It was an evening of no particular significance in December of 2023. A Louisiana indie band was waiting to take the stage for a local show. The quartet, consisting of Kylie Gaspard, Zachary Derouen, Austin Wood, and Joseph Perillo, had formed the previous summer and, in the months following, seen homegrown success in their beloved Lafayette, LA for their bayou-burning, low-fi rock sound. 

A couple of minutes before they were set to go on, Kylie's phone began blowing up—friends, family, acquaintances, strangers: all reporting miraculous news. Frank Ocean had posted their song “Beginner” on his Instagram story. Praise from such a large musician of any magnitude was worthy enough celebrating, but from the infamously recluse, pop-culture icon and fellow Louisiana native, his co-sign cemented a cult-like origin story. Yet, as early fans will tell you, Cashier’s break would have panned out regardless of a cultural tastemaker’s co-sign or not. 

Often sonically compared with lauded indie bands, (Pavement, Incubus, Dinosaur Jr, and even, on occasion, the Foo Fighters), Cashier has produced some of the most well constructed rock ballads of the 2020s. With the shoegaze renaissance and iterations upon iterations of indie band genre splicing, Gaspard expounds upon why Cashier’s sound resonates above the rest: “We live in true Cajun Country.” 

Having grown up in Southern Louisiana, Cashier finds their sound mired in the sonic history of Creole culture. The merging of African, French, Caribbean, and Spanish culture that institutionalized slavery brought to the Americas, Creole formed with a distinct note bending, string and accordion companionship that has been in Louisiana since the 17th century. Creole is well cited as being one of the key foundational sounds that led to America’s greatest musical invention of the 20th century; jazz. It is within jazz that every other music genre that came after is a byproduct of. To Gaspard, what makes Lafayette so irreplicable is the patina of, “Zydeco music cascading during Mardi Gras, people gathering en masse to do this long gallivanting walk, while a Cajun band plays on the back of a truck trailer. It’s projected through these blown out, busted old speakers, loud as hell, and people are just dancing everywhere; laughing and screaming in Cajun French. It’s magical.”

The band’s debut EP, The Weight, has a more defined narrative than their earlier work, dealing with the undulating happenstance of immortality and the life one leads. Gaspard explains, “All the songs touch on this essence with which life wields its inevitability. Navigating relationships and self, through all its complexities and tragedies, embracing the good moments…it really comes for us all.” The lead single off the EP, “Like I Do” has this momentous quality to it, urging the track forward. All the while, Gaspard’s double-ententre-riddled chorus is unwaveringly clever, with riffs throwing the track into gear. “We found that you can mix these two sounds—alt rock with an ambient guitar, and it produces this unique resonating quality. Without the resurgence of shoegaze and more traditionally hard rock groups, we wouldn't have made our way through the cracks of the internet,” she says.

Gaspard laughs about how Cashier came to be, explaining how their namesake “Doesn’t really have any meaning at all, it’s just so catchy. It does its own advertising too. You can go to a place, such as a highway stop gas station with a big sign that says: ‘See Cashier,’ and there’s an album cover right there.” Now 3.5 years into the project, Cashier’s true meaning is simple; a group of friends making killer rock music and embracing their roots. With an independent fandom, exceptional artistry, and social media infamy, it’s a name one might want to get familiar with before it becomes ubiquitous. 

The Weight is available to stream and download via Julia’s War Recordings.