Chris O'Keefe started building the project in 2021, after the pandemic had rearranged everyone's sense of priority. He spent months on Craigslist and musician platforms looking for the right people. The band existed by early 2022; Dani Judith stepped in as frontwoman after three singles with original vocalist Maria Angelica. At the end of 2024, bassist Jake Kaspari joined after what the band described in a Bold Journey interview as a "challenging" stretch, helping them reimagine the project after a period of stagnation.
The result is a five-person lineup learning each other onstage, in real time, in front of rooms. The behind-the-scenes video from their February 2025 Tiny Telephone session makes this explicit: the band talks about the unusual intimacy of building performance chemistry when you didn't start as old friends. Tone, trust, the whole human part that doesn't show up in a Bandcamp lineup field.
What Fruitless does
The EP came out February 4, 2025. Recorded at Panoramic House in Sacramento, produced by Mike Davis. O'Keefe calls it "Paramore meets DIIV," and the shorthand works because it names both sides: the melodic reach and the guitar fog. The Dirt's review put it in a lineage of 90s alternative rock and shoegaze, which holds.
Honest assessment: most of the tracks run through similar tempos and emotional registers. A full album needs range. Chalk is the kinetic exception, the track that wakes up the second half. But "Water Under the Bridge" is where the record closes its argument.
In the Tiny Telephone footage, the band describes Chalk as one of the most stressful songs to write, with parts still coming together in the room. "Water Under the Bridge" is the opposite: it arrived when they stopped pushing. The Tiny Telephone live version, recorded and mixed by engineer Maryam Qudus, makes the chemistry audible in a way the studio recording only suggests. Same song, different room, and you hear five people who have figured out how to lock in. The improvement from their earlier recordings is not subtle. Earlier, the band sat behind Judith's voice. Here, they're building with it.
The next record should push the range. This one proves they're ready to make it.
Three years of Sacramento stages have left a usable map. Farm-to-Fork Festival in 2022, on a bill with Japanese Breakfast and The National Parks. Concerts in the Park in 2023 with Wild Child, and again in 2024 with Royel Otis. Goldfield Trading Post. A June 2025 Red Museum show documented by Solving Sacramento's Hangout Gigs, which is not a feature, just a scene receipt: band identified, lineup named, song centered, show noted. Three months later they were opening for Chasing Abbey at a sold-out Brick & Mortar in San Francisco — the Irish act's North America Tour, a 400-cap room they didn't headline.
