Why Lovelytheband’s Debut Song Was No ‘Happy Accident’

American indie pop act, lovelytheband, ushered in massive success in 2017 with a single track, “broken.” The triple platinum song spent 76 weeks on the Billboard Alternative Songs charts, breaking the record of longest run at 66 weeks on that chart with 44M views and 500M streams.

The group’s latest song, “sail away,” released in January as a remix from multi-platinum producer and DJ R3HAB. It peaked at Number 22 on Spotify’s Global Rock streaming chart and surpassed almost 40M streams, landing number three on the alternative radio charts.

Earlier this year lovelytheband announced a third full length album, if we’re being honest, releasing on June 2 by the band’s record label, happy accident, in partnership with Vydia. This summer will also bring a headline tour kicking off on June 6 in San Diego.

Today the artists, Mitchy Collins, Sam Price and Jordan Greenwald, dropped a new song “make me wanna die,” illustrating how a successful career in music can be found in a winning debut song.

“It seems to be a challenge for some acts, where the song gets out of the gate faster than the act has time to develop, but we were very prepared knowing that that was one of the possible avenues we would have to traverse,” says Denis Lipari, manager of lovelytheband. “And we feel blessed that the first song we put out in the world reacted the way it did, and just kept growing (American Idol and Times Square on New Years’ Eve).”

One key to the band’s success, Lipari says, is the fact that they are music fans themselves. Growing up, each musician had a blueprint and sense of community with their favorite artists that guided them to build the same with their fans. This mindset has guided all of lovelytheband’s decisions and ultimately shaped its success of a fanbase that has caught up to height of their debut song.

“Now we’re at a point where they sell out 2K-capped venues, and people know the words to all their songs,” Lipari adds. “It just keeps growing, and with this new song and album, we are about to show some new growth that was maybe unexpected for some people. We knew it was growing, and it looks like a long run with a crossover into pop. Be it expertise or luck, we’re happy it’s happening this way.”

Collins wrote “broken” before he met Price and Greenwald. He had just lived through one of the toughest years of his life, he says, exiting a former project in somewhat stereotypical musician fashion of getting dropped from a major music label and management.

One day Collins just picked up his guitar and started creating again. He worked in a music studio for about six months, he says, stumbling into songs like “broken” that would give rise to lovelytheband. About one year after he wrote “broken,” he felt a pull to write more. The artist sent his music to Lipari, the idea of a band ignited, and shortly thereafter, he met his bandmates.

“It’s always been important for me to build community around me because that’s what I grew up on. Bands and songs saying some stuff you may not know how to say yourself,” Collins says. “And that’s what we try to do is to make people feel a little bit less alone, because when you’re in that headspace of dealing with whatever issues you have going on in your life, it can be isolating and make you feel very lonely. We’re just hoping that these songs make fans realize that they’re not the only ones out there, and we’re more than our worst moment.”

Brendan Lustenring, director of Label and Agency Partnerships at Vydia, has worked with lovelytheband since the early stages of “broken.” He says, “Though ‘broken’ was a massive global hit, lovelytheband has since had multiple charting alternative radio singles, nearly a billion on-demand streams globally across their catalog, headlined tours in the US and Europe, played major festivals such as Lollapalooza, and have had their albums sold at Target
TGT
, Urban Outfitters and Independent retail. ‘broken’ was only just the beginning.”

Following today’s release, lovelytheband plans to debut new music every four weeks. And in their own way, they are redefining the meaning of “one-hit wonder.”