“The whole venture of this band, the idea of this band anyways, it’s still pretty recent,” said Bridget Stiebris, one half of indie rock band OK Cool. Stiebris, along with fellow band member Haley Blomquist, only began crafting music for the group two years ago. But the two have accomplished a lot in their short time span, including releasing a series of stellar singles that capture an innocent DIY spirit full of future promise. Their latest release, the two-track “Songs From the Spare Room” released in February, is their most accomplished yet.
Part of this is unsurprising. Stiebris and Blomquist entered the music world with formal training. Both were part of local music schools, Downers Grove’s Rock Academy and Arlington Heights’ El Rey Music Center. And it was their music schooling that ultimately brought them together when the owner of Blomquist’s music school decided to put together an all-girl cover band.
After some lineup changes, Blomquist found Stiebris on Facebook. “She originally hit me up because I had a guitar on my profile picture,” Stiebris admitted. “Like we had never talked or anything.” Not content on just focusing on “one thing long enough,” Stiebris was in the process of learning how to play drums when the two met. Originally turning down Blomquist’s offer to join the group, Stiebris eventually joined when a drummer was needed.
“It was really good. We were hanging around the summer. It was a good place to kind of hone your skills and figure out that part of it,” said Blomquist. Before OK Cool, the two were also in a group called The Weekend Run Club, but it wasn’t until 2020 that they began writing songs together officially as OK Cool.
“And we’ve made a couple of records now, but I definitely feel like we’re still figuring it out. And that’s a kind of a fun feeling,” said Stiebris. “Like, I don’t feel like we have to kind of settle on a specific sound or anything.”
Unlike other artists, the isolation and downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic brought the two together creatively. And it also inspired them to step outside of their comfort zone. Used to performing in the background as part of the rhythm section of other bands (Blomquist plays bass and Stiebris plays drums), forming their own group has forced the two musicians to redirect the spotlight onto themselves.
“The funny thing is that neither of us have ever been singers, or have ever had a desire to be singers,” said Stiebris. “Writing our own lyrics was this whole other side of music we’d never really gone into before. This active time of going from the background to the forefront all at once has been this crazy social experiment we’re doing to ourselves, but it’s a ton of fun.”
In addition to making music, the two also formed their own label, Take a Hike Records, as a way to stay involved and supportive of their local music community.
“We wanted to figure out more things for other people and be more involved in our music community,” Blomquist said about starting their own label. “Kind of growing through that and working on our own writing together, and putting out more and more and kind of honing our sound with each one of those [releases].”
The elevation in OK Cool’s sound from early singles like the minimalism of “I Can’t Stand in Ice Skates” to their latest release, brimming with confidence, speaks to the continued development of their artistry. This is a new group, but one with a point of view and one not afraid to test things out as they learn and grow along the way. They even admit to experimenting in their songwriting style, jumping from jam sessions one day to poetry workshops the next. Nothing, essentially, is off the table.
“It’s fun to kind of get together and fly things around and mess with the structures and everything,” Stiebris said. “I think we just really like for it to be organic because songwriting two years into this [is] still another one of those concepts that’s really new to us. And we haven’t really, in the grand scheme of things, written very much at all.”
Rejecting the pressures of what it means to be an artist or how much to release or what their music should even sound like gives the duo room to treat all of it as one large inquiry into making music. It’s a safer place to play around in. And for audiences, a fun one to experience.
Britt Julious is a freelance critic.