Shark Week
EP

Standout Track: No. 2, “If You Want Me to Stay (for a While),” the bluesy, boozy garage-rock jam off Mount Pleasant fourpiece Shark Week’s self-titled debut EP, is scheduled for release Aug. 10, two days before Shark Week begins on the Discovery Channel. There’s a spritz of surf rock to Eric Myers’ infectious riff, but singer/guitarist Ryan Hunter Mitchell says that their sound has developed into something more diverse than the name implies. “[Surf rock] was our gimmick starting out, but we didn’t want to get pigeonholed with one kind of sound,” he says.

Musical Motivation: “Stay,” Mitchell confesses, “steals part of a progression from Sly & The Family Stone’s ‘If You Want Me To Stay,’” but kicks the tempo up a few notches and adds in some brash, nihilistic ‘tude. “C’est la vie/As the old folks say,” Mitchell sings in a raspy drawl, “It’s hard to give a shit about shit like this.” He says, “It’s about settling for something and thinking, ‘OK, it’s not a very long-term thing, but I can bullshit this for a while. Which could relate to a shitty relationship, or living in D.C., or whatever else.”

Climb Every Mountain: Shark Week has earned its buzz the old-fashioned way: through live shows—and wild stage antics. Mitchell in particular is garnering a reputation for swinging from things, like Montserrat House’s rafters (“those were pretty high, fun to climb”) or the now closed Gold Leaf Studios’ pull-up bar (a moment memorialized on the EP’s cover). “If there’s something climbable around and I’m drunk enough to think it’s safe,” says Mitchell, “I will climb it.”

Shark Week plays Montserrat House Aug. 10.