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The Rare Occasions

Founded in Boston and based in Los Angeles, the Rare Occasions make music reflecting their bi-coastal personality with a smart, energetic edge that informs their wiry melodies and witty lyrics that mesh with their sunny and engaging California-style pop hooks. The band draws inspiration from garage rock and indie pop, and mixes a dash of punk-pop with a tunefulness and spiky undercurrent that complement one other. They set down the framework of their approach on their debut album, 2018's Into the Shallows, and sharpened their attack on 2021's LP Big Whoop, while the single "Notion" became a commercial breakthrough for them in 2021. The Rare Occasions were formed by Brian McLaughlin (lead vocal, guitar, and keyboard) and Luke Imbusch (drums and percussion), longtime friends who began making music together when they were attending high school in Providence, Rhode Island. They played together in a local jam band, and after graduating, McLaughlin planned to study electrical engineering and Imbusch wanted to study music. As fate would have it, they both enrolled at colleges in the Boston area, which allowed them to stay in touch and keep working out songs together. McLaughlin, who was attending Tufts University, met a like-minded classmate who played guitar, Peter Stone, while Imbusch struck up a friendship with fellow Berklee College of Music enrollee, bassist Jeremy Cohen. The four formed a band called the Custodians in 2012, before souring on the name and changing it to the Rare Occasions. They found their feet quickly enough to win the WBRU-FM Rock Hunt in 2013, a Rhode Island-area Battle of the Bands contest. In 2014, the group self-released a five-song EP, Feelers, which included "Dysphoric," which won the "Song of the Year" prize in the annual John Lennon Songwriting Contest the following year. A second disc, the four-song Futureproof, followed in 2016; it featured the first version of "Notion." The Rare Occasions released their first full-length album, Into the Shallows, in 2018; by this time, Imbusch had relocated to California, where he hoped to establish a career scoring film and television projects. The band continued to write and rehearse virtually through file exchanges and Facetime, and eventually McLaughlin and Cohen would follow Imbusch's lead and move to Los Angeles. Stone would stay in New England, and dropped out of the group. While the music business was struggling to figure out what to do when the COVID-19 pandemic locked down the country in 2020, the Rare Occasions had the advantage of having worked remotely when they were split between Massachusetts and California, and during that period they wrote and recorded the bulk of their second album, 2021's Big Whoop. While the record was winning new fans, an earlier song developed a new life when "Notion" went viral after being featured in a video on TikTok. In October 2021, "Notion" was racking up streaming figures in the nine digits, and made the singles charts in Canada, England, and Ireland after the group struck a deal with Elektra Records to reissue the song. With an eager fan base waiting for their next move, the Rare Occasions put out a six-song EP, Attaboy, in November 2022.
© Mark Deming /TiVo
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Discography

21 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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