A look into the Vancouver underground music scene and the people who form it.
A.K Broznitsky (he/they) // Contributor
Andy Poystila (he/him) // Illustrator
Born out of an old mechanic’s shop, Green Auto Body is one of the many underground music venues that dot Vancouver’s landscape. Venues in Vancouver act similarly to the nurse trees in the forests of the Lower Mainland, and Green Auto is no exception. The physical building of Green Auto was not designed with concerts in mind, but the distance between the band and the audience is negligible. In one section of Green Auto, guests walk up a set of stairs and are prompted by the person at the door to take off their shoes and find a seat on the floor, where they’ll sit about a metre away from the performers. If the underground scene in Vancouver needed to be summarised in one word, it would be “intimate.”
Nitroglycerin is a new and unique sound beginning to permeate Vancouver’s underground subcommunities. This Vancouver-based band has a grunge-punk-rock-shoegaze sound, and is an incredible example of how music genre labels often fall short. They serve as an almost perfect archetype of an underground band: young, passionate and equally as financially troubled as any other 20-something-year-olds in Vancouver. Recently, they played live at the Cobalt, another nurse tree venue, alongside Autonomous Apes, Hope Slide, and Felisha and the Jazz Rejects. Nitroglycerin set up the event, contacting the other bands and venue to organise the concert.
Community is a key facet of the Vancouver music scene, so members of local bands are usually in the audience for other bands. This sense of intimacy, this tight-knit and friendly community, makes the Vancouver scene so fun to be a part of. Instead of sitting in a crowded Rogers Arena watching some massively popular band play on a far-away stage, the band plays right in front of you and talks to you after their set. It is a cooperative space with a strong sense of camaraderie, and it’s not exclusive to musicians. At these tiny venues, painters sell their art, poets read their work between sets, photographers scurry about snapping photos and writers sit in isolated corners scribbling notes for a student newspaper.
“If there’s anything musicians know, it’s being broke, sad and alone,” said Nitroglycerin bassist Hannah. “You can’t put all this stuff on alone. You need someone to run sound, you need a place to do it, you need other bands to be with you.”
A cynic might say this attitude comes from a capitalistic sense of networking, a need to make connections to grow your brand and increase profits. More accurately, it comes from a place of mutual respect and love of not just the act of making music but of making art itself.
Vancouver is full of artists creating and experimenting with their art just like Nitroglycerin, and despite the rising cost of living, they show no signs of stopping. New people, whether new artists or new audience members, are always welcome in the music scene. If you have some spare cash, now is the perfect time to start going to underground concerts. The tickets are cheap and the bands would love to see you there.