So you’ve listened to all three of The Strokes’ albums over and over and don’t think you can get your pants any tighter. You are searching for the next big thing in rock music, only you don’t know where to look and MTV is no help. All you want is something to shake your butt or nod your head to and you are beginning to get desperate. Search no more, for the answer may be right here in Raleigh. “Our music makes you want to tap your toes and dance,” Trent Miner, lead singer of Iconic, a band created in Raleigh from a group of guys with a love for rock ‘n’ roll music, said. “I remember one girl told us we made her night because she danced the whole show,” he said.
Unofficially formed in 2003, some of Iconic’s members played music together long before then. “Trent and I have been playing together since we were 13,” Bernard Hanlon, guitarist and N.C. State alumnus, said. “Later, Trent and I met Roy [Bourne] at State and made him learn to play bass, and then we met Nick [Palmer], our drummer, through a friend of a friend.”
The band added the final member, guitarist Scott Hirsch, last December. The members of Iconic came together from all over North Carolina, with Hanlon and Miner from Charlotte, Bourne from Winston Salem, and Palmer and Hirsch from Raleigh. Their musical backgrounds are almost as varied as their locations.
“I didn’t really care about music until I heard Oasis’ ‘Definitely Maybe,'” Bernard said.
Bourne, on the other hand, grew up listening to a lot of bluegrass while Hirsch was weaned on U2. Hanlon marked the joining of Hirsch to Iconic as when they officially became a band.
“After Scott joined, we took on a whole new sound,” Hanlon said. “Soon after he joined, we put out a three-song EP in late January.” The self-titled EP, an infectious mix of dance rock and candy-sweet harmonies, is Iconic’s only release, but the group is working on putting out a full-length album.
“Right now we are just writing songs and trying to get back into the studio,” Bernard said.
“We are writing at a furious clip,” Hirsch said, “at the rate of a song a week.”
At the band’s show at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill on April 1, Iconic played about seven or eight songs that will be on the album the members hope to release this summer. While not officially on tour, Iconic plays shows in Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Charlotte.
“We do really well in Charlotte,” Miner said. “We hope to begin touring up and down in the East Coast in places like Atlanta, South Carolina and Virginia.”
Iconic’s next show is at the Raleigh Music Hall with The Capulets, Elevator to Space and Juniper Lane on April 14; the doors open at 10 p.m.
