The San Ramon student rock band Friendly Fire has reached a few milestones in just three months.
The band, composed of four 11th graders from California High School, released their first nine-song album, “Friendly Fire,” on July 26. They headlined their first paid show in Walnut Creek in August. Last month, their first music video was released.
These achievements are the latest by vocalist Viktoria Lutsenko, 17, guitarist Maurice “Mojo” Maldonado, 16, drummer Lucas Chan, 16, and bassist Orion Duerrmeier, 17, who have been together since 2024.
“I think our diverse track list kind of shows how we make songs, because we’re really invested and passionate about our writing and what we do,” Maldonado said. “We try to make it all different. Sometimes we’re like, ‘Oh, we can’t do this. This is too similar’.”
The album, available on YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify, was recorded and produced by the band’s friend Dmitrii Morov, a Cal High graduate who is studying technology and applied composition at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Morov met some of the band members when they played for the school’s band, the Grizzlies marching band.
“Recording, producing is just something I do in my free time, and I’m trying to make it a career,” Morov said. “I approached them, showed them my work, and they were like, ‘Oh that’s cool. You should record our album.’”
Morov was paid about $200 and a couple band T-shirts for his work.
“He gave us a ridiculously good deal to basically produce the whole album and set up all the mics and stuff in Lucas’s garage,” Duerrmeier said. “So we got to record it where we were comfortable playing for a really good price, and it was great. It was really fun.”
The band followed its July album release with its first paid show on Aug. 14 at Up The Creek Records in Walnut Creek. About 60 fans paid $15 apiece for the show, which also included Morov’s band Death of Creation and Post-Man.
Friendly Fire’s music video for the song “Panda Express” (with the band members performing in panda masks) was released a month after the show on Sept. 15.
“We are very open to local artists,” Vince Lay, Up The Creek Records’ show director, said in an email. “We’re not your normal bar. We don’t sell alcohol, so we’re relying on people showing up to the shows as much as possible.”
The August show brought in about $500, which was split between the three bands, Morov said.
“I think in the end we really did kind of ball out,” Maldonado said. “I hope we gave a more than a $15 performance.”
Before every show, the band has a ritual of spiking a baby doll named Steve into the ground to mark the start of the performance.
“Starting at our sophomore year talent show, I started spiking her into the ground before we played,” Chan said.
The tradition continued at the Walnut Creek show, in possibly its most dramatic iteration.
Maldonado said Chan jumped up on the chair stand for the drum kit, revealing a full body dress underneath and ran to the front of the stage where he “spikes Steve into the crowd and then starts screaming into my ear. Then he runs back, starts making noise, then we go up.”
Over the past year, the band has strengthened its chemistry and musical skills.
“I feel like we’ve improved so much; we consider the time that we have, and we have a better idea of what we’re doing compared to the beginning,” Lutsenko said. “The first few rehearsals that we met, we were getting to know each other and goofing off compared to understanding how to build a song or write a song, because we didn’t have much work ethic.”
Each member of the band has their own goal for the future.
“I would love to have a fan that doesn’t know who we are and just likes us” for the music, Maldonado said. “They come support us at our gigs and I would love to have just a fan that’s like, ‘Who are you guys?’”
Lutsenko said she hopes the band can grow more serious.
“I feel like we can make a bigger thing out of this, and not just play free shows all the time,” she said.
Chan said he hopes to come out with more music.
“I think three albums could be cool,” Chan said. “We could get that.”
“I want to have, at one point, a crowd where people are punching each other,” he said.
Duerrmeier said he hopes to perform at larger showcases with bigger crowds.
“Most of the venues we performed have been pretty small,” he said. “I think the biggest show we had was maybe 50 people, so I would want to do one bigger than that.”
This story originally appeared in CCSpin.