Ash & The Endings

The soundproof door shut with a definitive click as the final notes of a vocal warm-up rings out against the man-made acoustics of Stinson Studios. Feet carefully tread over the chords that intertwine on the floor while a little tin of spare guitar picks rattle on a loaded pedalboard. As they don the headphones, a voice buzzes through giving the cue. At the same time, the “recording” sign flickers to life and drumsticks click into tempo.

Walking down any major street on a weekend night in Austin means listening to a wide range of local music overlapping all at once, making the trek an experience equivalent to something between stimulation overload and an indecisive dance party.

With the music scene flourishing post-pandemic, there is no shortage of live performances from bands in the area.

One such band is Ash and the Endings, a five-piece group that consists of Ashton Chase (singer), WK Wahlert (lead guitar), Conor Kelch (piano, rhythm guitar, vocals), Josean Rodriguez (bass, vocals) and Jamie Foster (drums).

“A rite of passage in Austin is to play at Carousel Lounge,” Chase said, smiling as she reminisced on her first live show with this new musical coalescence. “My husband and I had been considering moving to New Orleans, but after that gig I just thought that we couldn’t possibly leave. These are our people.”

The band’s roots lie in St. Edward’s University, where small circles blossomed into jam sessions at Chase’s pad covering old country and jazz hits.

These jam sessions, in turn, solidified their signature sound. Ash and the Endings, both in style and character, produce an energy that is straight out of a time machine – mastering the slick experimental combination of a rock and roll lead to carry raw, kaleidoscopic vocals. Chase holds the power and grit within her voice that lays the foundation for the band’s alt-rock style with psychedelic persuasion perfumed throughout – like Karen Carpenter and Amy Winehouse had a little belting baby in a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt. (You heard me.)

“It’s fun to work on and hone two completely different sounds,” Chase said. “At the base of it, it’s still rock and roll, but the attitude and the influence and what comes out is so different – I think we keep it Their latest single, Squelching Sneaks, as featured on KUTX, is unlike anything they have released before - adding a bluesy ambiance to their repertoire. When examining the staples of the blues, one thing is evident: No matter how funky that groove can be, they had to get the name of the genre from somewhere. Like many other blues tracks, it’s all in the origin of those heartfelt lyrics, written by Chase herself.

In light of the tragic Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas in May 2022, followed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade a little over a month later, Chase put her emotions as a woman in Texas best as being “fucking pissed off” – and that’s putting it nicely for the magazine.

“I was the kind of mad where you don’t know what else to do except drive around,” Chase said. “I was driving around Riverside and chain-smoking cigarettes and so angry.”

A thought-provoking, soul-searching, come-to-Jesus-moment drive is not complete without a soundtrack. Chase described listening to Howlin’ Wolf during this time of her life, but more specifically Spoonful. This song became a catalyst for Chase to not only turn to her own lyricism for a release, but it also tuned her ear to the creative possibilities behind the rhythmic swing of the blues – even sliding a reference to the song into her own lyrics. Chase’s recognizable exasperation is a thorn on the stem blooming with a lyrical ingenuity that makes the whole collaboration a rose too stunning to *not* pick. It soon came to be realized that this song became more, an outcry of disdain for decisions that are made seemingly far beyond one’s area of control.

“Yeah, I wrote the song about women, but I think it’s much bigger than that,” Chase said. “I think it’s a song for anybody who’s had their rights decided for them, like what’s appropriate, what’s allowed, what they can and cannot do.”

So Chase did what Chase knew she could do, and she wrote.

“I guessed the only thing I could do with my feelings was to go write the blues,” Chase summarized. “I just rage wrote.”

She began connecting her frustration and rebellion against the general social and political anomies surrounding her and many others with rhymes and harmonies – not to mention a wicked guitar riff to boot, courtesy of Wahlert. The tune was picked up quickly by the rest of the band, and all that was left was giving it a name before they could release it to the world.

“I really hadn’t heard the term ‘squelching’ before, so I googled it and thought it was just a nasty word,” Chase elaborated, crediting the term to the overdramatic Stranger Things subtitles. “So, I decided to pair it with these creatures – these sneaks – who keep running our damn lives and pulling the rug out from under us.”

Squelching Sneaks is officially available to stream on all platforms, and they are always posting local show dates on their Instagram account (@ash.and.the.endings). The band also has their first tour planned for the beginning of November, with a Halloween hometown show at Sahara Lounge to kick it off. Costumes on Halloween are not only customary but borderline mandatory for this show.

Ash’s Written Piece on the message behind Squelching Sneaks:

“This is a song. This is a song about waking up to less safety than you had yesterday. This is a song about losing your bodily autonomy to men who couldn’t label the parts of a woman’s reproductive system. This is a song about the exhaustion and horror of seeing children die in school because our country prioritizes easy access to deadly weapons. This is a song about the tiredness you feel in your home if you are a woman, a person of color or someone who identifies as LGBTQ. This is a song about the few elderly men who dictate our lives. This is a song about America. We are tired.”