Chicago indie rock six-piece Six Foot Blonde push into a more kinetic sound on their spirited sophomore album ‘Hummingbird,’ pairing bright, danceable arrangements with heavier, emotionally charged lyrics while drawing on the natural world and a newly collective approach to songwriting.

by guest writer Olivia Sigunick

Stream: ‘Hummingbird’ – Six Foot Blonde

I think our songwriting voices have become a voice.

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Six Foot Blonde are changing their tune.

The Chicago-based band is turning up the rock, turning down the pop, and hitting the road for their first national tour and the release of their second studio album. With a little inspiration from the sands, the seas, and the skies, frontwoman Julia Rusyniak is steering the band toward a more rock-driven sound.

“I’m both not surprised and also so surprised at the same time. The logical part of me is like, yeah, of course you would steadily grow, but I don’t think I realized how far we would get,” Rusyniak tells Atwood Magazine. “I didn’t realize we were going to get fans that have tattoos of our lyrics or fans that are at every show and sing along to every single song that we have.”

The steady growth has been well underway since becoming a sought-after Indiana University cover band at local bars in Bloomington, Indiana. Back then, there were nine members; now, just six. The group currently consists of lead singer Julia Rusyniak, not six feet or naturally blonde, but the titular six foot (in platforms) blonde (dyed) in question. John Alex Rusyniak is on piano and saxophone, Elliot Obermaier and Zach Patrick on guitar, Dom Heyob on bass, and Brian Healey on drums.

Their first step into the limelight came in 2022, when they released their first original song, “Callin’ to Karma.” For their first foray into songwriting, the band created a song every fan who goes to their show now knows – their usual concert-ending number. “Within the first year, it hit 20,000 streams. For someone who’d never released music, it was insane,” says Julia. “From there it became something close to 2 million, and I don’t even think I realized. I was having a lot of fun making something that felt like a scrapbook, a beautiful summation, and a tie to my friends’ time together in college.”

The song opens with a plucky guitar solo that leads into Julia and former band member Emma Spartz’s buttery vocals. Julia’s voice recalls that of Amy Winehouse – soulful and coming from deep in her chest, with a juxtaposed smoothness; her tone clean yet forceful. The song features both saxophone and trumpet, played by former members Adam Cohen and Kaleb Weisenfluh, and the energetic song’s instrumentals are led by Healey, adding a hearty feel to the beat. The band easily transcends through a mix of soul, power pop, and jazz, with a nostalgic yet modern feel.

Since that release, the group has released music every year, whether a single, an EP, or an album, and this year is no exception with the introduction of their sophomore album, Hummingbird.

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Growing up in Indiana, Julia and John Alex, the group’s sibling duo, were musically gifted but not raised by musicians.

Their mother was an artist, their father a “science guy” with a healthy record collection.

“My dad introduced me to a lot of singer-songwriters like John Prine and Sinéad O’Connor, who are two large inspirations, and my mom introduced softer acoustic artists like Norah Jones, John Denver, and The Weepies,” says Julia. “I remember my parents discovered Adele before she got big.”

Though not musicians themselves, their parents were highly encouraging. “I would put the piano in the playroom instead of the living room so they would play on it,” Janet Rusyniak, Julia and John Alex’s mom, tells Atwood Magazine.

Their house was always filled with music, partly due to their dad’s extensive record collection. Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon was among the first albums that Julia would receive. Her love for making music is also heavily inspired by Irish musicians – Sinead O’Connor and The Cranberries, to name a few.

“Julia would sit in the basement singing at the top of her lungs, to the piano, likely to some Broadway tune,” says John Alex. “I remember my dad would be blasting some version of whatever he was into at the time, whether it be Bob Dylan or REM and then there was my own version of that, which was trying a little bit of everything, playing equally as loudly, guitar, piano, and even drums, for a bit.”

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Julia, along with Heyob and Patrick, joined the band in 2020, their first year of college at Indiana University.

John Alex, Healey, Obermaier, and three other former members were already making music together. It was a college-affiliated group at first. “It was called Bloomington Delta Music Club, which one of our members, Elliot [Obermaier], actually started,” says John Alex. The group members varied throughout the years, but during this time, the nine of them came together during hard times. “We needed something to do during COVID that was outdoors and six feet apart, so we would go to these outdoor quarantine-type music jams where we would be playing music apart from each other,” Julia says.

After the pandemic subsided, the band began playing at local bars and quickly gained momentum. Their first gig was at Kilroy Sports, a music-and-sports bar.

“That whole summer we just continued to do outdoor shows that were COVID-friendly,” says Julia. “Then two years later, all of a sudden, we were fully integrated into normal life again, and things just felt like they took off. At first as a cover band and then with original music.”

