Led by Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and guitarist Shab Ferdowski and featuring Skyler Garn (lead guitar), Kenzo Cardenas (bass) and Arturs Reirs (drums), the rising indie rock act Blushh can trace its origins back to 2015, when Ferdowski started writing songs as a joke before spending a month long trip to Ireland. At the time, she thought it would be funny if she could make some money busking on the streets of Galway while she was abroad. And although she didn’t make a lot of money, she wound up getting into the habit of daily songwriting.
When Ferdowski returned to Los Angeles with a batch of new songs, her friends offered to join her to flesh out the new material. She bought herself an electric guitar in the Fall of 2016, recorded her debut single “Are We Too Far” in her friend’s garage and shortly after played her first full band show. In 2017 Ferdowski and her bandmates released their debut EP It’s Fine, which they followed with a split EP with Maddie Ross that Fall. And by 2018, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter mastered power chords, which appeared prominently on the band’s sophomore EP 2018’s Thx 4 Asking. The band went on their first West Coast tour, and within the next nine months the band went on two more West Coast tours, played SXSW and Treefort Festival — all before writing and recording an album. “After Blushh went on its first tour in the Fall of 2018 though, everything flipped on its head. I had never felt more energized or sure about anything before,”the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and guitarist recalled in press notes. “Adrenaline and excitement made a light bulb explode somewhere inside me and for the first time in my life, I had something to work towards! Something to care about! Playing music that I wrote in my bedroom for people in different places, making connections and building community along the way? It still fills me with an adrenaline I had never felt before that first tour, an it’s a feeling I can’t ignore.”
Building upon a growing profile, the members of Blushh will be releasing their full-length debut R.I.P. Apathy is slated for an April 17, 2020 release. “The album is a reminder to myself that I have something to give a shit about,” Ferdowski says. “That I am happier when I get out of my head and focus on the work in front of me, the community around me, and the waves we can make when we come together.” Ferdowski adds., “I’ve always known I’m a late bloomer. I spent all my life until I was 22 just going through the motions of school and so on, blending into whatever space I was in, not really making an effort to be my own person. ‘Get out of your head, Shab and stop being so apathetic!’ I would tell my younger self.”
R.I.P. Apathy’s latest single is the “Too Dark.” Centered around rousingly anthemic hooks, an alternating quiet-loud-quiet song structure, fuzzy and distorted power chords, thunderous drumming and Ferdowski’s ethereal vocals, the track immediately brings 120 Minutes era alt rock to mind — in particular Veruca Salt, Hole and others, complete with neurotic yet earnest songwriting. And while written from the perspective of someone in the prototypical quarter life crisis,.the song captures the uncertainty of being a young person in an equally uncertain world.
“I wrote’ Too Dark’ in a time when I was stuck in my head. It’s where most of the songs off our first album, R.I.P. Apathy, came from. I had just moved back home to my parent’s house for the second time, 25 miles away from my social life. Because I don’t drive, I felt stuck physically and emotionally in all kinds of ways. I was 26, never really had a direction I was working towards, didn’t know what I wanted from life, and felt like I had just spent the past few years since college goofing around instead of working towards something real.”
The recently released video for “Too Dark” features the members of the rising Los Angeles-based indie rock band in front of bright backgrounds — it’s playfully ironic, behind-the-scenes, DIY-take on a song that’s a bit dark and uncertain.
