An introduction to Toast Club and hints about their future endeavors

The other day I was scrolling on Instagram when I came across an ad for a song and group I had never heard before. It immediately caught my eye because the groove was infectious and the main riff was stuck in my head. I looked up this song, and it acquainted me with a group called Toast Club. I explored their page a bit and noticed that their recent releases have a plane and aviation theme going on. The song in particular that I heard was called “Café Pacific” and what caught my ears and eyes was that firstly, the lyrics had plane references in them that I found hilarious, like “is it a Boeing” and “he’s looking for a Dreamliner” to name a couple. It also appears that in the promo I saw for this song, they somehow had permission to shoot it at London’s Heathrow Airport in front of a Boeing 747. I had to know more about these guys, which is hard when the band has less than 40,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and there appears to be absolutely no writing on them (song reviews, gig reviews, etc.).

What I can gather is that Toast Club is a group consisting of two members: Tommy Villiers and Chuck Smythe. I can try and pin down their sound to one particular style, but it’s more of a blend of a lot of specific influences, at least to my ears. To me, the aesthetics of their music resemble the sunny jazz fusion of Masayoshi Takanaka, with similar grooves to the late 70s era of Prince’s music. The cover art for their singles (as of writing they have not released a debut album) maintains the plane theme, with picturesque images of planes in flight, evoking a dreamlike aesthetic of travel brochures, or perhaps even 20th century-era advertisements for luxury goods. The guy described in “Café Pacific” in particular is more of a mundane figure, which adds to the humor of the track, underpinning an upbeat jam with the averageness of walking through an airport to get breakfast before a business flight.

“Rescue Human,” the proceeding single of “Café Pacific,” is also in a jazz fusion style, being an instrumental jam in the vein of Japanese city pop band Casiopea, or maybe even a tasty jam taken from the sessions for a Mario Kart soundtrack (seriously, the musicianship on some of those songs is breathtaking). Based on the energy of the track and its cover art, I get the feeling of taking off in an airplane, excitedly thinking about whichever exotic destination for which I am being transported.

“Ghostbusters (Toast Punters)” is another recent single and is a jam off the “Ghostbusters” theme by Ray Parker Jr. It’s filled with a lot of the similar energy of “Rescue Human” albeit less laid back and more energetic. The drums at the start of it remind me almost of house music, and the keyboard playing to me is a massive highlight, featuring clean and glistening arpeggios which absolutely soar like the airplane on the cover. This track reminds me of jamming with my friends at band practice off a song we all know while randomly noodling and messing around.

As of writing this, they have a new single releasing on February 27th, titled “Lift Explained,” and based off of the snippets posted, it resembles the airy and energetic jams of “Rescue Human” and “Lift Yourself.” In the caption for a post promoting this song, they even added to the joke of the song by writing the equation for Lift which I thought was really funny. These guys seems like very lighthearted and funny guys, but also incredibly proficient and diligent musicians. I hope that they drop their first album soon because what they have released so far is absolutely stellar.