The band, based out of Columbia College of Chicago, sits down to discuss their recent album and relationships

The lights are dim, and the crowd’s excitement is electric at the Bottom Lounge in the West Loop. Ethan Reinbach comes out first, jamming on the drums, setting the atmosphere, and the audience’s eagerness grows. Finally, the whole ensemble is on stage, sending everyone into a frenzy as the introductory lines of the first song starts playing. This is the moment they have been waiting for: Aisle Five’s EP release.

Once the band of five is situated on stage, guitarist Simon Shah removes his shoes, apparently to get more comfortable. Izzie Rutledge, lead singer, claimed that the rest of the band was unaware of Shah’s decision that resulted in them all laughing.

Upon request by the crowd, Shah eventually takes off his socks, too, hyping up the crowd, telling them that they had paid enough in booking fees for that privilege. It is this laidback fun and playfulness that makes the experience of watching this group perform magnetic.

The group of five students from Columbia College in Chicago all have different backgrounds in music, but fatefully made their way together in September 2022. It all started with a Facebook post from Rutledge asking for someone to “hit her up” if they wanted to start a band and bassist Meriah Fearon taking her up on that offer.

Rutledge and Fearon eventually collected drummer Ethan Reinbach and guitarists Malcolm Filichia and Simon Shah to produce their groovy indie-rock band, or their “final form,” as Rutledge describes it.

The band really focuses their attention on their bass and guitars as the basis for their songs. Most of their tracks include catchy guitar riffs that are synonymous with your average indie music; however, they come with a refined richness that gives them an edge. Think Peach Pit mixed with No Doubt.

These songs tell the stories about the band’s life and experiences. They are the types of stories that you expect to hear out of a group in their early twenties: being heartbroken, tempestuous relationships and teenage antics.

Aisle Five practicing for an upcoming gig. Photo courtesy of Dong-chong Shin.

From the first moment you sit down in the same room as Aisle Five, their friendship is palpable. Izzie, Meriah, Malcolm, Simon and Ethan are Aisle Five. They are the heart and soul of this band.

“It makes it more fun,” says Shah about his friendship with his bandmates. “I’d rather play with my friends than play with some random dudes.”

This friendship and trust bleeds into their music and their creative process. One only needs to hear how well they mesh their musicality with one another to fully understand this bond that they share. They harmonize both in their music and in their life.

“They’re so close,” says Rutledge’s roommate and self-proclaimed number one fan, Jordan Lee. “Because I live with [Izzie], I can attest that they hang out all the time, they text all the time — whenever we do anything the band comes over.”

Aisle Five talk about trust being an integral factor in their relationship as a band, especially within their songwriting. “I think that strong trust we have is built upon our strong friendship,” explains Reinbach.

It is this connection that they share that helps them understand their peers while writing and getting into the real nitty-gritty required to compose meaningful songs.

“Sometimes you need to learn to just leave it here and go and hang out and not say anything about music at all and just be friends outside of it, because then once you come back, you have more of a connection with that person. You also respect them more and so you’re willing to be more patient,” Shah says.

The band grew up listening to anything between the Beatles to Nirvana. Despite their varied tastes and interests in music, they ultimately draw their inspiration from each other. “We really work off one another and we’re very collaborative in our songwriting. Someone will come in with an idea and then five minutes later it’s a completely different new idea; we really work off each other a lot,” adds Rutledge.

Attesting to this is friend and colleague Johnny Bear. He says he loves watching them work together and looks forward to meeting with them.

“I got to watch [the first song on the EP] get written which was cool, because they’re very collaborative,” says Bear about his experience mastering Aisle Five’s EP, Emergency Mood Ring, and experiencing the songwriting process of “Bloodsucker,” a groovy track with a ‘60s vibe about a tumultuous relationship. “They’re very back and forth and bounce off each other.”

Aisle Five. Photo courtesy of Nahc Gnodnihs.

Aisle Five are very intentional with their collaboration. “We have a policy of being honest,” says Filichia. Having to constantly be vulnerable with other people can be a difficult and draining task, one the band is familiar with.

“We trust each other’s judgment. So, if somebody sends an idea and it doesn’t work for the band, it’s easier to not take it personally because we know that we all have good tastes and know when something is right,” describes Fearon.

When I first met the band, they had set themselves up in a very practiced and professional arrangement: two in the front and three in the back. They looked like a well-versed group that had multiple press junkets under their belt already and not as if they were just about to release their first EP into the world.

The EP in question is their debut work: Emergency Mood Ring. Emergency Mood Ring is a six-song amalgamation of their lives individually and as a band up until this point. Each song brings its own style and vibe but cohesively fits into the overall Aisle Five-ness that is their sound.

There are tracks like “Stolen Candy” or “Surf Song” which have an edgier sound whereas a song like “Emotional Overdrive” is more mellow and melodic. Despite the distinctive energies these songs bring, they all give that very bass- and guitar-driven indie sound that runs throughout.

The title of the EP has a fun little anecdote associated with it which is dripping in the friendship lore of the band. Laughing, Fearon described the process:

“We were talking about naming the EP ‘Emergency’ because Simon’s got an issue with pressing the emergency button in elevators. So, we thought that was funny because we wanted something that had an inside joke to it, but it didn’t totally feel right.”

Filichia then jumps in, saying, “I’d been thinking, because a while ago we played at the Extraordinarium, which is like this novelty shop. It is no longer a venue, but we all got mood rings there and that just seemed like a fitting thing that seemed like a cool title that fit the concept of all the songs not sounding like one another, but still sounded like a band.”

You can catch Aisle Five wearing their mood rings around Chicago this summer.

Header illustration by Julia Hester