While Lafayette College students were listening to the songs of the summer over break, former Lafayette student band ‘geek’ was mixing a lot of audio.
As they edited an EP that saw a delay or two, fans of the band waited.
“I got a middle finger emoji from my friend,” said Max O’Rourke ‘26, the band’s bassist. “I know it’s just people want to hear it, which feels good. As much as it is a backlash for delaying something, if anything, it was motivating to really get that push.”
The EP — titled “what’s so wrong with that?” — was released on Monday, though it was originally scheduled for release in July. A story posted to geek’s Instagram account claimed the release acquired more than 500 listens on Spotify in just a day.
“He said it was inspiring to him, he’s a singer,” O’Rourke said of his friend’s reaction to the EP. “Words like that really mean a lot — what we do is actually reaching people. It’s not just in a basement.”
The EP includes four of the band’s songs: “sweet thing,” “french braid,” “saccharine” and “hound.” It features all of the band’s original members: guitarist Jaidan Marano ‘25, synthesizer Taylor Friedman ‘26, drummer Dean Gennosa ‘25, vocalist Sedha Byrne, audio mixer Conrad Tilroe ‘25 and O’Rourke.
Friedman described the finished EP as something to “commemorate” the band and its style after three of the band members graduated in May.
“I feel like a lot of our music was inspired by the music that we all listen to,” Friedman said. “Because of that, they kind of have a similar sound. I feel like they kind of fit under an umbrella.”
O’Rourke explained that the band started to prepare the EP last November, following a conversation that sparked in a Lafayette dining hall. It took the band four days to finish recording, an effort that took place in the Williams Center for the Arts before the end of finals week that fall semester.
“I remember the crunch time, the two first days that we recorded, we were there until like two or three in the morning,” Friedman said. “We were like, ‘Yeah, building closes at like 11, OK, we can’t leave until we’re done with this.’”
Tilroe — a music major at Lafayette alongside Friedman — did a hefty amount of the editing. He’d send the band a draft of a mix, and they would “write paragraphs” in response to how they wanted the final EP to turn out, O’Rourke explained.
“I think it turned out great, but it’s a lot of back and forth, and it’s also hard,” he said. “We’re all students, we have jobs during the semester.”
With the band’s farewell at the end of the spring 2025 semester, geek performed around a dozen concerts — some at campus buildings like McKelvy House, others in backyards that brought in over 50 guests.
“The music was incredible, but I’m also going to miss the community that followed geek and the community that geek fostered,” Chris Murphy ‘27 said.
“I think it really did feel like such a beautiful final, not goodbye, but farewell and closing of an era for geek,” Juliet Minadeo ‘27 said of the band’s EP. “It felt like the final evolution; like, of course they need an EP on Spotify.”
Bella Crapanzano ‘26, Friedman’s housemate of two years, said she enjoyed the EP by “seeing all their creative forces come together.”
“As each of them got to know each other on a personal level, as well as know their fans on a personal level, I feel like the music got that much more intimate,” she said.
