Grub worms spend three years in the larval stage feeding on plant roots before they emerge in the summertime as June bugs.
Junebug, the debut EP from OKC’s Compost Adjacent, also took a while to arrive.
“We recorded it at this point back in March,” vocalist and guitarist Ryan Smith said. “With the name Junebug, we were kind of anticipating in March that we would get our stuff together and by June or July be out. The June bugs don’t necessarily come out in June, but here we are. June bugs are still present.”
Recorded live at producer Johnny Manchild’s Wasted Space Studio, Junebug comes out Friday, Aug. 15. Compost Adjacent will celebrate the release 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 16 at bookstore and performance venue Bookish, 1005 NW 36th St. Tickets are $10, and Alan Edward Murphy, Moriah Bailey and Flash Jordan are also scheduled to perform. The band returns to Bookish on Friday, Sept. 19.
Smith, the band’s primary songwriter, wrote Junebug album opener “No. 7” more than a decade ago, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about it until after he heard the band playing it. Now the song is one of his favorites.
“Lyrically, it’s very optimistic, and when I brought it to the guys, I was like, ‘It’s a little too happy,’ Smith said. “I was going through a divorce, and I was at, I guess, a more somber place. Even though some of our songs are a little bit heavier, we just played it. And they love playing it and it sounded good, and so it just stuck.”
Compost Adjacent formed in 2023 when Smith teamed up with bassist and backup vocalist Nicholas Allen. The band grew into a six-piece with Marcus Upshaw on keyboards, Jared Eoff on electric guitar and Joseph Mohmed on doumbek. Drummer Joshua Gibbs recently replaced Jules Deberry, who plays drums on the album.
The band takes its name from CommonWealth Urban Farms, 3310 N. Olie Ave., the community farming and composting operation where most of the band members originally met.
“One of our first shows was literally adjacent to the compost lot at a house next door,” Smith said. “It’s interesting because there’s just a variety of musical backgrounds that all kind of came together over a mutual interest separate from music.”
Well almost everyone.
“I’m the adjacent part. I’m not the compost part,” said newest member Gibbs. “One thing that drew me to this project was Ryan specifically and his emotion that he carries in his voice.”
Seeking structure
Smith said Junebug has an emotional arc mirroring a weekend with “No. 7” opening like a rowdy Friday night before the mood gets gradually more contemplative as the Sunday night scaries emerge.
Allen said the album’s genre-spanning sound mirrors the lyrics.
“The first song on the EP is more like a fast-paced, more rockabilly-sounding song, and then by the end of the album, the last song starts and ends with a poem. And it’s a lot more ethereal, a lot more effects-driven,” Allen said. “That one is played with a loop that I set up with the double bass.”
After writing the basic song structure, Smith brings the song to the band and the other members develop their own parts.
“I kind of come to the table with a song with two or three chords and just strumming,” Smith said. “And then Nick and the rest of the guys kind of just turn it into a symphony.”
Smith is constantly surprised by the inventive ways his bandmates add to his songs and the emotional depths their instrumental parts uncovered in Junebug.
“It’s wild because a few of the songs on there, when I wrote them, the feelings that I was feeling … the other guys aren’t necessarily singing but are able to bring that emotion and its fullness … feeling it in their own way,” Smith said.
Finding space for six different interpretations of an emotion can create chaos, but order eventually emerges.
“We’ve been able to balance all of our songs to where everybody’s integrated pretty well,” Smith said. “The first run-throughs, whenever it’s like, ‘All right. Here’s the vibe. Here’s how it goes,’ and then everybody just comes in, it’s just a big mash of sound. But, I mean, it sorts itself out pretty quickly.”
Sometimes the songs change drastically, not just in their forming, but from show to show. Junebug’s fourth track, “Dropping Gypsum,” for example may sound unfamiliar even to fans who’ve heard it before.
“For the first two years of playing that live, that was always really fun because we played it differently every single time,” Allen said. “That song starts with some improv that I’m doing on the bass with the bow. We captured a version of that song that we’re really happy with, but if you’ve heard us play it live, it’s maybe slightly different.”
Though the songs on Junebug may continue to evolve, Smith is proud of the way they sound on the album and happy to have them collected on physical CDs. Compost Adjacent previously released two singles digitally, but Smith said the feeling wasn’t the same.
“It felt really shallow,” Smith said. “It’s just a couple songs, but with a CD, we’ve been putting a lot more intentionality into the layout of the songs, to the insert. We did a bunch of collages and lyric pages and stuff.”
Compost Adjacent released “Silly Boy Prance,” the lead single from Junebug, on Aug. 8. The lyrics advise listeners to “Take time out for what is good for your soul / Everybody wants to be something else sometimes / Grass always greener / The wine seems sweeter / Everybody wants to be something else.”
Songs can vary from show to show, and shows vary too, as the band navigates the challenges of performing as a six-piece.
“We’re all buddies,” Smith said. “We’ve played some shows that pay pretty well and it’s really exciting and engaging, and then some shows it’s like, ‘Yeah, there were more people on stage.’”
But even when the band outnumbers the crowd, Compost Adjacent are having a good time.
“We haven’t really had a bad night,” Allen said. “We haven’t really had a bad show because we’re hanging out and we’re playing.”
Visit compostadjacent.bandcamp.com.
This article appears in Best of OKC 2025.