It was people with Chinese names, and people that didn’t seem like they were from Vancouver. Then suddenly it was 100 a day, 200 a day, every single day. We were just an indie band from Vancouver, and every day a couple of people would like our page. “We just started getting a lot of followers. “We didn’t even know about the placement on the playlist,” Smith says.
It’s sitting at an insane 19 million listens today-with fans from across the world leaving comments like “This song makes me nostalgic for things that I haven’t even lived yet” and “Makes me want to draw flowers while I contemplate the sunset, drink tea and my girlfriend smokes some flavored cigarettes and plays with my hair, at summer, in some small town.” The buzz was started by a Filipina music tastemaker named TheLazylazyme who spotlighted the breezy early single “Peach Pit” on her YouTube channel, where the song took off immediately. If Smith sounds blessed by the band’s good fortune, it’s because most acts don’t go from regional obscurity to international sensation in the space of a year. “Now we’re at the point where we’ve already sold out 10 shows on this tour.” “We’re spoiled because we pretty much started touring and immediately had people coming to our shows, which was incredibly lucky and rare,” Smith says gratefully, reached on his cellphone. Packed rooms are something the Vancouver quartet has gotten used to since blowing up on the Internet in the spring of 2017. Along with his bandmates-guitarist Christopher Vanderkooy, bassist Peter Wilton, and drummer Mikey Pascuzzi-he’s on this third swing through the Windy City with Peach Pit, the difference from previous visits being the show is sold out. Quite understandably, singer-guitarist Neil Smith sounds like a man living the dream when he’s tracked down in the architectural wonderland known as Chicago.