The Hails will be returning to Gainesville on Friday after spending several months touring.
They will be sharing the stage of the High Dive with local band Driveaway and Jacksonville-based Miles from London. Tickets for the 9:30 p.m. show are $10 to $12 and can be found through the High Dive’s website.
This show will be part of The Hails’ return home from a short run of shows across the east coast.
“We went to the mountains of Virginia for like a week and just wrote some songs right before the show,” Robbie Kingsley, the indiealternative band’s 24-year-old lead singer, said.
Those songs, Kingsley said, have allowed the band to experiment with the direction they want their music to take.
“[We’re] continually trying to mess with new sounds, create new sounds, and [we're] not limiting ourselves by genre,” he said. “[We’re] trying to give people something they haven’t heard yet.”
Kingsley said the five-piece is also getting more focused on “what we want to talk about.”
“I think just talking about life experiences is important, even if they’re not grandiose or anything like that,” he said. “You can make eating a sandwich fun…. Even the most normal things can be sung in such an emphatic way.”
When it comes to songwriting, Kingsley said the band tries to be “deliberate with word choice and overall tone and all the things you learned in English class.”
Kingsley said that, although the band isn’t sure if those songs will be released on an album, this weekend’s show will bring them back down to Miami, where the band currently lives and where they will begin to plan for the upcoming year.
“We will definitely have a lot coming out in 2020,” he said.
Kingsley said the band tries to go into every show not knowing what to expect, and this rings true of their upcoming Gainesville gig.
“High Dive is like our home,” he said. “We’ve been playing there since the beginning of 2016. It’s where we basically grew up. We were little babies when we started out there.”
Kingsley said the band is excited to return to their “home base.”
“High Dive is definitely, probably our favorite venue, like ever,” he said. “So it’ll be fun to be back and it’ll be cool to see some familiar faces… We’re excited to see all the new faces, too.”
