Indie artist Brewster Durbin is teaming up with Fairys to bring a “Southern new wave” to Chicago.
Durbin, 24, was born and raised in southern Louisiana and has been involved in making music for as long as he can remember. His father, Scott Durbin, is also a musician and one of the former Imagination Movers from the 2008 Disney children’s show.
Durbin’s father is responsible for introducing him to a lot of music growing up, but in a uniquely modern way. Where many artists may sift through their parents vinyl collection, Durbin’s father played all of his music on an iPod for him.
Durbin began taking drum lessons as early as age 4, where his drive for creating art became much more apparent.
“I started begging my drum teacher to let me go on GarageBand during the lessons to make a song or something,” Durbin said. “So then my teacher talked to my parents and was like, ‘I think your child wants to make music.’”
Through more lessons and endless hours in GarageBand, Durbin kept making songs deep into his high school career. His first mixtapes consisted of him rapping over chopped up Sufjan Stevens and Vampire Weekend songs.
All of this paints a picture for a distinctive digital age artist, incorporating older genres and the cultural uniqueness of where he grew up with modern styles and sounds. Durbin loosely sees this as a basis for a genre he is pioneering known as Southern new wave.
“There was a time period where there was a bunch of Southern writers — like [William] Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and John Kennedy Toole — that really captured a truth about the South at that time period,” said Durbin. “I think people still have that mental association with it where it’s not the 1960s, it’s not the 1950s, it’s a modern day. So, I’m trying to do what they did, but in a musical form, and do it today.”
These ideas peak through in Durbin’s 2024 debut album “Rookie,” which tells the story of a made-up University of Lafayette football player who vanishes in the middle of his breakout season.
The sound blends genres like indie rock, electronic and a bit of hyperpop — a sound that will be a large jumping off point going forward.
In 2025, Durbin relocated to Chicago, where he began to work further with previous collaborator Jack Sadlier, also known as Fairys.
Fairys, 22, is from Bloomington, Indiana, and had a similar career trajectory to Durbin. They had a push from their family to do music from a young age, growing up listening to their parents’ Chicago and Billy Joel vinyls.
When Durbin moved to Chicago, Fairys was already developing some of the songs on the two artists’ joint EP “Flash.” The duo revived the idea when Fairys introduced the lead single, “Fallback,” to Durbin. The song is characterized by its NOLA bounce-inspired sound.
This EP is emblematic of the ideas present in Durbin’s past music. The two artists want to get a truer pop record out of their system with an update on the pop music that worked so well from the 2010s. Unintentionally, they found themselves channeling 3OH!3 and Kesha with a bit of a Louisiana flare.
“[The EP] is like early 2010s pop but with a more modern production style,” explains Durbin.
Fairys added that on top of these styles, they wanted to explore underutilized genres like NOLA bounce.
“The reason why I wanted to do a NOLA bounce song was because I was like, ‘No one’s doing this,'” Fairys said. “The last time that it was a moment in culture was when Drake did two NOLA bounce songs. That was kind of it. So I’m like, ‘We gotta do more of this.’ Like, why did no one go down that rabbit hole?”
The spontaneous nature of this collaboration speaks to the ever-evolving nature of these artists’ sounds. Durbin and Fairys said this bright and upbeat sound, combined with how fleeting this experiment is, inspired the name “Flash.”
“Flash” does not mark the end of these two collaborating or putting out music for this year, though. Both promise new albums in 2026, and Durbin said his project will be named after his very genre, Southern new wave.
He said that the project will have a more melancholic and cosmic vibe to it. The album will be an expansion on all the sounds and ideas from before, with new inspirations from Southern Gothic and Louisiana-set post-apocalyptic game “Norco.”
“When you think of Southern Gothic, you think of a very specific set of imagery, and I think that gets at something that’s true,” said Durbin. “That there’s some sort of haunted or spiritual or mystical element to what’s going on in the Southern landscape. That exists in conjunction with all this newer stuff like the digital world and computers. I feel like it’s me trying to bring some of that stuff into today’s climate.”
Brewster Durbin and Fairys’ new EP “Flash” is available to stream anywhere you get your music, and you can keep up to date with them on the Brewster Durbin and Fairys Instagram pages.
