Music Mid-Week: A Taste of D.C. at our Doorstep

The vibrant retro red, white and green of Jarrod Hendricks’ windbreaker popped against the sea of gray van-roof directly above him. The window to his right exhibited the tapestry of a road trip: a tree, a building, a dash of purple, another car. The streaks of color in and out of the van were a mimicry of those on the cover of the album he helped create four years ago.

Hendricks is the lead guitarist for The Crystal Casino Band, an indie rock quartet oozing with an early 2010s, Tumblr-era, Arctic Monkeys-eque nostalgia and sound. 

The band is headed from Columbus, Ohio to Nashville, Tenn., he said in a video call with UR’s WDCE 90.1 FM. The members, who had just wrapped up the opening half of their first tour since releasing “Cardboard Cutouts,” their newest album, were about to embark on a secret recording session in “Music City.” 

“We’re going from using a lot of our physicality last few days to really putting our heads together,” Hendricks said. “It’s gonna be interesting. We’re pretty excited about it all.”

The second leg of the tour begins in Atlanta, Ga., where Hendricks says the band has never played before, and includes a stop at The Camel in Richmond on April 11. 

The quartet is Joey Mamlin on drums, Jordan Mullaney on bass, Pete Stevens III on vocals and guitar and, of course, Hendricks on lead guitar. Before they were The Crystal Casino Band, however, they formed as The Colonies. 

Stevens and Mamlin created the band a decade ago, back in 2015, when they were freshmen at George Washington University. The duo met during orientation and almost immediately started making music, Stevens said. Although classes had yet to begin, the two were developing their sound and name. They settled on The Colonials, inspired by the old name for GW’s athletic teams

Hendricks, who joined after graduation, said he was never a fan of the name and was glad to change it when the band had gathered a small following and started to shift sonically. In 2020, after brainstorming through a bracket of 20 names, the band landed on: Crystal Casino. 

With the new name, came a new logo and a fresh goal. 

“We want to be a brand,” Hendricks said. “Looking at a lot of other bands from the early 2010s, the Tumblr-era, seeing them have their logo be like a brand: that went into our newest logo.”

The name change was something of a soft reboot for the band, a change in sound as noticeable as the change in label. 

“Arctic Monkeys, The Neighborhood, The 1975, that vibe was always cool to us,” Hendricks said. “We’re capturing a little of that and putting our own spin on it.”

Starting with the album “Not About You,” production was handled by Jay Nemeyer, a fellow GW musician. 

“It’s a funny story,” Stevens said. “We played a show in the basement of my fraternity at GW and [Nemeyer’s] band also played that show.” 

Stevens and Nemeyer stayed in touch. Then one day, Nemeyer reached out. He wanted to get into more music production and introduce the quartet to his collaborator, Kyle Downes. Since the two started production for Crystal Casino, the band has seen exponential growth, Stevens said. 

“It was like ‘dammit!’ why weren’t we doing that all along?” he added. 

With the assistance of dedicated producers, the band became comfortable in its style: able to go hard and get heavy, Hendricks said. With a more mature sound, lyrics matured as well.

“With songs like: “Twenty-something Socialist” and “Curfew” and “Middle,” we’ve gotten more political in our messaging,” Hendricks said, “And started looking towards what makes D.C., D.C.”

The most popular Crystal Casino song is “Waste My Time,” and it is, unlike runner-up “Twenty-something Socialist,” not political.

“It’s really cool to have our two biggest songs be very different in messaging and sonic tones,” Hendricks said. “It's cool to have a little bit of duality.”

That “we all went to high school in the early 2010s” vibe, however, has been the through line. And that’s all come to a culmination in their most recent project, Hendricks said. 

Roughly half of “Cardboard Cutouts” was written during a retreat between the four bandmates and the producers, Hendricks said. They would split into groups and take an hour to build a bridge, a chorus and a verse. The goal was simple: make as many mini-songs as possible. 

“This new style came from the music that wasn’t written by one of us, but written by all of us,” he continued. “Making it so much more Crystal Casino.”

This album was planned out more than any of the others. There was an overarching project idea, Hendricks said. 

“We had 53 song ideas to start with and we narrowed it down to the mid-thirties, got it down another 10, and then we got down to 17,” he said. 

Not all of those songs would end up on the album. Some of them, including freshly released “29,” released Feb. 28, would go elsewhere. 

“We’re kinda making it look like a single,” Hendricks said. “But it’s the next phase of the album.” 

That next phase is not tied to their secret recording session in a less than secret city.

The band’s ongoing tour, bisected by their first recording session outside of D.C., will fittingly end in their hometown, at The Howard Theater on April 26.

“It's the last venue we haven’t really played in D.C.,” Hendricks said. “It’s like a nice last jewel in the crown of our time in D.C.”

The Crystal Casino Band made their first real stride in completing the D.C. venue circuit in 2019, back when the band was still The Colonies. The quartet had recorded two songs and was hoping to do a single release show, Hendricks said. But they got more than they bargained for. 

“The booker for the Anthem in D.C., the huge 4,000 person concert venue, asked us to play a show on a Thursday,” he said. “But Jordan was in New York.”

The band was bassless. 

Mamlin managed to find a bass player on Facebook. But this guy was a DIY bass player, a real punk, underground type. Mamlin reached out anyway. The man agreed. 

“He learned 8 songs in 4 days,” Hendricks said. “We did 3 rehearsals in a row and made it work.”

That Thursday Night, The Crystal Casino Band opened for Judah & the Lion. 

“It was very frantic and hectic,” Hendricks said. “We were backstage where so many big acts had been.”

For their release show of “Maryland House” four years later, Hendricks said, “[We] played the 9:30 Club in D.C., very hallowed ground. We are participating in something bigger than ourselves.”

Now, The Crystal Casino Band is on track to play that last plot of hallowed D.C. ground.

Contact opinions and columns editor Jonathan Sackett at jonathan.sackett@richmond.edu