pop-up recording studio.

After touring together while the members were in other bands, Eric Martin, Chris Isaacs, and brothers Brad and Matt Hagmann formed a supergroup of Fremont-area talent who loved music too much to have given it up after their teen years. “You have the era of bands that are in junior high or high school where everybody meets and joins in their first band,” bassist Matt Hagmann says while we gather around a small room resembling a jail cell at a quirky coffee shop in Fremont. “Once the first band dies out, you poach the friends that were in the first band.”

They reminisce about the early projects over their coffee. Martin and Isaacs joke about reasons old groups disbanded. “He thinks that I kicked him out,” Isaacs teases before elaborating on how long he’s played with Martin. “Brad and Matt are brothers, they basically had a band for a really long time but Eric and I were several bands deep and I feel like we’re just the two guys left through all of those bands that are still doing it.”

The band continues to play music while maintaining busy schedules — not because they’re chasing a dream of making money from their songs but because they enjoy doing it. “We all found a way to make it work with our adult lives,” Martin, the drummer, says as the majority of the members admit they’ve gone into teaching. “We just love recording and playing shows together. We’re all going to be married in a few months, I have a daughter, we’re all working full-time yet we’re still recording our own albums, putting them our on our own label and doing everything on our own,” he continued.

For Talkie, playing music is a testament to how well the four friends work together and refuse to throw in the towel. “Everybody’s got their hobbies: Some people build trains in their garage, some people are into taxidermy, and we’re into bands,” Brad Hagmann joked.

Over the past two years, the members spent long hours recording Fundamental Things, setting up recording time in their own homes, an office building in Fremont, and even Martin's grandparents' cabin 30 miles south of Lake Tahoe.

“Much like in Thor, how Asgard is a people not a place, the recording studio is a people, not a place,” Martin says.

The band spent so much time writing songs, they recorded enough material for two albums. They labeled one batch of songs "The Cold Album" because of its dreamy, hazy sounds, and the other batch of upbeat, feel-good songs "The Warm Album." Despite the release of the album landing during the highest temperatures of the year, the band chose to use the "cold songs" on it.

We talk about musicians who have released double albums. While we all mutually find long albums we enjoyed, Talkie enjoys taking a different direction with each new release. "Our last record was a super-indulgent double album," Martin says. "The album cover is a very vibrant mountain in the desert in the south and we wanted to do the opposite of that."

And while the new record is vastly different than the last, one thing remains — Talkie is all about vibes and themes. Fundamental Things is an album with underwater dreamy artwork, ambient keyboards, and reverb filled guitars.

From doing multiple takes of an underwater photo shoot to meet the ambiance of the songs (requiring each member to hold their breath for extended periods of time) to making sure the album sounded like a playlist, the band pays attention to the smallest of details. "Instead of someone just pulling one or two songs from our album and putting it on a playlist, they can put on an album that feels like a playlist," Isaacs explained.

Check out the new album for yourself to hear the tracks that made the fundamental cold playlist. - The Bay Bridged

San Francisco indie rockers Talkie will release their brand new album Everything Matters on May 24th. Today we have the honor of premiering the 4th and final single shared from the record, “Boring Now.”

The single has this lush quality to it that reminds me of some of the charming work released by acts like Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin in the mid-2000s. Theirs a sweet and affirming nature to its vocals and interplay with its instrumentals that works to perfection and is an absolutely perfect way to lead into the release of the album next week.

Enjoy a listen to “Borning Now,” which is premiering below. Stay tuned for the full release of Everything Matters next week. - We All Want Someone to Shout For

Once you hear the San Francisco folk-rock band Talkie, their name makes more sense.

"Instead of having one person sing," says Brad Hagmann, "we pretty quickly discovered that all four of could sing and had sung the lead in previous bands." The resulting sound is a mixture of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and The Flaming Lips, which is to say, there's a lot of harmonies and sweet, sweet guitar-driven melodies.

