But what they found deep in the tunnels turned their whole lives inside out and changed all their plans. To explain their strange behaviour and their sudden regular disappearances from home they teamed up in a band under the name Weed & Dolphins and started to rehearse as a live act for their vocalist’s one-man-band home project.
In 2016 they released a bunch of their early singles such as ‘Like that’, ‘Secrets’, ‘Seaside’ on vk.com and started getting themselves into local gigs while reaching their first international audience through Instagram. In the beginning of 2017 the project dropped it’s debut LP – ‘Islandkid cassette’. The album was released on cassettes and tagged as ‘cloud-punk’ by Belarusian biggest art and music magazine 34mag. ‘Islandkid cassette’ summed up the sound and the aesthetics of Weed & Dolphins music of that period. It was a compilation of home recorded playful pop songs with gloomy lyrics behind childish guitar melodies and freaky synths. The production on the album was based on clashing the 80-90’s post-punk/grunge type arrangements with chopped-n-screwed rap refrains, monotonous spoken word verses and trippy vocal melodies.
The independent Belarusian music guide Experty.by described it as “something between sequenced freak-punk of Atom and His Package and lazy dream-pop of Beach Fossils”. Due to the DIY way of releasing the album and lack of promotion, major blog appearances and management ‘Islandkid cassette’ didn’t get much international attention as a record. At the same time putting the album on cassette tapes allowed to spread it among retro DIY aesthetic lovers, while positioning the project as an active live band capable of bringing the actual album sound on stage gave Weed & Dolphins a chance to start getting on shows and events outside their home country.
In late 2017 and during 2018 W&D did a number of gigs and festivals in Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, Serbia, Estonia, Lithuania and Hungary with appearances at Ment Ljubljana, What’s next in Music?, Budapest Showcase Hub. In January 2019 Weed & Dolphins performed two showcases at Eurosonic Noorderslag in Groningen, Netherlands and did a Netherlands tour in December 2020.
