UAD5: A Story for the People
- Ripley Scott
- 8 minutes ago
- 6 min read
I heard them before I saw them.
Not their music. Just their voices, shouting over each other in a way that made it impossible to pick out who was saying what.
The noise wasn't surprising. The enthusiasm was. The voices I heard sounded almost joyful, which felt... curious.
I'd just buckled my seatbelt to meet them when my phone rang. My thumb instinctively went for the red "Nope" button before I saw the screen: Steve Gigante.
Steve has a flip phone, and thus a habit of calling when a text would do for nearly everyone else in Western civilization. So I answered.
But it wasn't Steve: it was his bandmate, Maggie Brannon, laughing and trying to talk over the chaos behind her.
"Come on out. Walk through the side gate and follow the lights and the sounds."
When I made it to the practice space, they were in the middle of a new song. Nothing had been paused or rearranged to make space for me, and I exhaled in relief.
Steve Gigante was on guitar, Dave Weller on drums, and Maggie Brannon, Kat Brock and Adam Deal sang and danced around three microphones.
As the song ended, I started watching the band instead of listening to it, trying to figure out who was actually running shit, but no one seemed particularly interested in establishing that.
Adam pulled the mic close, "Are we going to do that one again?"
"Shhhhh," Kat whispered into her mic. "Why don't you go to the library, nerd?"
Maggie joined in, "You can read books about music, nerd. That's how you know about music."
The music began playing to the banter, and all three of them started pointing at me: "Annnnd you're a nerd!"
I basked in it.
The night after the 2024 election, UAD5 was born out of collective despair at a table at The Public House. Kat says they all just ended up there together.
"Everything felt so horrible and we were trying to figure out what the hell we could possibly do," she remembers.
That's when someone said it.
"A band. We start a band."
And then Dave walked in.
"Drummer!" Maggie said, pointing at him across the patio.
"Okay," Dave shrugged.
A few days later, around a bonfire, they shouted songs about playground animals at the sky, and within two weeks they had a full setlist of songs.
It happened that quickly and with that little deliberation, and it has carried on in the same version ever since.
UAD5's songs appear quickly. They're short and participatory. They might be about names in your mouth, a wet spot, nerds, paid time off or a spring-mounted plastic horse on a 1990s playground that knocks your teeth out and leaves you wondering how you're going to pay for it.
They played their first show during the 2025 What For? festival at Pilot Light. Maggie came out dressed as a nun and they handed fake beards to people in the audience.
The songs were loud and absurd and, underneath the absurdity, strangely sincere. The people loved it.
It's important to note that the members of UAD5 are not discovering a bit. They're veteran artists who have spent years making things. They have been on Knoxville's stages for a long time doing serious work and building serious projects.
Now they have a band where someone can be called a nerd for knowing things.
I've been trying for months to figure out how to explain what UAD5 is about. The problem is, I have no idea.
To me, they're about everything and nothing all at once.
The closest thing I got to an actual answer to any of my interview questions came from Steve.
"What we're doing is joyful, and it's almost more rebellious than saying, like, fuck you. To be joyful and happy is a more subversive way to handle what's, like, being shoved in your face."
He said he hadn't felt this kind of fun since he was 13, playing in his first band.
"It's like being a kid. And we're saying, 'No, you're not gonna drag me down. We're together.'"
It should be no surprise that whatever UAD5 is doing is contagious. Go to one of their shows and you can see it catching across the room.
The silliness is not the point.
The silliness is the point.
Maggie said that when she's the only writer in control of the lyrics, things can start to feel dark.
"But anytime I collaborate with other people, it's very silly. I can goof off with my friends."
Steve knows what happens when he takes the other road.
"I've overcooked songs to where I can't even play them," Steve said. "And I go back and hear the demo, the first time I played it, and I'm like, duh. That's it. Why did I spend eight years rewriting the third verse?"
UAD5 seems to have arrived at the opposite conclusion: don't spend eight years rewriting the third verse.
Maybe don't even write the third verse.
There's a cartoon from "The Far Side" someone brought up during practice, unprompted, the way everything gets brought up in that space.
Two scientists in lab coats. A sign behind them reads VIAGRA CORPORATION. One scientist turns to the other: "Why are we always trying to make things so hard?"
Editor's Note: the Far Side comic referred to here does not exist in any official capacity. My best guess is this was an internet edit or a different comic entirely. Anyways, back to Ripley
"But with us, there's no thought," Kat said.
"Songs just appear. And then they disappear."
They have a backlog of voice memos on their phones. Riffs. Chants. Half-formed things. Sounds they barely remember making.
Sometimes Dave or Steve scrolls through them and finds something to bring to the practice space.
Sometimes it becomes a song. Sometimes it goes back into the phone.
When pressed about who is actually in charge, they named Maggie's roommate Josh.
Later, they named Judy, Maggie's cat, a small calico with a clipped ear.
Judy was feral. A friend of a friend called Maggie about a wood pile and a scared cat. Maggie went over. Judy rode back home with her.
Last year, UAD5 called Leslie Wylie Bateman from practice to ask if she'd be their guitar tech. Specifically, if she'd be their guitar tech as Judy the Cat.
Leslie said no.
Kidding.
She showed up in a gray cat onesie and had too much fun dancing and being a cat to keep track of the set list. She threw cat toys at the band and drank beer out of a cat bowl.
"I got demoted, but I kept coming to shows as Judy. Summertime, not so much, because the onesie is really hot. But I'll be back this winter. I think they like having Judy around."
Leslie, who has known these musicians since their earlier bands were playing their first shows, recalls seeing UAD5 for the first time.
"They were just all in . . . winding up the room with this wild, in-your-face punk rock with lyrics that were pretty silly and absurdist on the face but kind of three-raccoons-in-a-trench-coat for real messages. Like, yes, let's DO duct tape some dicks please!"
After watching the same performance, Steve's friend Jake recruited a group specifically to see "this band that's really fucked up and weird."
UAD5 knew this.
So they opened with "Box Fan," a long, pretty, three-chord ballad with full harmonies and a real guitar arrangement.
Jake spent the first several minutes turning to his friends, "No, no, hang on. This isn't them. It's gonna get weird, I swear."
Eventually, it did. UAD5 had simply decided to make them wait.
The songs are built so that if you have heard them once, you can sing them. If you have heard them zero times, you can probably still sing them.
"It's hard to not participate," Steve told me.
"It would be more difficult to not be yelling, 'How am I gonna pay for this?'"
There's something old-fashioned about it. It's like being at summer camp. Someone starts yelling. Someone else joins in. The room figures it out.
Just like five people on The Public House patio figured it out by deciding to make something together, and what they made isn't particularly interested in being impressive or explainable.
This is what I know for certain about UAD5:
They have two cats. They have a flip phone. They have a long list of recordings they may or may not ever play again. They have a snarky rebellion made of joy and nonsense, with no plans to be intentional about any of it.
When I left band practice that night, I saw a birdbath on the stairs. I'd commented on it earlier when Adam called dibs and said he wouldn't forget to take it home.
He forgot it.
Nobody chased him down to remind him.
I touched it on the way out, and I've been thinking about why ever since.
When UAD5 makes something, they let it be as loud and silly as it wants to be and don't think about whether it will come back into their heads or amps again.
A joke becomes a song.
A stranger becomes a chorus.
A guitar tech becomes a cat.
A cat becomes a manager.
Someone forgets a birdbath.
And nobody goes back for it.
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