Winyah

A five-piece indie rock band from Georgetown, South Carolina, Winyah formed in 2023, locked themselves in a warehouse to write enough material for a festival set, and haven't stopped moving since. Their debut album Lot to Learn landed with real traction—sold-out headline dates, over 25 million streams, and fans singing words back to them in cities they'd never played before. A second album is on the way.

We spoke with frontman Thomas Rowland mid-tour, somewhere on the band's way to Utah, about the unexpected early momentum and keeping blinders on amid the intensity.

Analogue: From an outside perspective, the trajectory here looks pretty steep in a short amount of time. Does it feel that way from the inside?

Thomas Rowland: Yes, it does, for sure. I think that sometimes it goes over our heads a little bit because we're always keeping our foot on the gas, keeping our eye on the ball, always trying to be the best we can be, whether it's on stage, selling tickets, or in the studio. We really like to grind and hustle.

Sometimes I look back, and I'm like, 'Wow, I can't believe that this is where we were a year ago.' It feels like it was yesterday, but it also feels like so long ago just because we have been so locked in trying to grow this thing and do more and more. We do feel it. I definitely feel it all the time, but I think that sometimes we kind of ignore it a little bit and just try to keep our blinders on—to just keep making good music and playing the biggest shows we can.

Analogue: When did you first realize something was happening that was bigger than what you could structure and plan for?

Thomas: I think we always dreamed of becoming a real band, whatever that meant, and so it was just a matter of getting to these moments where it kind of felt that way. We really got lucky, and we played Bonnaroo in June of 2024, and that was kind of the moment where we were like, 'Okay, we gotta write a bunch of original songs and become a real band, to use this as an opportunity to go and tour and do it for real.'

After Bonnaroo, throughout the rest of 2024 and into early 2025, we kind of got our first taste of touring, and that was when I think we developed a little chip on our shoulder. We're like, 'All right, this is sweet, but we want to be the headliners. We gotta get a little bit more exposure in order for people to really give a shit and want to buy our tickets.'

Luckily, it just coincided with us dropping our first album, and people really connected with that, which was such a blessing and maybe supernatural in some ways. We're not really the biggest promoters necessarily. We're not posting every two seconds on Instagram and TikTok. We're very strategic and careful and intentional with how we post and what our online presence is.

Then, in the spring of 2025, we started doing the backyard covers thing and jamming that way and posting some stuff up, and that was when we really gained a massive following on social media. And that was really perfect timing because we had already played a ton of shows together. We were very dialed on the first album live, so we could follow up that social media success with great shows.

Our first run in the northeast was when we all were like, ‘Okay, this is insane. We're selling out headline shows, everybody's singing all the words to our songs to us.’ That was when it was like, 'Okay, this is definitely bigger than just the five of us.' The shows have just kept getting bigger and better, the fan base is growing, and it feels like a community.

Analogue: Do you find yourself wrestling with when to say yes or not to something in the midst of it all?

Thomas: It depends on what it is that you're saying no to. There's a little bit of pressure that comes with it, but for us, I think that it's a good thing. We're the kind of guys that when there's pressure, we go and we act on it and we make something happen. We've learned a lot about striking when the iron's hot in the past year or year-and-a-half. Sometimes, we've had moments where maybe it was a tough decision to say no or yes, and we just kind of went either way. Looking back, maybe we should have put some more thought into it. I think that sometimes any big decision is hard to make, so it could be hard to say no or yes, depending on what it is.

Analogue: How much of the live show is still a learning curve for you at this point?

Thomas: You gain experience through reps, and a lot of our primary reps in the first two years of this band were only in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Having the opportunity to go and play music all over the country, we get to see so many different people in so many different places and play in so many different rooms.

On the venue side, it's little things like figuring out how your in-ear mix is going to react to a 300-cap room with a 30-foot high ceiling versus a 200-cap room with a 10-foot ceiling that's super long, as opposed to a 1,000-capacity theater. So there's some technical stuff where we're getting the chance to try out a ton of venues and get comfortable as we settle into bigger rooms.

Getting to meet all of our fans in all different corners of the country is so cool because we get to see who is really connecting with this stuff firsthand, and it's really a diverse bunch of people. We're from a tiny town—a lot of people maybe don't get out of our hometown and don't get to see the world and the country. I think that it's really great for us, not only as performers but as people.

But honestly, it's pretty simple. The learning curve is: we play a ton of shows, and with that comes extreme confidence in what we're doing on stage. We have an insane connection and chemistry when we go on that stage. We are not five guys. We are one band, one unit. It takes time and patience and reps to get to that. And being out on the road, long drives, long days, is a test of that. We're constantly asking, 'How can we upgrade this live show? Is it adding a lighting director? Better decisions in terms of tone or amplifiers or stage plot?'

Being out on the road so much gives us the opportunity to get really nitpicky with our set. And I think that as a result of this tour and our previous tours, future tours are going to be absolutely insane.

Analogue: Is new music finding its way into sets on this run? Are you working on new material while in the van?

Thomas: It's always a little tough because we obviously know all of the unreleased songs. We're listening to them constantly, working on mixing and getting our second album ready. We want to play them, but it's always kind of tough in shows because we want the fans to be able to sing along and dance. But we do work them in sporadically.

Right now we're playing three unreleased songs in the set. I think it helps us a lot to afford songs and then go spend some time trying stuff out on the road, and then we kind of get new ideas or feelings about how the mix should sound in terms of mixing that studio experience with a concert experience. It's pretty integral to our recording process and the choices we make regarding what we put out first and what stuff we hang on to a little bit longer. We do toy around with unreleased music on the road a ton.

VISIT: Winyah

*Photo: Harrison Hargrave