Good Kid is releasing a new EP this month, which they've been teasing for a while, but it's officially out next week.
The band confirmed last week their Good Kid 3 EP is coming April 14, and while it's the third in their ongoing self-titled trilogy. And according to the group, as excited as they are about this new music, it's essentially marking the end of an era as they launch into an exciting new chapter.
"The way Good Kid writes music is very democratic," says guitarist Jacob Tsafatinos, speaking with Variance ahead of the EP's release. "We all get into a room together. Like, usually someone will bring a song idea or something like that and we'll workshop it. Sometimes, the songs are more or less flushed out, then we kind of bicker about it—sometimes for years."
He continues: "This EP kind of marks the last of the first songs we ever wrote as a band."
His bandmate, bassist Michael Kozakov, chimes in: "Some of the songs that are being released on the EP are songs that we tried to release before and we just didn't know how to write them correctly or how to record them correctly for a record. One of the songs, I think this is literally the third time we recorded it and I think we're just so much better as songwriters at this point."
The new project arrives as the band continues to follow a very organic path in releasing their work. And despite having millions of streams, the band, made up of five members who are all programmers by day, isn't getting ahead of themselves.
While many acts and labels have teams who scour the internet ensuring they're properly compensated for their music, Good Kid has taken a hands-off approach, instead insisting that fans can use their music without fear of a DMCA copyright notice. They say they recognize what it's like to be young and that's generally who is using their music: young fans.
"Over the last decade, a lot of distributors and labels, what they've done is they've built all these systems to prevent your music showing up in other people's content," explains Kozakov. "And when we came to our distributor and we said, 'Hey, we're actually interested in letting people use our music.' They're like, 'Whoa, there's so many barriers we've got to take down.' So we literally had to build a pipeline."
As the new EP arrives, Tsafatinos says, "It feels like things are bigger than they've ever been. And like everything has the highest potential to it. So it's pretty exciting."
The Good Kid 3 EP is out on April 14.
