Coming of age provides a deep well of emotion from which to draw artistic inspiration. According to Dinner Club, their hard-hitting, driven punk songs feature a touch of it all.

“Dig out the feeling you had when you were falling for your first real crush, the last days of summer before school starts, getting fired for the first time and feeling your life fall through the cracks only to get it back together again, then mix those in a blender,” Kiah Verinder, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, says.

The four-piece met in Landmark, Man. and is comprised of siblings Kiah Verinder (trumpet/guitar/vocals) and Josh Verinder (guitar/vocals), Kurt Bolduc (drums) and Liam Marsch (bass).

Every song Josh Verinder writes starts in the same place: on an acoustic guitar that has been in his family for decades.

“After I’ve come up with a new song, or at least a good portion of one, I’ll play it for the rest of the band at practice, and from there we collectively decide if we should keep it or not. If we decide to keep it, we proceed to work on the song together and keep developing it until it reaches a state we’re all happy with,” he says.

The band released their first record, Paid in Change, in the fall of 2018. Getting the record out and into people’s hands was a relief for the band.

“Recording (Paid in Change) put us through all the feelings, (from) frustration to excitement and back again, so once that came to a close, it was quite an accomplished feeling,” Kiah Verinder says.

“Josh and I did all the recording ourselves in our basement, sometimes working on it every day for weeks on end,” Balduc says. “After working so many months … slowly getting the pieces in place, all we wanted to do was get it out! Sitting on it for months after we finished it was very hard, because all you want to do is let other people hear it. It was a long summer, that’s for sure.”

Seeing the audience show their enjoyment through moshing was a highlight for drummer Kurt Bolduc.

“I love to mosh and crowdsurf at (shows) … Seeing people doing that for us made me feel great – especially when you get to see people getting pinned up against the vent on the ceiling!” Bolduc says.

The band is enjoying their introduction into the greater local scene and feel they are in good company, despite some initial trepidation.

“When you’re brand new to the music scene, I think that can feel a little bit intimidating. None of us had any serious past band experience, so we didn’t really have any connections,” Josh Verinder says. “It seemed like a lot of bands kind of had a select four or five other bands they would play shows with. We didn’t really know where we would fit in. Once we played our first couple of shows, everything started falling into place.”

Find Dinner Club’s music online at dinnerclubwinnipeg.bandcamp.com/releases.

Published in Volume 73, Number 17 of The Uniter (February 7, 2019)