And The Kids has one of the great childhood band origin stories. Vocalist/guitarist Hannah Mohan and drummer/vocalist Rebecca Lasaponaro met in seventh grade while both were music students at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton, Massachusetts, a facility referred to by Mohan and Lasaponaro as “Jail For Kids” (as in “JFK”).
According to band lore, Mohan and Lasaponaro started smoking pot and dropped out of high school together. With their creative senses and time availability heightened, they became more serious about their musical pursuits.
They played in a variety of bands as a rhythm section, but Mohan wanted to write songs, so they formed a duo and adopted their band name — originally And the Kids and the Pirates — after their status as relative street urchins earned them the derogatory local nickname “the kids.” Fearful that they would become the punks everyone already believed them to be, their parents enrolled them in the nearby Institute for the Musical Arts. They met keyboardist Megan Miller at IMA in 2011, and the following year, the trio released Nothing Came First, their first EP as And The Kids, which led to a contract with renowned indie label Signature Sounds, based in their hometown.
And The Kids has always been a rather tumultuous collective, enduring a number of lineup shifts and odd situations; Miller has become a tangential member since her unfortunate exile in her home country of Canada after being refused admittance to the U.S. in 2014 and fellow IMA alumni Taliana Katz joined as bassist shortly thereafter (Katz has since left the band).
And The Kid’s early Bandcamp page bore this description of their sound: “accessible unconscious existential indie glitter popsicle crisis music.” That doesn’t seem all that far-fetched, given the frenetic and artful Indie Rock results on their subsequent recordings, 2015’s Turn to Each Other, 2016’s Friends Share Lovers (which they recorded in Montreal to accommodate Miller) and their recently released third album, When This Life Is Over, featuring their Chihuahua mascot Little Dog on the cover.
With Mohan’s earthy and swooping Siouxsie Sioux-meets-Elizabeth Fraser vocals and Indie/New Wave/Punk guitar climbs and dives and Lasaponaro’s polyrhythmic thunder and nuanced intricacy, combined with an avant-garde sense of arrangement and the lyrical freedom to explore any topic, And the Kids is one of Indie Rock’s most elegantly aggressive outfits.
The band plays Urban Artifact Thursday, July 11 with Leggy, Strobobean and The Harmaleighs. The all-ages show begins at 9 p.m. Tickets are $6 in advance or $10 at the door.
This article appears in Jul 3-10, 2019.