In "Mountain," the quartet's first "official" music video and the first single to be released from their upcoming debut album, Hablas, the band frolics around Leonard Knight's trippy, technicolor Salvation Mountain ("It looks like a Play-Doh Sunday school drawing," Hagmann says) dressed in all-white attire. The drive there took a harrowing nine hours, and when they arrived, they discovered that it also happened to be Knight's birthday. Though the crazy genius behind Salvation Mountain passed away in 2014, his family was there to celebrate and do repairs on part of the mountain while the guys trounced around and explored the zany site. Though their original intent was to shoot photos for their album cover, Hagmann says, "at one point, we just started dancing. Later, when we looked at it, the footage synced up with the song. It was totally by accident, but it worked."

The band has only been around since 2014, but they've made quite a few waves during that time. They dropped an EP last January and played a show at Super Bowl City last week. In fact, their music has even being played at a number of big-name stores, like Starbucks, Chili's, REI, Jack in the Box, and L.L. Bean. With Hablas dropping in a few weeks (on March 4), it's looking like 2016 will have a lot in store with the burgeoning band.

Talkie play at 9:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 13 at Neck of The Woods. - SF Weekly

Talkie, a four-piece band based in San Francisco, released their album 'Fundamental Things' on April 27th, 2018 and gained an amazing response, hitting #13 and #20 on the FMQB SubModern Albums and Singles Chart. This new LP is self-recorded, self-produced, and self-released, just as their last, and features the recently released single 'Fuzzy Disco'. The vibe consists of indie and funk influences, which will never leave you bored. Between the amazing vocal range and use of harmonies to the instruments creating that light-energetic feel, Talkie really builds a stage for each other to shine and create the perfect balance for your ears. 'Fuzzy Disco' is the perfect song to blast through the city at night, or anywhere for that matter. It's definitely a happy-groove song that you'll find yourself wanting to move to.

The amount of creativity from these guys have is tremendous and we see their music being heard and loved by many, especially with the response from their new album and the features they garner from San Francisco's Alt 105.3, The Bay Bridged, SF Weekly, Indiemono, and Atwood Magazine.

Check out their new single 'Fuzzy Disco' from 'Fundamental Things', oh, and don't forget to add it to your favorite playlist!

We had the chance to sit down with Talkie and discuss their new song! Here's what they had to say-

Buzz Music: Care to introduce yourself?

Brad: Greetings. I’m Brad, this is Eric and this is Chris. You can’t see it, but I’m gesturing to each of us right now.
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Buzz Music: We're completely in love with your new song 'Fuzzy Disco'. Can you tell us a bit about the song and the writing style behind it?

Eric: We were inspired by the following question: "What would it sound like if Sonic Youth was actually fronted by Barry Gibb?" I can't remember which one of us asked it, but we changed our studio computer's wallpaper to a glamorous shot of Barry and his posh mane. There was no turning back.

Brad: Yeah, there were more than a few moments where we’d be in production and would stop, look at that picture, and ask “does this sound like it could be coming out of Barry’s bronzed face?” If the answer was “yes”, we’d proceed.
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Buzz Music: Where did the inspiration behind 'Fuzzy Disco' come from?

Brad: Being a millennial in the new millennium. That dang Backstreet Boys album certainly didn’t help things. Also, struggling to get a job after college.
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Buzz Music: Let's get personal for a second! What are 3 things you would love your fans to know about you?

Brad: Eric and I are pretty passionate about vaporwave. Maybe a little too passionate.

Chris: I happen to teach elementary school and there is a Talkie poster in the principal’s office. I am secretly but not secretly at all a videogame geek. I regularly play world of warcraft and fighting games.

Brad: Matty isn’t here to defend himself, but I’ll add that he’s oddly obsessed with Halloween. Really, just spooky things in general. He told me the other day that he wouldn’t mind being a ghost. Not sure what to do with that information.

Eric: We all have college degrees. I think that’s pretty cool.

Brad: More about me, you ask? Come now, you’re making me blush! I love anime. I work for Supergiant Games, sometimes. I don’t know if I like the new Star Wars films or not. Fight me.

Eric: That’s 3, I think.
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Buzz Music: Any upcoming shows in the near future? For a new fan who hasn’t seen you live yet, how would you describe your live performance?

Chris: Yes we do have one! We’re playing at Moe’s Alley in Santa Cruz with Hurricane Roses on September 22nd. I’d describe our live performance as lighthearted. We all genuinely love playing music together and were all groomsmen in each other’s weddings. I think people can pick up on the positive vibes and that helps make it a good time. We also enjoy adding extra bits to our songs to give people a different experience live.

