Today we’d like to introduce you to Animal Arcade
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Our journey began in December 2023 – we’re only about 7 months into this thing, which feels crazy to reflect on considering how fast things are moving.
We come from relatively simple beginnings but have big dreams. Tommy Floegel (guitar/sax) and Will Duson (keys/backup vocals) met in college at Belmont University, but didn’t begin making music together until early 2023 when Tommy moved to Austin and Will noticed a familiar face posted up at Barton Springs.
Will and Sam Sobell (drums/percussion), were roommates and high school friends who played music together in a pop-punk band from 2012-2015 as teenagers.
Danny Vicharelly (bass/guitar) got involved with the group after meeting some mutual musician friends at a few different open jams around town.
Once we solidified a few funky instrumental demos, we began our search for a singer, which led to Gigi Hess (vocals) rounding out the band. More on this story later…
The journey since then has been a fast-moving one, and the our weeks are filled with a balancing act of writing new original music, evolving our live show, and self-producing and releasing professional recordings of our original music.
Our fans have described the band’s live show as “energizing” and “genuinely a really fun time”. We attempt to keep every show unique and interesting – you’ll never hear us play the same set twice, and we incorporate a variety of genre-bending tunes and instrument changes throughout the show to keep fans engaged.
Our ultimate vision is to bring our energizing show to venues across America, and help drive the return of fun, funky, dance-first music back to the forefront.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Our greatest challenge came early on, when the band’s first singer left the band 11 days before our first ever show.
This led to a frantic search to fill the now empty singer position – we skimmed every possible outlet for finding musicians, including Craigslist, Facebook groups, Vampr, open jams around town, and more.
Right when we were about to make the call to postpone the show, we stumbled across a phenomenal voice on Instagram after browsing the hashtag #ATXsinger.
That singer was none other than Gigi Hess, who stepped up, immediately got along with the band, and learned all of our music just one week before the show! It was only over time that we learned that she was already making a run as a professional singer, having appeared on both The Voice and American Idol.
The rest is history, as they say.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
One of the unique aspects of Animal Arcade is how we fuse together multiple genres together in our original music – people who listen to our songs have identified elements of pop, funk, soul, disco, rock, electronica, latin, and even EDM and hard rock. We’re also all multi-instrumentalists and enjoy switching up instruments on stage for different songs.
We would love to get to a place where we can support ourselves doing this full time. Until then, we’re going to continue to build the band up into something that we’re proud of and trust that our music and mission will resonate with others as much as it does to us.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
Likes: Hanging out with fans before and after shows, collaborating with other Austin-based bands around town, playing the venues around town we used to dream of playing less than a year ago, changing instruments on stage. One of the big reasons why we love Austin is the city’s attitude towards new music and live performances. It’s really cool to us that we have the opportunity to pursue our music project in such a vibrant city.
Dislikes: Broken air-conditioners, the relentless grind of building a social media presence in order to keep growing our following,
Contact Info:
- Website: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0fXPz7VyceMcBw9WE9lBaJ?si=QWPzLQUpQsugOY64YszjGA
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/animalarcade.mp3/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562590994005
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AnimalArcade.MP3
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@animalarcade.mp3
