Tempe Indie Jingle Band Slug Bug Are Just Along for the Ride

If you’ve paid attention to the Tempe music scene as of late, you just might recognize Slug Bug. The quartet – singer/guitarist Wyatt Hjerpe, bassist Ellie Willard, guitarist Alex Zahn, and drummer Waylon Hjerpe – have only been official for a year. (Their first show came in January 2022 – at Willard’s house in Tempe.)

But in that time, they’ve garnered some sizable hype. They won a recent battle of the bands contest to play ASU’s Devilpalooza 2023. Then there was that day-two opening slot for M3F. They even filmed a Tiny Desert Concert for KJZZ. Despite all that, they’re very much a young and inexperienced band.

“We’ve never sent an email saying, ‘Please put us on this bill,'” Willard says. “We’ve just been really, really lucky and had the right connections that got us to the right places.”

Well, maybe they’re not entirely inexperienced. Hjerpe says he’s played local shows, including a Tempe coffeehouse, since he was a teen, and credits his relationship with fellow rocker Veronica Everheart for learning the ins and outs. Meanwhile, Willard has been performing in various projects since she was 11 or 12. It’s not long considering they’re all mostly of college age, but it proves that they’re savvy enough. Especially when it comes to seizing on some important if not complicated opportunities.

“Unfortunately, my uncle, who was big into the drums, he passed away, and we got the drum kit,” Wyatt Hjerpe says. “We had this drum kit and we thought, ‘Well, again, let’s do something, and I basically persuaded my brother [Waylon Hjerpe] into drumming.”

It helps that they’ve also seized on their existing friendships/relationships in a big way.

“All of us are really great friends,” Willard says. “So the main reason that drives me – at least in Slug Bug- is that we’re all buddies. Any time we play, we’re just hanging out and having a good time. And it doesn’t get better than that, really.”

That doesn’t mean, however, they don’t have their fair share of internal struggles.

“I’d add to that, and say that having a brother in the band changes things as well,” Wyatt Hjerpe says of the band’s interpersonal dynamics. “Because there’s been one or two times, for sure, where there’s been disagreements. When you have that many people period, there’s going to be issues. It’s just a part of the process.”

He adds, “But that closeness makes it so you’re not afraid to say whatever it is that you want to. We can just call it off and go get food or something.”

Part of their multifaceted friendship means they each bring something different creatively to the table. Hjerpe says he loves “pretty much all that 2000s, early 2000s bands,” name-dropping The Strokes and Mac Demarco, while everyone else maintains more eclectic tastes.

“Alex brings more of the ’90s guitar thing, and Ellie brings some of that ’80s New Wave thing,” Hjerpe says. “Waylon will listen to anything – even, like, Mongolian throat-humming beat compilations or something.”

The biggest issue, then, has been trying to sort out their musical identity, especially in the weird and multifaceted landscape of Tempe.

“Early on, we weren’t really calling ourselves any one genre or the other,” Zahn says. “And we didn’t know how to book shows with bands of genres. They’d put a bill together and we didn’t know where we fit in.”

Adds Hjerpe, “We’d play shows with indie bands, and then we sounded out of place. So we’d play with punk bands, and then we’d sound too soft.”

Luckily (or maybe not), the band were eventually saddled with their very own genre: “indie jangle.”

“But then the indie jangle was something we were all laughing about, and it definitely set more of a jovial tone to our project as a whole,” Zahn says. “It helped us realize this was kind of a goofy thing.”

Adds Willard, “It was definitely nice, but someone decided that for us. So we thought, ‘Yeah, we agree with that.’ I think it would have been terrible for us to try to put a genre to what we did. So we just accept it.”

If it seems a tad silly for a band with this much buzz to be concerned with something so trivial as genre tags, it’s because Slug Bug have a decidedly laissez-faire approach to their career.

“I think we really started this band on being so genuine,” Hjerpe says. “None of us thought, ‘We’re going to start a band and we’re going to totally blow up.’ I think we played six First Fridays in a row. And that’s how we got a base of people who followed us and actually showed up to our next shows and our next shows and our next shows.”

Yet there’s no denying that not only have they “blown up,” but a lot of that success has come fairly easy compared to some other outfits.

“We just kind of did it for fun,” Willard says of their Devilpalooza gig. “I think we didn’t have very high expectations going into it. We actually registered late.”

The same mostly goes for playing M3F.

“It was kind of just thrown at us,” Hjerpe says. “The M3F folks put something on Instagram like, ‘Which local bands do you want to play?’ And I guess a lot of people said [Slug Bug]. But we definitely played to more people at Devilpalooza.”

They were so unprepared, in fact, that Hjerpe says a music business professor of Everheart’s helped them get out of a radius clause that would’ve stopped them from playing the Valley for some 200 days.

There are other moments, too. For instance, they did basically zero promotional work behind their recent Jazz Compilation 5 EP and still “got 4,000 streams in roughly one month,” Hjerpe says.

At the same time, this easy breezy approach and overall lucky streak doesn’t mean the band aren’t self-aware enough to recognize it all.

“The fear of making mistakes is still there because we don’t know what we’re doing,” Hjerpe says. “I’ve got to figure out how to do that work and figure out how to actually make it happen.”

Zahn says the experiences have helped the band mature; M3F; for instance, taught them about contracts and insurance and operating alongside bigger national acts, adding, “It gave me the first real sense of, ‘OK, maybe we’re going to go somewhere with this.'”

But Zahn says he also recognizes their unique position, and how tenuous a proper career can be in this often topsy-turvy industry.

“I can’t speak for everyone in the band, but I think a lot of this has to do with luck,” he says. “Or that they could be flukes, and it can be over next month.”

He adds, “It’s interesting because you want to be excited and you want to keep going and use this momentum to keep being able to produce art that people love. But at the same time, you don’t want to hold on to that and bank on that too much and set yourself up for disappointment if it is just a fluke. So it’s this weird balance of going back and forth between that momentum and trying to stay grounded.”

As such, all that Slug Bug can do collectively is accept the luck and support they’ve been given and plan ahead accordingly. That includes a possible “micro-tour” and some “high quality” singles down the road, according to Hjerpe. (They’re also playing May’s Space Cadet Fest at Trunk Space.) If they really want to keep the hype train rolling onward, though, it means doing things they never have before.

“Hopefully a release show is being planned for the summer,” Willard says of their most recent EP. “Which would be our first show we’ve ever booked, so we’re going to have to email a venue.”