Connect with Talkie on social media:

Spotify: spoti.fi/2ABwkzQ
Bandcamp: talkie.bandcamp.com
Instagram: instagram.com/talkiemusic
Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/talkiemusi c - Buzz Music

Bay Area indie group Talkie took most of 2017 off from live shows to complete their follow-up to 2015’s huge double-album Hablas. They are in the final stages of mastering the recordings, but spent so long working on the material that they ended up with two albums.

“We were just taking our time and not trying to rush it,” says drummer Eric Martin. “We set out thinking, ‘hey, let’s write a follow up to Hablas,’ We ended up writing the follow-up to Hablas, and a follow-up for that as well,” says drummer Eric Martin. “It really speaks to the amount of time it ended up taking.”

They’ve released a couple of songs from the first of the records, which are mellow and have a groovier beach-pop feel and lusher production than Hablas. That album should be out this spring. The other will come later, and will have a harder edge.

The band explains the first album as being “cold,” and the second as “warm.” Sensing my confusion, they then explained it in Santa Cruz terms. The first one is “you are going out to Santa Cruz and have yourself a hot chocolate and listen to this record, then [the other is], you’ll be riding the Giant Dipper, drink an energy drink and get on that roller coaster,” says Martin.

As complicated as it all sounds, these two albums are actually a move away from the heady thought processes behind Hablas, which they say is loosely a concept album. They’d only put out one release prior—a short and sweet self-titled EP. While discussing the follow-up, they imagined an album cover taken at the psychedelic, desert-y Salvation Mountain, and then they wrote all of the songs with that visual in mind, capturing the mood of that photo, and then imagining various narratives that would work in that setting.

“We really just wanted to make an indulgent double-album for our debut. We thought it would be hilarious,” says Martin.

Just as the extremity of doing a self-indulgent concept record is the opposite of their bare-bones rock ’n’ roll EP, they see the next two records following a similar pattern of ping-ponging between different extremes.

“Everything reacts to the last thing we did,” says singer/guitarist Brad Hagmann. “We were reacting to the original EP which was very heavy rock. Hablas was the other end of the spectrum. It was kind of psychedelic, a little more delicate. This reacts to Hablas in a similar way, but it’s definitely not the EP.”

The new records are also part of a continuum of self-production that they started with Hablas. After recording their first EP in a proper studio, they decided to build a portable DIY studio, which first got installed in a barn in San Martin. Having their own studio afforded them the time to really devote to fleshing out details without fear of going over budget.

They’ve become competent self-engineers, which has given them the ability to experiment in terms of textures, creative mic placements and little songwriting tweaks. The drums on this upcoming record, for instance, were recorded in a cabin in Lake Tahoe, to give it “a big room sound.”

“There was a lot of experimentation. Because we’re not working in Abbey Road, or even Tiny Telephone, everything we did was the second or third attempt that we did doing it, for us being musicians first and then record engineers and then producers and mixers after,” Martin says. “Doing all three and having the ability to not worry about the clock, that allowed us to really experiment.”

They have consulted with some sound experts who steered them in the right direction at times, but a lot of the charm of the recording is that they didn’t always know the correct way to do it. When they would land on the wrong thing, they’d come up with some creative sounds.

“If it’s technically wrong, then who cares? If it sounds cool, let’s try it,” Hagmann says. “When you’re recording in odd spaces, you just try a lot of things.” - Good Times

Since winning The Deli SF’s Artist of the Month poll last year, the fuzzy Bay Area indie rockers Talkie have been hard at work on their forthcoming album Fundamental Things, slotted to be released on April 27th. The Deli is excited to announce the premiere of the single “Costa Rica” (streaming below), a catchy and quirky track that we just can’t get enough of. The strength of this song is in its deceptive simplicity; meaning, the way the four-piece can make interesting guitar parts, tight percussion, and smooth lyricism all sound so easy and carefree. But, that's just Talkie in a nutshelll. Stay tuned for the release on April 27th, and make sure to mark June 9th on your calendar so you can see Talkie take Bottom of the Hill. - Lilly Milman - The Deli Magazine