“The customer is always right” is a cliche of the retail/restaurant industry, but the thing with cliches is there is always a little bit of truth in them. Alexandria resident Kasey Raj believes the same can be said in the music scene, in that musicians need to change it up for the audience.
“All artists in the world need some kind of attention from audiences or else what’s the point of doing it,” says Raj.
That’s why Raj has been thinking up how best to draw the eyeballs—and ears—of his potential audience for his new punk rock band, BOAYT, from the start, not least of all beginning with the band’s name (pronounced boy-eight). Raj confesses there is no hidden meaning behind the name, he made it up simply to give the band a unique signifier.
BOAYT, brought together by word of mouth, is a three-person band with Raj playing guitar, Aaron Aleiner on bass and Guido Dehoratiis manning the drums. Dehoratiis, a Falls Church native, had heard Raj was looking for a drummer to start a new band and went to see him play with his previous band, Tempercrush. Aleiner joined the group after moving down from Philadelphia to D.C. and was put in touch with Raj through a mutual friend. The trio have been playing together since January and are currently preparing to release their first album, Young and Hungry, which was recorded at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio and produced by Don Zientara.
While they bill themselves as a punk rock band, Raj says that label is just the easiest classification. According to Raj, BOAYT has taken influences from blues, rock & roll and other genres, but overall their style leans closest to punk.
“Everyone describes punk rock differently, rock & roll differently, blues differently,” says Raj. “But every single person in the world as far as I know has one thing in common, which is that feeling inside them.” If BOAYT’s music can get audiences to feel anything, whether they like it or not, that is all that matters to Raj.
Metro-D.C. music fans will be able to get one of their first tastes of BOAYT on May 5 via a performance at the Velvet Lounge in D.C. That same day, the band will release its first single, “I Don’t Know What I Want.” The same strategy will be used at the band’s other upcoming shows, releasing another single in conjunction with a June 8 performance at Slash Run in the District, and releasing the entire album digitally on Bandcamp at the same time as a July 12 show at D.C.’s Black Cat, where physical albums will also be on sale.
