Phoenix-based indie outfit Louis on Tour — currently founding members Nick Kahlor (guitar) and Jesse Martinez (guitar) with Sam Green (drums), Tyler Stumpy Beck (bass) and Shana Backman (vocals) — can trace their origins back to 2018: The band’s founding duo Kahlor and Martinez started Louis on Tour after their high school band split up. Through countless auditions and hard work, the duo found and recruited Green and Stumpy Beck. And some after a couple of years, Backman joined the band in 2021.
Their debut EP, last year’s It’s Pronounced /Lou•ee saw the Phoenix-based quintet quickly establishing a high-energy sound with dueling guitar, power house vocals and tight grooves. Since the release of their debut EP, the members of Louis on Tour have been busy writing and recording material for their full-length debut, Don’t Hit Kids.
But in the meantime . . . The Phoenix-based quintet’s latest single “Shaman Mama” is built with enormous grunge-inspired power chords and dexterous guitar work and thunderous drumming paired with Backman’s powerhouse Hayley Williams-like vocal, rousingly anthemic hooks — and fittingly a trippy, shamanic like bridge. Sonically, the song sees the band seamlessly meshing elements of metal, emo, punk and grunge in a way that feels familiar yet very new.
The band explains that the song was inspired by a story that a therapist told them about her work and one of her patients. The patient had gone through something terrible, and the therapist, claiming to be a shaman, offered the patient a journey into the spiritual realm, so that they could collect a missing piece of the patient. “The song is an interpretation of what we think that journey was like,” the band says.
“The most fun and challenging song for me to write was ‘Shaman Mama,’ just because we came up with the song name and the sound of the song before we came up with the concept,” the band’s Shana Backman adds. “When it made for an epic story about a shaman, I knew nothing about shamanism. So, I definitely spent a lot of time immersing myself and deep diving into that so that I served it some justice that kind of made for an epic journey.”
