Blush — Friendship, Growth and the New EP

Some bands begin with a plan. This one didn’t.

On this episode of Inlet Wire, Blush talk about how the band slowly took shape through friendship, shared shifts, and casual jams that turned into something more. It started without much agenda. Just people spending time together, making noise, and seeing what happened.

That part comes through clearly in the conversation. Even now, after recording and releasing music, Blush still talk about the band like something that grew naturally rather than something forced into place.

They trace it back to those early connections between band members, and the way one jam led to another. What began in a loose acoustic setting eventually became a four-piece rock band from Victoria, but the feeling underneath it still sounds the same. A group of friends making music because it felt good to do it.

That shared history also says a lot about the band’s sound. When Rosie talks about what ties Blush together, she doesn’t land on one fixed style. She talks about texture. The synth parts, the strange sounds, the guitar pedals, the details that keep revealing themselves when you sit with the songs a little longer. It is a good way to describe a band like this. Their music does not feel pinned down to one lane, but it does feel connected.

One of the nicest parts of the episode is hearing how early the band started committing things to tape. Before they had even played their first show together, they had already recorded their first EP. That is not how a lot of bands do it, but it fits the Blush story. The project did not seem to grow out of live momentum first. It grew out of time spent together, figuring things out, and following where the music was already going.

That early recording experience at Barnhouse Sound ended up shaping more than just the first EP. Drummer Eric talks about how it changed the way the band thought about production. Not just getting a performance down, but hearing how a song can evolve through tone, texture, mic choices, and experimentation. Later on, that carried into the newer recording process too.

There is also a nice full-circle feeling when they talk about the single “Seasons.” It was the first Blush song I heard, and in the episode the band describe it as a song that connects back to their roots. It carries that laid-back, acoustic, unhurried feeling from the early days, before there were bigger plans, deadlines, or the usual pressure that can start creeping in around a band. In that sense, it sounds like a memory as much as a single.

The newer material seems to stretch things a bit further. They talk about coming out of sessions at The Hive Studio with Colin Stewart, and it sounds like the next EP gave them room to focus in a deeper way. More time, more intention, and a stronger sense of what they wanted to capture. When Renata talks about “Wrong Answers Only,” she describes it as something that feels more dancey than people might expect from Blush. That shift feels small on paper, but in context it says a lot. The band is still recognizably themselves, but still moving.

Maybe the most telling line in the whole episode is when they describe the new project as a time capsule of Blush in that moment. That feels right. Not in a grand way, just in an honest one.

This episode gets into where the band began, how the songs have taken shape, and what still holds the whole thing together. If you have been curious about Blush, or if you only know a song or two, this one gives a clear sense of who they are and how they got here.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited from the original recording for readability. Speaker labels and brief audio notes have been added for accessibility.

Transcript

Cold open

Blush: We started this project so organically, not with the intention of being a band or releasing any music, but just us hanging out and sharing a common interest and a way to spend time with each other.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Main episode

Eric Chan: I’m Eric Chan, and you’re listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

In this episode, I’m joined by Blush from Victoria. What started as friends making music together slowly turned into a band with its own shape and sound.

So let’s wire in.

Blush: Blush is a four-piece rock band from Vancouver Island, Victoria, British Columbia. We’re just a couple of friends who started jamming together, and we progressively got louder and better at making music.

Eric Chan: Friendship plays a big part in Blush, and here’s how they first met.

Blush: I met Eric before we all worked together at the same workplace, at a different restaurant, and we jammed a few times with a friend of ours. Then when we all came together at this other restaurant, I think it was like, you play an instrument too? Like, let’s jam.

Eric and I would jam on our guitars, and then Renata was like, I can play piano. I would love to come jam. And Rosie is an amazing fiddle player. We kind of got together in this acoustic atmosphere, which was a lot of fun.

Eric Chan: From the friendship behind the band to the song “Dear Building,” bass player Rosie says a big part of Blush comes down to texture.

Rosie: I feel like all of our songs, or a lot of them, are quite different from one another. So something that could apply to all of our songs and projects, and yeah, that’s kind of the through line for me.

I think a lot of that comes from Renata’s synth magic and all of the cool weird sounds that she makes and adds. I think that’s something that makes our music kind of unique. And also weird, crunchy, cool guitar stuff coming from Anton’s gajillion pedals and stuff.

That’s something that I really like about the music. I feel like a lot of the time there are things going on that I don’t even hear until I’m sitting down listening to it.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: Not long after coming together, Blush found themselves doing something a lot of bands don’t: recording their first EP before ever playing a show.

Blush: We actually, funnily enough, recorded our first EP before we played our first show together. It was a couple months of just jamming bi-weekly in my auntie’s shed in her backyard.

We saw this thing from Barnhouse Sound that was like an artist development program of some kind where you just had to submit some music. So one day I just put my iPhone in the middle of the room and I was like, all right, we gotta play like five songs. We sent those five songs off, and Rosie went off on a two- or three-month trip to Europe, and we got accepted to it.

We were just like, all right, we’re gonna do it, and I hope that when Rosie gets back, she’ll want to play bass in the band.

Eric Chan: For drummer Eric, that time at Barnhouse didn’t just help make the first EP. It also helped shape how the band worked on a new release.

Eric (Blush): When we recorded at Barnhouse, it was an awesome experience, but it was a very compressed experience. It was really quick.

So having those full five days to kind of spread out and redo takes and play with mic positioning and play with tones and pedals and stuff, that was really cool. I think what stuck out most from that experience was just the fine-tuning that went into it, and then also the emphasis of production.

So how something sounded when you first recorded it to where it ended up, and being flexible with that sound being completely different than what you expected, sometimes for the better. You record something one way and then you put it through a bunch of different pedals and it comes out so much more textured, to use Rosie’s word, than you had planned initially.

So it was cool just to see that evolution that a song could take from start to finish. I think we got to experience that a lot more fully with this most recent project.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: We also talked about their single “Seasons.” It was the first song I heard from Blush, and it really left an impression on me.

Blush: We just released a single called “Seasons.” That one’s more like speaking to our roots as a band. It’s very laid-back, acoustic. I think that one really speaks to our past and our journey.

Yeah, it does have a very nostalgic feeling. And I think part of that, for me personally, is nostalgia for the jams we had at the beginning of when we first started playing together. Yeah, the kind of unhurried feeling in it. It didn’t feel like we had an agenda, like we were rehearsing for shows or trying to iron out things for recording or whatever. It was just making music for the sake of making music because it felt good and it was fun.

[Music excerpt from “Seasons” by Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: It’s clear Blush have bigger plans in the works, and this new EP feels like something people should keep an eye on.

Blush: We just came out of recording, I guess, our sophomore EP at The Hive Studio with Colin Stewart here in Victoria. I would say that that’s our first proper in-the-studio, for multiple days, multiple hours, focusing on this project. And it was a really amazing experience being there.

Eric Chan: Here is synth player Renata talking about the new song “Wrong Answers Only.”

Renata: This song, I feel like, is the one that makes you feel kind of dancey, which is kind of new for our music because I feel like our music is very shoegazey, and some of our stuff is a bit slower and moodier, makes you just kind of sway. So this one kind of gets you moving.

[Music excerpt from “Wrong Answers Only” by Blush plays.]

Blush: It was us creating a time capsule of Blush in that moment. And yeah, like Eric was saying, that’s something we can hold forever for the rest of our lives. It’s just like a little timestamp.

Eric Chan: That was Blush. I’m Eric Chan, and you’ve been listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

Transcript note

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