Sub*T is on the rise

They did so in a looser, nascent stage of the internet before algorithms gripped our views and discourse so tightly. In the mid‑2010s, the content that crossed your feed wasn’t always something you consciously sought out. Just as often, you stumbled upon it, and sheer coincidence made these modes of discovery all the more potent, where a stray tweet or meme carried as much weight as a deliberate search.

Platforms were designed to facilitate subcultures and bring people together, and it was only a matter of time before their impact became tangible. Internet relationships leaped outside the confines of the screen a while ago. The users on the other side are no longer abstractions. They’re people you can hug, kiss, and play music with.

Our parents eagerly signed up for Facebook to reconnect with friends they’d lost touch with. Teenagers, driven by a desire to belong during the pivotal stages of ego construction, skilfully lied about their ages and slipped onto Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit, where they finally had the freedom to try on tastes, aesthetics, and entire personas in varying degrees of anonymity. 

After they migrated to Instagram and caught glimpses of each other’s lives, Bennett and Alcantara’s friendship eventually crystallised IRL. They finally met in the pit at a show. “It was a big moment,” Alcantara gushes. “We took a selfie. Our anniversary is at the beginning of June.” Bennett eagerly adds, “We became really best friends right away.”

Neither of them knew how to play instruments, but that didn’t deter them. Much like the fluid, democratic mechanisms that brought them together, they relied on online tutorials to teach them guitar. Their first LP, How My Own Voice Sounds, self-released this past May, weaves shared traumas with reflections on girlhood in the digital age, grounding those stories in their love of classic alt-rock and 90s grunge, à la Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair.

“A huge part of why we started our band was because we were, like, really turned off by the whole post-punk scene that was popping up, and how male-centred it was,” explains Bennett. “We were like, we gotta fix this. We gotta do something about this. That's a huge reason why we wanted to make music.”

To remake the alt-rock landscape in their image, they collaborated with the artists they admired. Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, who worked with them on their 2021 EP, So Green, taught them their way around the studio. Most importantly, she advised them on announcing themselves to the world on their first LP, refining their intentions and narrative direction more than the sound itself.

 “I don’t know if she so much influenced the sound we were going for, but she definitely gave us advice that we've never forgotten when it comes to our relationship as musicians and how to control your band,” says Bennett. “Not in a dictator way, but just, this is what the band is. It’s me and Jade. We write the music. We have people that play in our band.” She advised them to “protect your relationship – make sure everybody knows that it's you two.”

Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch helped them define and polish the timeless guitar rock sound they had in mind. According to Bennett, “everybody that we've worked with has definitely left their fingerprints on how we write music and how we want to be as a band and how we wanna sound. It was nice doing an album where we felt like we had the time to make it our own, in the studio especially.”

Across the record, they arrive at a clearer sense of how they want to show up for themselves and the people they care about. They know how their voices sound in a literal sense, but deliberate how they want to express their personal stories in ways that harmonise with their own evolving self-understanding. Alcantara stresses the importance of showing up with intent:

“It was important to us to have a collection of 10 songs that was just undeniably identifiable as a sound for us. Having singles here and there and two EPs with different producers, I feel like it was all hints of what was to come, and so this felt really important to be our way to introduce ourselves, and that felt like our number one priority. And then after that, it was just exploring all of these themes that came out when we were writing the music.”

Though they write separately, they rely on each other to bring the songs to life. Parallel experiences online and off broaden the record’s emotional aperture. Their voices, contributions, and points of reference feed off one another, often swirling into something greater than the sum of its parts. The buzz of a phone on “Mirror Image”, soft laughter on “Imaginal Cells”, and push and pull of each other’s duelling voices on “Overcomplicate” imbue the record with a larger-than-life, cinematic quality.

Bennett sings on “Standing Room”, but Alcantara wrote the song about attending her mother’s funeral. She recalls a time before they met in person when Bennett sent “the nicest message ever” via Instagram DM. “Finsta,” she clarifies, a portmanteau of fake and Instagram. “It was this groundbreaking moment where an Instagram mutual felt very real all of a sudden. And I was like, we're gonna be probably friends forever. That happens to so many people, and it shows the internet is real life now because we've all gone through these moments together. I remember that was foundational for our friendship.”