Homegrown band talks new music, remixes and what comes next

The summer of 2020 was dreary even by Juneau standards, but at least one local garden is flourishing.

Garden of Agony, a hard-rocking four-piece band consisting of members of the Friday family — Darren, Caleb, David and Keilani, who writes and performs as Daizy Floyd — released an album in May. In the ensuing months, they have released new music videos and continued to worked on new music amid the pandemic.

[They’re a family band]

“That gave us a lot of time to work on a lot of time to work on everything in general,” Floyd said in a video interview. “It kind of gave us the opportunity to just sit down and write on our terms in our own processes.”

Darren Friday said several songs are now nearing completion and are likely to be released as a series of standalone singles.

Recently, Garden of Agony also found some new sonic textures in their older tunes.

That came courtesy of work with Matt Coles. Coles is a musician, engineer and producer whose diverse decades-spanning credits include work on the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and releases from Blake Shelton, Chicago and more.

The Fridays said they were put in touch with Coles through local music promoter and artist Lance Mitchell. Coles was given access to the studio recordings used to make the Garden of Agony album “Chasing Summer,” and the results are remixed, souped-up versions of the alt-rock songs that made up the album.

“They definitely sound like they’ve been mixed so that they’ll better translate through radio,” Darren Friday said. “He’s definitely got the ear. You can tell he knows how to mix rock music.”

Despite the fruitful nature of the protracted, pandemic-related downtime for Garden of Agony, band members uniformly said they’re eager for a return to normalcy and performing live.

Darren Friday said the band had been able to play a handful of in-person, outdoor shows as well as some online performances, but there’s a desire to get back to gigging.

“Playing live is a completely different experience, ” Floyd said. “But it gives everybody the opportunity to listen or watch, and it kind of keeps us prepped up for any future shows, and it keeps us playing so that we don’t lose that live energy. I can’t wait to play live again, it’s going to make me appreciate it more.”