Packed rooms, headbanging crowds and a nine-day road trip via a rented van across the west coast await the alt-rock band Sap. With plans to jump between seven major cities, the unit eagerly shares their music beyond their home state of Texas.
The group emerged from an ad posted on Craigslist in late 2021 and consists of three members — vocalist and guitarist Evan Fundora, bassist Hank Barna and drummer Jared Cox. The Austin-based trio played live shows of unrecorded original work for their first year and a half together before releasing their debut album Lard Baby last July. Since then, Sap played shows across Texas and have been invited by The Jins to accompany them on tour starting the end of May.“We’ve been writing music since we first started (as a band). We had 20 something songs, we were playing shows, and then we randomly decided to throw all of it away and start fresh,” physics junior Fundora said. “That’s when we wrote all of Lard Baby.”
When creating music, Barna said the band primarily bounces between grunge and 90s hard rock. However, they don’t let labels define their musical expression as they experiment with different instruments to create new material.
“We don’t really try to fit into any sort of genre. We just make the music we make and it comes out how it does,” Barna said. “We don’t really say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re gonna try to make a (progressive) rock song,’ we just play around.”
This versatile mindset also applies among their live shows. With an unconfined setlist, Sap said they haven’t played the same set twice. However, Cox said the group rehearses roughly four times a week to iron things out and make a more cohesive setlist for their upcoming tour — predominately pulling from their recorded work.
“We’ve been experimenting, changing songs up, moving orders around and figuring out what’s the best (to) see where songs hit and where they get slow,” Cox said.
Fundora said, in addition to the tour, Sap is sitting on new material with plans to put out another record post-tour. However, he views this as a means to an end, allowing the trio to attain their real objective — playing live.
“Recording music and putting it out there is a means of gathering an audience so that you can have a better live show,” Fundora said. “Playing live is the best feeling. … We live life, wake up, make breakfast or whatever and it’s so boring. (But) when we go on stage, that’s when we get to actually have fun and experience something that makes life really exciting.”
With Sap having plans to add tour dates in Texas, Fundora said going beyond a Texas tour proves the group to be moving in the serious direction they are striving for.
“Now it’s showing us that (being a band) is not just something that’s fun and that we enjoy, we can actually do something with it,” Fundora said. “We can let our ambition (be) free and break out of what’s going on here.”
