The pop music scene isn’t as upbeat as it used to be—but ICYDAY are doing their best to fix that. The trio of performers share a love of music and a longstanding friendship, and they’ve brought both those things to their debut as a band. Their first-ever single “Open Up” arrived in January 2024 and is the kind of feel-good pop track that will immediately land a spot on listeners’ playlists, followed quickly by the delightfully verbose “Love Isn’t Fair” in February.
To get an idea of how they developed their sound and how they came together, I spoke to the group—singer, guitarist and bassist Sloane Morgan Siegel, singer and drummer David Bloom, and guitarist/pianist Isaac Cohen. Learn about how their other entertainment ventures (both Sloane and David are also actors!) helped them as they officially ventured into the music world, and just what they love about working as a trio.
Brittany Frederick: What motivated you to start a band? Was it purely for the fun of it, or was there something specific that brought you around to the idea?
Isaac Cohen: It was pretty much like that. We all are just amazing friends, we love music, and one day, we kind of decided we [wanted] to try writing songs and just see what happens. And from our first song, we really enjoyed it—just enjoyed the whole process. We started taking it more seriously once we wrote our first song, and here we are.
Sloane Morgan Siegel: We got like three or four [songs] in and we were like, “I guess we should write more and then release [them].” [laughs]
David Bloom: “I guess we should actually put these things out instead of writing them for us.” So [the band] started to form once we realized that it was more fun than it was work.
BF: Was there a moment when you first felt that the band had a chance of being successful, beyond just as a passion project for the three of you?
Siegel: I think it’s when we wrote “Open Up.”
Bloom: Hearing that song come together, and just hearing what we could do exceed what any of the three of us individually thought we’d be able to do. Hearing the product, even if it was just a demo, it started to make us feel that maybe we could actually do this…I feel like the fact that it’s three of us together, that we can lean on each other in such a very unique and important way, it keeps us going.
Siegel: It also started to feel like like it was larger than us—like the music we were making needed to be heard. We love listening to it all day long. But we were like at some point, people need to hear this. I feel like people will get the same amount of enjoyment out of it we have, if not more.
BF: But once you make that decision, you have to come up with a band name. What’s the story behind calling yourselves ICYDAY?
Cohen: It took us a long time.
Bloom: It’s definitely the hardest part, because you think you have a name, and maybe you’re not super confident with it but okay, this will work—and that’s [another] band. And so you’re like okay, maybe something stylistic—and that’s a band. Everything you think or like for a band name…I envy people who can just have their own name, because that’s your name. Most people don’t have your name. But naming a band… We eventually came upon ICYDAY, which thank goodness, is not a band. It’s a combination of our names. “I” for Isaac, “sie” for Siegel, and “day” for David, but spell it out: ICYDAY.
BF: Now that your first single is out, are you getting the reaction from the audience that you hoped for back then? Has it affirmed your decision to take this public?
Cohen: We’ve gotten a lot of a lot of support on social media and from our friends and family… It’s been really cool to just see all the comments, and people sharing stories of our songs, and just sharing music everywhere, because we all love music. We love impacting other people and making them feel what we feel when we listen to music.
Siegel: It’s fun watching the song pop up in people’s playlists as well… It’s really cool seeing people love the song and add it to their daily lives.
Bloom: The song has so much meaning to us because we spent so much time writing it, working on it, perfecting it. And watching people we know [or] hearing about people who we don’t personally know [listening] to it, like we haven’t just spent the last however many so years making it, it’s a really surreal feeling. To watch them like it or hear a certain guitar pattern that we weren’t listening to as [heavily], or maybe they really love the bass line—it’s really cool to hear to hear people’s response, especially people that don’t know us personally, but just like the music or came upon it some random way. We are so thankful and so glad to be able to have people listen and share it with people that any response from anybody ever, even just an acknowledgment that they listened to it one time part-way still makes us feel good. Absolutely.
BF: What’s been the most interesting or surprising thing to come out of this journey? Because working with your friends can be very different from just hanging out with your friends. How has that dynamic evolved now that there’s a professional component?
Siegel: You just get to spend more time with each other. You get to know each other even more. I’ve known David since we were 12 years old. We have grown up together, and we will spend the rest of our lives hanging out. You’d think that there would be creative differences or something, [and] we argue, but not the bad way—in like a loving, brotherly way where it’s like, I think it should be this or I think it should be that. At the end of the day, it just makes us stronger. It just brings us all closer together.
Bloom: We don’t agree on everything. We have a lot of differences here and there. [But] I feel that because we all have the same goal, and we all have the same expectations of ourselves and what we can do. We’ll have tough conversations, we’ll have debates, [but] it’s all for like the greater purpose. And it’s not that this is work time and this is friend time, and we are two different groups; it’s all one big thing. Half the time, we have to stop goofing off.
Siegel: [Laughs.] That’s really the one thing we have to do. The hardest thing is focusing.
Cohen: And if one of us can’t be there on a certain day to work on the songs, we end up making some pretty different stuff, since we all have very different music tastes. We’ve got to keep ourselves accountable and keep ourselves in check, just to make sure we’re sticking to the plan of writing what we want to write, but something that all three of us want to do.
Siegel: That’s a good thing, having such different perspectives, as well. As musicians and as friends, we keep each other honest, we rein each other in. When one of us has an idea that’s way out there, the other ones ground it, and when somebody isn’t quite figuring out how to do something, the others lift them up. That’s the best part of the three of us; the different perspectives only make us stronger.
Bloom: I’ve known Sloane since I was 12; I’ve known Isaac since I was 14… We all want each other to succeed. So if it’s checking your own ego or compromising or whatever it is, it’s for us all getting better. And we’ve noticed that we’ve gotten a lot better at this process over the last two years. It’s night and day. We write so much faster [and] so much more concisely.
Sometimes you get discouraged. Sometimes your ideas aren’t working. Sometimes you have a suggestion and looking back, it might be really stupid. But it’s the fun of it, being able to be here. Having this song out and having more songs coming out. We’ve been through a lot of good and bad and ups and downs writing these, and to have this out is just a testament to what we’re able to do.
ICYDAY’s singles “Open Up” and “Love Isn’t Fair” are available now, and their next single “One More Song” arrives on March 8. For more information on the band, follow them on Instagram.
Article content is (c)2020-2024 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram.
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