Wichita’s Keo & Them will release a new single, “Eyesore,” on Friday, March 14, and celebrate the new music with an all-ages show at Odd Fellow Hall.
The show will also feature a performance by Sunblush and dance music from Goose. The event will also serve as something of an unveiling of the current Keo & Them lineup.
The new single marks a sonic departure from previous Keo & Them releases, something bandleader Keo notes is by design and a welcome change from previous material from the group.
Keo recently spoke with KMUW about “Eyesore,” which will be available via digital streaming platforms on its release date.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Every time I talk to you, every time there’s new music, it’s always like you’ve taken another step someplace else that you haven’t been before.
We put out an album a year or two ago [“This Time Around,” 2023] and it represented a part of me that was very young and was experiencing the world in a different way. We kind of sat on those songs for, honestly, I would say eight years, and we had never gotten in the studio and recorded those and so by the time I was ready for another phase, we were recording them, releasing those songs and making music videos for them. Then, I was just so ready to move into a different phase, and so this phase represents the way that I want to express myself now for a little while.
All the songs on “This Time Around” were … it’s not a problem that they were long, but I always felt like it wasn’t perfect unless I was saying a lot and there was so much put into it. With this specific song, I was challenging myself to stop doing that to myself because a lot of time we artists get in our [own] way. We end up focusing so hard on something … that it ends up becoming ugly to us, it becomes an eyesore. And we either end up sitting on it, or we never release it so instead of trying to make it this profound song with these incredible lyrics, [I thought], “You know what? No, let me just get to the point,” which is, “If you wanna dance, you wanna get down, now’s your chance.” Just get to it, just do it, just put it out, so that’s what the song is about.
It's hard being a musician and getting yourself to believe in what you put out and to stop being so hard on yourself and just know that art is art and sometimes people just need the simple parts of it.
You’ve been through all these changes, musically, in the time that I’ve been listening to you and the time that I’ve known you. You were talking about being hard on yourself … I mean … you gotta know that people love you?
[Laughs.] I hope so. Well, thanks for saying that.
Is there some sense though that [you feel like], “Well, they did six months ago but it’s not guaranteed that they will six months from now”?
Oh, yeah. You know, sometimes people don’t like change, which is kind of what we’re going into. And sometimes they do. So, hopefully they like what we have going on.
