Photo: Facebook - AMISTAD

The band prepares the studio for recording on Feb. 9.

Five high school students from Vernon are watching their musical dreams come together, as their new single trends number one on the Canadian music magazine, Exclaim’s, website.

Amistad is made up of five high school students, in grade 11 and 12 from W.L. Seaton Secondary and Kalamalka Secondary, who have been playing together since elementary school.

They are currently in the studio recording their upcoming EP, Talk Peace to a Wolf. They released their single from the EP, Radikal, on Feb. 3, in partnership with Exclaim magazine, and have been blown away by the response.

“It’s very weird to go back to school and people are like, ‘Hey I heard your song on Exclaim and I loved it,’ that’s crazy, I’m not used to that at all,” said Aidan Andrews, lead singer for the band, on a break from recording. “It’s really cool to have a song that you wrote in your bedroom and everybody listens to it and likes it … it’s really surreal.”

Making Talk Peace to a Wolf is the first time the band has recorded in a proper studio. Their first full-length album, Lee, was recorded in the basements of their homes.

While Andrews says some of the members of the band have been classically trained, on piano and violin, he credits their improvement to playing together for years.

“We’ve really just taught ourselves and we’ve just got better by playing together all the time,” he said. “We’re very, very close now.”

Andrews says the band’s own musical tastes differ radically amongst each member, and that’s contributed to their unique sound.

"Everybody listens to completely opposite music from each other, anything from Of Monsters and Men to people like Primus to Cage the elephant,” he said. “I don’t think we’d sound like this if we all listened to the same music.”

Because of their mosaic of influences, Andrews says he has “no idea” how to describe their sound, although he says the genre ‘alternative’ is probably broad enough to cover it.

Exclaim describes Radikal as having "laid-back rhythms, slinky grooves and crystalline vocals," and says the song is "sure to have heads bopping along from the get-go."

Amistad is focused on finishing recording the new EP, which is due out in April, and then plans to hit the road, once school is done of course.

While the band has mainly played shows around the Okanagan, they plan to take their music to the rest of B.C. this summer.