It’s hard to believe that March is here already, and we are featuring our third The Zone @ 91-3’s Band of the Month for 2021. This month, we’re excited to share indie-rock trio Wet Future.
Victoria’s Wet Future is made up of Cam Nayler on bass, Lucas Bosma on lead guitar, and is fronted by Sean Lyons on guitar and lead vocals.
As the first snowflakes fell before a winter storm, Tyson Elder dug deep with Sean, Lucas, and Cam about their mysterious origins, their future releases, and everything Wet Future.
Tyson Elder: I can’t start the interview without congratulating you on being The Zone’s March Band of the Month.
Cam Nayler: Thank you!
TE: It must be exciting for you to be Band of the Month having put out your debut single in early January.
Lucas Bosma: Yeah! It’s our first song, and we are excited [Laughs].
Sean Lyons: It’s a good start, and we want to keep the momentum going; just continuously release videos and singles. We are planning on putting out a full-length album later in the year too.
TE: Do you have most of the album written at this point?
Cam: It’s roughly 90% written. We need to fix some structure things here and there, but besides that, it’s just recording it all.
Lucas: We have a huge pool of songs that we’ve written over the past year and a half that we can pick from and curate for the record.
Cam: I’ve been playing with Sean for about three years now. When Sean lived in Vancouver and was working on solo records, I went over there to play guitar with him.
Both Sean and I grew up in Port Alberni, and before we both eventually moved to Victoria we started a band to play a gig at a music festival he booked. We called ourselves Sean Lyons & The Good Boys – it was just the us and all of our best friends. It was a lot of fun and a good time but… we were just terrible. [Laughs] Like, not good at all. We did that for like year and a half…?
Sean: Something like that.
Cam: Eventually Sean and I had a conversation that we should actually be in a good band. That’s when we found Lucas.
Sean: I guess it all stared with that competition, eh? There was this Zattzoo Project Battle of the Bands competition in Port Alberni. I came first place as a solo artist among all these bands and the prize was a slot at the Five Acre Shaker.
TE: I’ve heard lots of great things about that music festival from friends who have played and gone up to enjoy the music. Plenty of them rave about how fun the festival is.
Sean: It’s pretty wild.
Cam: I think it’s been running for about five years now so it is still relatively new.
TE: The Five Acre Shaker is in someone’s backyard, right?
Cam: For the first two years it was but all of his neighbours were like “this can’t fucking happen anymore.” [Everyone laughs] There is the really old log mill that they don’t run anymore called Maclean’s Mill, and that’s where they host it now. It’s an amazing spot for a festival and has potential when things eventually come back.
TE: The idea of a destination festival calls to people. Especially one within the island that doesn’t have the extra burdens of a ferry. You can sell that idea pretty easily.
Lucas: I think if festivals like the Five Acre Shaker could happen this summer we would gunning to play them.
Sean: Unfortunately I don’t think festivals are going to be happening this summer with everything going on…
TE: I have seen some festivals happening in New Zealand.
Cam: Really?! That seems concerning [nervously laughs].
Sean: I think it’s the same with Australia. They had no COVID cases.
Lucas: [In his best Australian accent] Crickey! [Everyone laughs]
Cam: If they are getting away with it – good for them. Then again, they probably have some crazy regulations on everything too.
TE: I miss concerts so much. You don’t know what I’d give to drink several beers at Lucky Bar again.
Cam: Who would have thought I’d miss being so close with a bunch of sweaty people? You don’t know what you will miss until you miss it.
TE: You know what I don’t miss? The BO from all those sweaty people. [laughs]
Lucas: There is nothing like a good Logan’s punk show BO. [laughs]
Lucas: I actually first met Sean when he was playing a solo show in Vancouver.
Sean: I was very impressed with Lucas.
