The Church of Free Noise: The Philosophy of Garret Elias

Photos by Brian Cohen

I’m sitting on the sidewalk outside of a Brooklyn warehouse as the muffled sounds of soundcheck drift down towards the street. It’s the kind of night where the skyline seems infinite, the pavement sweats, and the day’s adventures still linger. No tickets, no corporate sponsors, just a Partiful filled through TikTok videos, homemade flyers, and a sound that could rattle the G-train off its tracks. They call themselves Garret Elias, and they’ve made chaos feel like community. 

It’s 6:37 p.m. and I’ve climbed a narrow, fluorescent-lit stairway to a rooftop above a photo studio. Cigarette butts cover a picnic table, beers and tallboys emerge from a stack of cardboard boxes, and four guys who love music are sitting around a table talking to each other. We’re deep in Brooklyn, but on a rooftop lined with string lights and the promise of something special, we might as well be in a different world.

As we speak, music leaks through the cracked roof door as the opening band works out last-minute kinks. What began as a few friends fuckin’ around after work has transformed into the most New York of stories. It feels like something your parents reminisce about. Part block party, part rebellion, part reminder that music without a price tag is music in its most raw form. And people are buying what Garret Elias is selling: a love for the game.

With riffs that make the guitars sing and lyrics that hit somewhere between hangover and heartbreak, the band is rewriting what it means to make it in a city that measures everything to the dollar. For them, it’s not about the money; it’s about the music, the feeling, and the dream. 

Their music feels like it was built for these nights, the kind soaked in the urgency that only comes from living too loud and too fast in a place like New York. But it’s the free shows that are turning Garret Elias into a band to watch: a DIY revival act for a city that somehow forgot what spontaneity and connection feel like.

Michael Rapino, CEO of LiveNation, believes that ticket prices aren’t expensive enough. Garret Elias disagrees. “It’s getting people here because people just want to party,” says frontman Garret Elias. “It’s free, it’s live music, and then, hopefully, they turn into fans. There’s really no other way for a small artist to get 500 people in one place.” 

The open door, open hearts ethos has become the backbone of the band’s rise in New York’s underground scene. While the current music scene relies heavily on algorithm-chasing promos and fleeting moments of virality, Garret Elias has flipped the script: build community first, and let the fandom follow. That plan is working. Videos of their warehouse shows have racked up views across social media, turning curious locals into devoted fans. 

“People aren’t breaking the bank to come here,” Garret says. “They just want to see live music. And then we get all these people here, and hopefully, they’re fans who’ll stick around.”

They’ve already got the songs to back it up. A run of singles full of jagged hooks and late-90s rock nostalgia, the most recent being “Peek of my Heart” which dropped on October 8th. But it’s the BYOB shows, sweaty, euphoric, that feel like a time warp to old New York, a New York I yearn to experience, and younger generations feel has been stolen from them. 

The band – Garret, Jack, Chris, and Sean (everyone calls him Lave) – met the way a lot of great New York stories start: at a restaurant. “We all worked at Union Square Cafe,” Garret laughs. “Chris was actually the first person I talked to there. The manager just brings you straight to him.” 

Jack, the band’s guitarist, smiles. “Yeah, they make you say a fun fact when you start, and I said I played guitar, and then right after, he comes up to me and he’s like ‘Dude, you play guitar?’” 

It snowballed from there. Soon, the guys were jamming after shifts, playing through songs Garret had been writing and producing with his longtime producer, Rob Bedson. “Me and him had been working for like two years on all this music,” Garret explains. “Eventually, when us guys were jamming every week, the songs just exploded creatively.” Before long, they had an eight-song setlist. Their first show? “Jack’s roof,” Garret recalls. “Eighty people, all family and friends. That was the spark of ‘oh, we can actually do this.’” 

Six months later, and they’re beginning to pull crowds that small venues would kill for…without charging a dime. “There’s kind of a zeitgeist going on where house shows are more popular, so it’s nice to see live music coming back, I feel like this is just the right time,” Jack adds.

Each member brings something distinct to the table. Garret is the driving force, a frontman with an innate talent for storytelling and a voice full of grit and longing. Jack’s a melodic architect, crafting riffs that balance rock nostalgia with raw, bluesy textures. Lave, the bassist, maintains the foundation, fusing a thoughtful nature with explosive passion. Chris is the heartbeat, combining a steady reliability with exceptional starpower. 

Part of the magic is that everyone in Garret Elias feels like a fan first. Their influences range from Catfish and the Bottlemen to Green Day, Nirvana, Counting Crows, and Led Zeppelin. “My Rushmore’s been locked for years,” says Chris, flashing a tattoo of Green Day’s American Idiot heart and hand grenade on his shoulder. “Green Day, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Johnny Cash. That’s it.” Lave, the band’s low-end philosopher, cites Rage Against the Machine and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and breaks into laughter mid-interview when Garret admits his go-to karaoke is Gavin DeGraw. Within seconds, the whole band is yelling the chorus of “I Don’t Wanna Be.”

Moments like that are the band in a nutshell. Unfiltered, self-deprecating at times, and deeply bonded by the same thing that drives their shows: pure joy in creation and performance. Although they all have individual stories, they all have the same messaging at the core. It’s always been, and always will be, music. 

When they’re not dissecting riffs or rehearsing, they’re making each other laugh. The band’s group chat is full of “hype tracks” that Garret makes before every show, instrumental versions of “sick songs,” as he describes them. “Today’s was Baba O’Riley,” he says, smirking. “We wake up, and I send out a tracklist.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna stay offline,” he laughs, after I jokingly say the hype tracks should be shared with fans. 

That private camaraderie bleeds into their creative process. Their chemistry, half chaos, half brotherhood, is exactly what makes their live shows so good. They write like they play: collaboratively, instinctively, and with a hell of a lot of passion. “Sometimes I’ll come in with an idea,” Garret says. “Sometimes it’s born in rehearsal. ‘Always Changing,’ our first single, literally started with Jack playing a riff, and we just built from there.” 

Songwriting is a shared effort, a mix of intuition and patience. “For me, there’s usually something there, a nugget, as I start to write and I create the melodies around that and fill the rest in like a puzzle as it grows with the band,” Garret explains. “It just depends, sometimes I’ll start on an acoustic guitar and write the whole song line by line.”

The goal is simple but glorious. “Stadiums,” Garret says, grinning. “Take over the world,” adds Chris. But, even as the dream grows, the ethos stays the same. No pretense, and no velvet ropes. “The free stuff is so cool,” Jack says. “It’s real.” 

That energy has become their signature. After all, they’re operating in a post-pandemic city that’s still starved for community. “We’re still coming off COVID,” Lave says. “Everyone’s just like, ‘I’m never missing a chance to do this shit again.”

It’s no wonder crowds flock to Garret Elias’ gigs. It’s a rare blend of rebellion and relief. 

The band isn’t stopping in New York. A fan in San Diego offered them a backyard, and the band said yes without hesitation. “We just want to play,” Lave says. “If we make enough to live off it, that’s an awesome plus. This,” he gestures to the warehouse, the incoming crowd, “this is the shit.” 

Before they go on, I ask each of them one word to describe how they feel. 

“Electric,” Jack says. 

“Ready to shut this place down,” Garret adds. 

“Fuckin’ amped,” says Chris.

Lave just smiles, itching to get on stage. “Dopamine.” 

Couldn’t have described it better myself.