Music artists of the Spokane-CdA area unite to create new band Psily with cross-genre sound

Two sets of the area’s most recognizable local musicians have joined forces to create a versatile rock powerhouse in the form of Psily (P.S. I Love You).

For decades, Cary Beare and Michael Koep have been playing alongside each other throughout the Inland Northwest and in bands like the RUB. In more recent years, guitarist Tristan Hart Pierce and keyboardist Blake Braley have become local staples through nights at downtown’s ZOLA or on the road with Chewelah’s own R&B son, Allen Stone.

In late 2024, the two duos found themselves loosely testing out the concept of a Beatle’s cover band but instead stumbled upon a sense of musical chemistry too magnetic to deny.

“The focus very quickly shifted away from playing cover songs and to just writing and recording music without a goal in mind, which was super refreshing,” Hart Pierce said. “We didn’t have a band, didn’t know it was going to be a band, didn’t know we were going to release any of the songs, we just wrote a bunch of music over the span of a few days.”

Named after a track on the Beatle’s debut record “Please Please Me,” Psily played a single tribute-esque show at the Hive. But with a new collection of original music at their disposal, they decided to leave the Fab Four covers behind – besides the name, that is.

“It started by accident, basically,” Hart Pierce said. “It was just like a really pure and wholesome thing.”

With the two sets of people consisting of relatively wide age gaps and diverse musical influences, the sonic nature of Psily can generally be defined as rock but with hints of the blues, country, metal, soul and R&B depending on the track and which member is on lead vocals – a role they all exchange.

Essentially, if the four musicians happen to combine forces and have fun creating a song, it will be added to the repertoire.

“We’re not afraid to venture into new territories or different genres because there’s no one to tell us we can’t do it,” Hart Pierce said. “There’s no manager, no label, no nothing – we’re just four guys in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area that started a band, that’s like the lowest amount of pressure you can imagine.”

Instead of “picking a lane” in order to be more commercially viable or marketable to a single genre, the band has decided to roll with whatever they create and put it all on one hodgepodge debut record. The album is currently at the tail end of production in Koep’s home studio while being mixed at the home studio of Josh Lorenzen, co-owner of the Chameleon as well as RÜT Bar & Kitchen.

“All of that mixed together has mixed into kind of a soup; the record is all over the place,” Hart Pierce said. “My favorite part about this record is everyone has their fingerprint on it in a major way. … There’s a lot of guitar on the record; it’s kind of fulfilled my childhood dream of being lead guitar player in a rock band.”

Although Psily has consistently performed at the Iron Horse in Coeur d’ Alene, the band’s Friday show at the Hamilton Studio’s Listening Room will be their first proper performance in Spokane. Hart Pierce is excited to once again perform at one of his favorite local venues while finally getting to show off the new project to audiences back home.

“It’s just an exciting, fun new band. I think people are really going to dig what we’re doing,” Hart Pierce said. “The freedom and the fun that we have on stage hopefully allows everybody else to kind of feel that same way: to enjoy the music but not take it all too seriously.”