Lucas: Sean was opening for my old band, Saltwater Soul. We bonded over the headliners being complete dicks to us. I definitely thought he was weird at first. [laughs]
Sean: His parents think I’m weird too. [laughs]
Lucas: Yes. Yes, they do. [laughs]
Cam: We thought you were an amazing musician but when you joined the band I had my doubts. Just because you wore a sailor hat. I thought “we can’t have a guy who wears a sailor’s hat on stage.” [laughs]
Lucas: I still have that hat.
Sean: After a while we lost some of the Good Boys and changed our name to Chapped Lips. A few months after that we changed our name to Sniff the Pepper and more recently we decided on Wet Future.
Cam: It was a good time to rebrand ourselves and start from the ground up.
Cam: One of the things that makes this group kind of special is we all come from completely different musical backgrounds. Sean is really into punk and modern rock like Arctic Monkeys and Cage the Elephant. Lucas comes from surf-rock and I come from a blues background. There is something really special about our dynamic. There is also a lot of push and pull and arguments at times, but it’s what makes this band special. I feel like something great will come from this.
Sean: We’ve spent a lot of time writing. We have like 20 songs at the moment that we are going to get down to 11 for the record. They are all very different too. There is going to be some funk on there, some punky stuff, blues and rock obviously. We are trying to keep it cool meets fun genres.
We want to have an emphasis on big choruses and get people moving like it’s a live show.
Lucas: That’s everything to us.
Sean: When it comes to music you either have to connect or want to move to it. Motion is huge.
TE: If you can get both that’s even better.
TE: Let’s talk about your debut single, Toughen Up. It will be featured on The Zone all month. It came out on the January 1st and was one of the first brand new songs I heard this year.
Cam: Love that. We aimed for that.
TE: It took me a little while to fire it up. I had a bit of a hangover from the year before.
Sean: Toughen Up was written about trying to decide between a love interest and a passion – like being in a band while trying to decide which is more important. What’s more valuable? Which should stay with and focus my energy on? That’s what the song is really about.
At the end of the song you have the lyrics “I can feel you breathing down my neck, but I’m in love.” Is it about the girl or about the music? That’s the question that is left up in the air. Everyone has that fork in the road in their life when they have to decide on big things. It’s about sacrifice.
Cam: Sean writes most of our songs on either electric or acoustic guitar by himself…
Sean: Or Cam starts it off. He’s got a lot of nasty bass licks. [laughs]
Cam: Sean came to us with Toughen up with just the guitar and vocals. We jammed it out over the past year and we finally a structure we liked. We were pretty confident about it and decided this was the song we wanted to go with for our debut. It is a good representation of what the band is going to be.
We headed up to Silverside Studios in Cobble Hill with Lucas McKennon, and Chris Eriksen produced it. We brought in Brett Attig on drums and did it live off the floor for most of the song. We jammed it out for probably like 20 or 30 minutes and it’s wasn’t jiving. Brett was playing the drum beat our old drummer had played and then the producer came in told him to just play whatever Brett feels. He did, and in my opinion, it came out much better than the original version. It was an exciting process.
TE: Working with people like Lucas McKennon and Chris Eriksen helps too. They are both very talented guys who know what they are doing.
Cam: Going into the studio we were so confident that we weren’t going to record live off the floor. We were like fuck that. We had never played with Brett before. There was no way this is going to sound good.
Lucas: We had some resilience to that idea it took some convincing to get us to do it live off the floor.
Cam: They pushed us in that direction and I’m actually glad they did it. You can hear that in the recording too. The only thing we overdubbed was lead guitar and vocals after.
TE: Thanks for chatting with me guys. I look forward to hearing you on The Zone all month.
Sean: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
Wet Future’s single, Toughen Up, will be in rotation on The Zone @ 91-3 for the month of March 2021. Find out more about the band by visiting their Band of the Month page where you will also be able to hear their minty-fresh new single, Peppermints.
Rocktographers would also like to give a shoutout to our dear friend and collaborator, Adam Lee from Victoria Music Scene for assisting with lighting and helping out on our Band of the Month shoot this month.
Rocktographers is a proud supporting sponsor of The Zone’s Band of the Month program.