Last year was a banner year for Tacoma-based rock band Enumclaw.

After dropping their first single "Fast N All" in early 2021, the band blew up, nabbing features in the Seattle Times, KEXP, Pitchfork, and The Fader before playing any public live shows. In April, they dropped their debut EP Jimbo Demo to rave reviews. And just last week, Enumclaw announced Luminelle Recordings signed them. Things are only looking up for the grungy four-piece.

For the past couple of weeks, the band has been on a West Coast tour opening for Seattle's Naked Giants, and on Saturday, March 5, their final stop will be at Neumos. When I hit them up by phone last week, they were stationed in Encino. The night before, they played The Echo in Los Angeles. The show, allegedly, didn't go well.

"It was not fun, honestly," confessed Aramis Johnson, lead singer and guitarist for the band. "It was the stiffest crowd we might have played in front of yet. Our monitors got messed up, so it sounded like shit on stage."

Still, he said playing live shows has been fun and an opportunity to see their music's real-life effect on people after spending so much time not playing for anyone. At the L.A. show, he recounted that a fan brought the band the Oasis album Definitely Maybe on vinyl (Enumclaw calls themselves the best band since Oasis, which might be true when it comes to cool factor).

"You get to see that this thing is not just on the internet and that there are people in real life, people that have spent money to come see you play music," said Johnson. "Which is really cool and important to us."

The band officially came together during the summer of 2019 following a drunken karaoke session when Johnson—who co-founded Toe Jam and DJ'd for hip-hop group Boiler Boyz— convinced guitarist Nathan Cornell and drummer Ladaniel Gipson to start a band, he told KEXP. The trio had three demos recorded and just before they had a chance to play live, the world shut down in March 2020. On the upside, it gave them more time to make music. Eventually they recruited Johnson's brother, Eli Edwards, on bass to fill out their lineup.

Citing bands like Nirvana, Radiohead, Mötley Crüe, Drake, and Weird Al Yankovic as influences, Enumclaw's sound is a mashup of shoegaze, post-grunge, and emo. The mix is a kind of ironic evocation of the music that made the Pacific Northwest so popular in the '90s. There's an angst inherent to the band's distorted guitar and disaffected, flat singing, with lyrics earnest enough to make you want to sing along—like when Johnson speak-sings with his characteristically brash vulnerability, "Remember when we were kids/ How did it end up like this/Those are the days that I miss" on Jimbo Demo album opener "Cents."

As for their name, Johnson told the Seattle Times he was inspired by the city of Enumclaw's "elite wrestling squad" he went up against in high school. Somewhat incredibly, Enumclaw told me they had never heard of the most (in)famous thing about their namesake—the Mr. Hands Enumclaw horsefucking case that has gripped the imagination of this alt paper since it happened. Nor had they seen Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede's Zoo.

"We just thought it sounded it cool," Johnson said of their name. "Now it's because of the horse thing," joked Gipson, later saying the band would watch Zoo for a group movie night. Nothing like watching a film exploring the sacred bonds between man and animal with your bandmates.

Last week, the band released their first single and video with Luminelle Recordings, "2002." Produced by Gabe Wax, Johnson told Stereogum that the track is a "sarcastic" take on narcissism. Over the phone, he said it was inspired by a particularly rough breakup where his ex’s friend made him feel like a bad person. So he decided to write the song from that perspective.

On "2002," the guitars are all fuzzy and blown out, wailing across the track over a forceful drumbeat. "As soon as I open my eyes," croons Johnson, "I think of all the ways that I can be bad today." It's appropriately self-loathing, but not self-serious. The accompanying music video, directed by John C. Peterson, intercuts clips of the band in neutral-toned suits in a desolate parking lot against clips of a dark bedroom scene. It has a movie-like sheen that expands on their universe of music videos, which were mostly shot by Johnson and Edwards's older brother Tristan.

Though they only have about 16 minutes of released music, Enumclaw plays a 45-minute set, composed of only four songs from Jimbo Demo. The rest, Johnson said, is unreleased material that "sounds kind of like if Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves and Siamese Dream [by The Smashing Pumpkins] had a baby." Sick.

As for the future, Enumclaw is sailing overseas to play some shows around the UK for their Big in Japan tour in May. And they are, in fact, big in Japan. The legendary Tokyo record store Big Love Records reached out to Youth Riot Records, who put out the EP, just after "Fast N All" dropped and ordered 30 copies of Jimbo Demo on cassette before it even came out. "They found Enumclaw overnight almost before anyone else and then I immediately increased our pressing numbers," wrote Youth Riot Records co-founder Daniel Cohn over email. "It was pretty amazing, honestly! We had never shipped anything to Asia as a whole at that point as a label either."

But even though this Tacoma band has a small following over in Japan, they don't plan to hit up Tokyo anytime soon. "We wanna make sure the Japanese audience is really ready for the show," said Johnson. "We wanna up the stage production by the time we get out there to give the Japanese fans a real good experience."

They also promised lots of "new stuff" to come out and hope to be in most major U.S. cities by the end of the year. "We just plan to be everywhere and anywhere—on your TV, on the newsstands, on your mom's iTunes," Johnson proclaimed. "Everywhere."

Find out more about Enumclaw's Saturday, March 5 show opening for Naked Giants at Neumos here.