THE RISE OF .XOM, A YOUNG INDIE ELECTRONIC BAND FROM LA

We're .XOM (They/Them) from Los Angeles…actually Palmdale, CA to be more specific.  We’re a young Indie/Electronic band, formed in 2018 by singer/synth player Ivan Oliva and bassist Dakota Metzger. Working off individual demos each of us had made, we added drummer Christopher Cameron and guitarist Dominic Parker for our live shows. Blending our own individual styles of synth lines and lo-fi electronic samples with indie dance drums, deep bass and shoegazed guitar.

We’ve spent the last two year or so establishing ourselves in our home town and the LA area performing at bars, record shops and house shows hosted by us and our fellow artists and friends.  We’ve also worked concurrently with our friends in local Antelope Valley promotion company ‘Burgerwolf’ with shows and events.  In the two years we’ve existed, we’ve played diverse and wild shows including a  Zine Release show at the Smell for Trash Mag, downtown LA venue Rare House in a self-organized event of our own doing, a trek to the bay area to play at famous indie venues Honeyhive Galleria and Oakland Secret and numerous benefits shows all self-organized by the band across the city.

We admit it hasn’t always been easy. It’s easy to lose yourself in the culture. You have this sense of continuously having to work and putting up the best version of yourself. Dealing with the aftermath of a bad day are always the hardest thing we all have had to soldier through. Most of it just stems from balancing a work/life balance. Most of our endeavors have been through our own hard work, ingenuity and financial sacrifices. We at one point lost 300 plus dollars on a self-organized show and suffered broken fingers, all in the same night. Our third EP was self -released in August 2020. Digging into movies from our childhood, relationship breakups and some of our favorite local acts, this release combines all of our interests into what we could call “the best thing we’ve ever done”. Our dream for this is really just to reach as many people as we can with our music and possibly do this every day for the rest of our lives. It’s a tough situation to try to keep a band together but we wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t the one thing we wanted more than anything. We feel for sure that. XOM is reaching new heights and territory out of our home base. We’ve earned every single accolade and we’re proud to still be standing.

Thanks so much to .XOM for writing this article for us. You can check them out for yourself by following @xom_band on Insta or heading over their Spotify to listen to some tunes.

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1jteTGkAiQm9ZQSTsFN5LO?si=HcCqDNg1TPOUe7SqTcSd6Q

INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/xom_band/