Photo by Ashley Gellman
Beach Bod
With dreamy vocals and a hazy summer feel, Beach Bod is music for a drive to the shore, enjoying a warm breeze through your window. Blurring between surf-pop, R&B and indie, it’s got a relaxed pep that’s just right for the laid-back fun of the season.
Core members Nathan Avila and Rachel Wild hail from the Pocono area, and perform regularly in Philadelphia with a coterie of city musicians. As best friends who love writing the same kind of music, forming Beach Bod in 2016 was almost inevitable. “Nathan and I have been in like a million bands for years,” Wild says. They learned to play, sing and write music through the trial and error of countless high school garage bands, doing what they love. Their first band together was of the hardcore genre, and now they seem to have found a comfortable voice with the synth sway of Beach Bod.
The name was chosen casually before they knew how far Beach Bod would go. “We were thinking, what’s the most generic, awful name?” Wild says. “Now we’re stuck with it.”
They weren’t expecting that flippant name to appear in The New Yorker’s “What We’re Listening to This Week” and spike their Spotify stats out of nowhere. But despite good press, the Bod isn’t super commercially ambitious. “I love doing everything myself,” says Wild, who’s also kept busy working at Martin Guitar.
Beach Bod has performed locally at ArtsFest, the Alternative Gallery and National Sokols, and keeps coming out with new stuff. The best part of being in a band is writing music, being with friends and having fun. Get in on this vibe via Facebook, Spotify and Bandcamp.
