Meet Gift, the Space Rockers Aiming for ‘Otherworldly’ Sounds

N
ew York’s a hard place to do psychedelics,” GIFT frontman TJ Freda says. “It’s really intense here. Stuff’s always moving so quick, and everyone’s getting thrown around. … I’ll save the big cathartic, psychedelic experiences for really special moments.” That said, the city’s hectic pace hasn’t stopped him or his bandmates from occasionally enjoying mushrooms — “but we’re not the type of band who’s tripping our brains out and jamming,” Freda says. They just sound like they are.

On their second album, Illuminator, the Brooklyn quintet plays trembling space rock with airy, psych-pop hooks that recall the Cure, Spiritualized, and Spacemen 3. Their music occasionally resembles that of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, too. Just don’t use the word “shoegaze” around them. “We were first lumped in with psych rock, and we felt like we were in psych-rock jail,” keyboardist-guitarist Justin Hrabovsky says. “And then we worked to not get called psych rock, only to be labeled as shoegaze when shoegaze was the buzzword.” He looks increasingly irritated as he attempts to defy definition.

It’s a chilly November evening, and the band’s five members, who returned home from a European tour a few days earlier, are drinking wine and eating pasta and parms at a round table in the back of a dimly lit Italian joint in Ridgewood, Queens called plainly Joe’s. While they don’t enjoy describing their music, the one thing they all agree on is that they think of their music simply as rock & roll. Freda hopes GIFT’s music, whatever people call it, provides a “transformative” experience for listeners. “I want to make music that opens up a portal or something that feels otherworldly,” he says. “The new record was meant to be listened to out loud and not in headphones.”

Freda, who sports a curly head of hair and looks sharp in Lou Reed sunglasses, feels such a lust for life partially because GIFT had to press pause on their career shortly after they formed in 2019. The name GIFT is a nod to the title of yogi Ram Dass’ spirituality tome, Be Here Now. (Get it? Being present … GIFT? “Don’t get us started on SEO,” Hrabovsky quips.)

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They played their first concert in December 2019. Their second-ever gig was scheduled for March 2020 but was canceled for reasons beyond their control (y’know, a devastating global pandemic). Freda used the break in touring to produce Momentary Presence, GIFT’s 2022 debut album, which only spottily featured his bandmates because the lockdown kept them from recording together. The LP nevertheless served as a fitting blueprint for how to present the group’s otherworldly rock & roll. When the world started reopening, they were ready.

“It was kind of a rebuilding exercise,” Freda says. “We hit the ground running really hard because it was the feeling like, ‘Oh, damn. Two years of our lives just went away when we were teeing it up.’ I think the notion of time passing quickly stuck through the project.”

All of GIFT’s members are New York transplants in their thirties, originally hailing variously from Utah, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and northern California; blue-haired drummer Gabe Camarano was born in Brazil but knew Freda from Massachusetts. “I’m super proud to be a musician in New York, because it’s really hard,” Freda says. “It’s hard everywhere, but in New York, you have to endure a lot.”

What the band members have in common, largely, is an affinity for the Brooklyn venue Alphaville, since they all had formative New York experiences there (bassist Kallan Campbell has since become a co-owner) and the undying support of Freda. Guitarist-singer Jessica Gurewitz, a photographer Freda befriended who’d only been playing guitar for a year before the band, blossomed “from barely knowing how to play an E chord on guitar to now playing sold-out shows and being onstage,” Freda says. “There’s times when I’m yelling at her like, ‘Sing, sing — I know you can do it,’ and she’s like, ‘I don’t know,’” he says. “And she killed it.”

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While writing Illuminator, Gurewitz and Freda collaborated closely on the lyrics. The album’s title came from something she said during one of their nine-hour writing sessions. “A big part of Illuminator was about life moving so fast,” Freda says. “Momentary Presence was all about being still and going inward, in the same way that meditation helps people. This one was the opposite. It was like, ‘Ride the wave of just giving to the feelings; surrender to the speed at which life comes.’”

Some of the lyrics, however, are personal for Freda, especially “Wish Me Away,” which he wrote after his younger sister survived a scary motorcycle accident. His concern for her prompted him to write — “It steals my breath, time’s lost, I pretend/It dawns on me, this life I can’t repeat” — while en route from New York to Boston to see her. “It’s about trying so hard to be in the moment and cherish what you have,” he says. “But also realizing that you can blink in three years have passed by. … Did I get everything, accomplish everything that I’ve wanted to accomplish in this short, fleeting time?”

His sister’s accident also forced him to reflect on a macro level. “Oh, man, have I just had my head up my own ass for so long, being focused on myself rather than what I care about?” he wondered. “Everything hit me in a really peculiar spot where I was just really overwhelmed by a lot of emotions that I don’t think I had really given myself the space to process.”

He soon got the time. In the period between albums, Freda “got half fired, half quit,” by his account, from his graphic design job; touring life did not suit his employers’ needs. “That was one of those weird, rude awakenings where it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, I have to go for it,’” he says. So he devoted himself to GIFT, recording music in his home studio from 11 p.m. until 5 a.m. “That was the best thing for me,” he says, since it allowed him to focus Illuminator. He now supplements his music career with sound design and graphic design gigs. But like his bandmates, who operate Alphaville out of their touring vehicle while on the road, with Camarano booking artists from the backseat, he’s able to make touring life work now.

At the dinner table, each musician holds his or her own unique spark, the sort of fresh enthusiasm you see in just-formed bands after their first gigs. And in a way, because of the drawn-out lockdown period right at the beginning, GIFT feel like they are still getting started. European music fans have an appreciation for American music, they say, so they felt especially welcome there.

“It was a great tour,” Gurewitz says. “It was good in an almost spooky way. Every show was like, ‘Why is everything packed? This is crazy, how did they even hear about this?’”

Since November, Freda has spent a month and a half in L.A. at a songwriting retreat and in Paris for some relaxation. He also designed the artwork for Sunflower Bean’s upcoming Mortal Primetime album. In May, GIFT will kick off their first full U.S. tour, supporting Sunflower Bean at dates that include a hometown Brooklyn gig. “It’s cool to have two, in quotes, ‘psych rock’ bands from New York doing a tour,” Freda says. “There are not a lot of bands that share the same taste and musical values of both of us.”

For the band, it’s an opportunity to expound on Illuminator’s musical ideas. “The intention of a live show is not just to regurgitate the album,” Gurewitz says. “It’s to create a really sick experience for everyone who’s there and to be engaged with them. Sometimes that means, again, making things faster, making things a little different.”

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In the months since releasing Illuminator, Freda says he’s more interested in seeing what the band can do as a quintet since he had previously done a lot of the recording himself. When he listens to Illuminator now, what he hears is genre-less: a fusion of pop and electronic sounds with the rock & roll GIFT started with. Since they’ve gotten more comfortable performing live, too, the whole mix has congealed even more. “I think for GIFT’s next step, we’re trying to capture the magic that happens when all five of us get together onstage, versus making songs in a studio and essentially covering them live,” he says.

“We’re super excited to keep going,” Freda says. “Being on tour that long [in Europe] brought out a lot of conversations: ‘What are we doing? What do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish?’ I feel super rejuvenated.”