The band ebbed and flowed through different groups and formations as members graduated, moved on, or generally went in their own directions. “I took about 7 months off and went to travel, and I spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City to ski but stopped at a couple other places to explore the outdoors,” John Alex says. “I came back for a show in the spring, and I heard Six Foot Blonde play their first [not yet released] original, which was some version of Lady at the time, and that pretty much immediately sparked inspiration to rejoin the band.”

After that first gig, the band had to come up with a name. “We came up with the name on a whim,” John Alex says. “There was a beer in town called Six Foot Blonde, and we had two tall blonde singers. We didn’t think much of it.” Julia remembers being in her dorm room, on a Zoom with the band, looking at the bottle on her desk and saying, “Guys…we should just call it Six Foot Blonde,” she says. “Emma was super tall and had bleach blonde hair, and I was close enough to six foot and had been called the six-foot baby.”

Their first two singles, “Callin’ to Karma” (2022) and “Lady” (2022), became part of their first EP, Tino’s Place (2022), an exploration of the jazz genre with sultry vocals and an emphasis on horn instruments. Those first three projects included all nine members until the following year, when they whittled it down to six, with “Perpendicular Universe” pushing Julia to take over as the lead vocalist. Two years after releasing their first original song, they released their first album, Ask Me How I Am (2024).

This album marked Julia’s move deeper into songwriting. “I feel like I understand the formula of writing a song a lot better and finding inspiration in the day-to-day things.” As with “Landgirl” (2024), the first single released before the band’s first album, Julia pulls inspiration from nature and the things around her, a similar thing for brother John Alex, who took that time to explore the outdoors.

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Their upcoming album follows a similar theme, although it departs from Six Foot Blonde’s original sound.

“This one’s the furthest genre-wise from what we’ve originally stayed true to,” Julia explains. “There’s a lot more alternative rock/indie rock.”

The album takes on heavier subjects, but in a way that is digestible for listeners. “The songs are upbeat, fun, and dance-y. The lyrics, however, are quite the opposite,” Julia notes. “Lyrically, I wanted it to be a little more difficult to pin down. I wanted the words to feel evocative, important, and emotional, but I didn’t want them to be so obvious that you listen to the song and know exactly what I’m saying. I want people to find their own interpretations from my lyrics and the stories.”

Many of the songs are rooted in influences from the ’80s and ’90s rock scene, combined with an upbeat melody that is intended to invoke dance, similar to that of modern pop music.

The first song on this album, released as a single on August 21, “Carmilla,” references a gothic tale from the 1800s that now stands for queer liberation, following the band’s goal for this project. The album creates throughlines that weave in and out of each song, but “Carmilla” is a story of its own, making room for it to stand alone. They accompanied the release with a music video – an eccentric satirical re-telling of the story using a puppet as the titular Carmilla.

* * *

Up until now, Six Foot Blonde have been creating songs individually or in small groups and combining them into an album, without a cohesive storyline.

For this new album, they wrote all the songs as a full band. “I think our songwriting voices have become a voice,” says John Alex. The band grew more united, musically, through the process.

The album’s preparation began during a time of uncertainty in the United States. The 2024 presidential election’s impact, combined with the Rusyniaks’ love for nature, heavily influenced the songs on the album.

“We wanted to create a total work of art rather than a collection of pieces,” guitarist Elliot Obermaier says. “Hummingbird is an evolution in our songwriting because it forced us to write a lot more as a unit and with a collective vision of music that we all wanted to write.”

As the band came together to create the music, unity became more and more the theme of the record.

 “A lot of the songs came from a place of trying to make people feel loved and unified together,” Julia explains. “I am so inspired by birds because they are free to just go wherever. I’m inspired by hummingbirds and their ability to cross over from Mexico into the US, and I’m inspired by starlings and how they make murmuration,” Julia says.

When starlings form murmurations in the sky, often in the fall, they take flight and form images by flying together, almost like a wave of water – floating and moving in synchronicity while making a pleasant bird song. The birds have no leader; they all go up and move together as one, following the bird above, below, and to the sides.

“They just trust each other,” says Julia. “There are so many aspects of oneness and unity I wanted to bring into this album, and I found so much inspiration in seeing the environment. I am blindly following the guys in the band around me, following them and trusting them to make something beautiful.”

And just as she is following them, they are following her, evoking a murmuration of their own making and uniting as one.

Hummingbird by Six Foot Blonde is out now.

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Olivia Sigunick is a New York-based writer, journalist, and photographer with a master’s in Magazine Journalism and Digital Storytelling from New York University. Originally from Chicago, she is steeped in the music scene in both the cities she calls home. When she is not typing away, she can be found reading, usually in nature, or listening to music and curating new playlists.

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Hummingbird

an album by Six Foot Blonde