Written by Shea Roney | Photo Courtesy of k9

Amongst Richmond’s animated DIY scenes comes the band K9, the five-bit rock band who released their debut LP earlier this year titled Thrills. Songwriter and guitarist, Jake Schmader, came up through the city’s hardcore scene, most known for his role in the heated project, Reckoning Force. But K9’s beginning was just as simple as finding excuses to record some covers with fellow collaborator and singer, Brenda. The project operated on the whim of possibilities for some time, as the band continued to grow with the additions of Ian (guitar), Evan (Bass) and Christian (drums). Soon with new voices, K9 has since shared a sparse, yet incredibly promising catalog of demos and EPs for public consumption, including 2023’s Harmony Kills EP and 2024’s In Blistering Stereo. 

At its core, K9 lingers around those harsh pronunciations and “off with their heads” kinda daydreams that hardcore punk instinctually offers, but Jake has always been clear that they don’t want to be held down by it. The tracks on Thrills revel amongst the scruffy middlemen that come in and out for introductions, as each member performs with old back pocket magic that blends so seamlessly with these new ideas and some low-fi holy prowess. Making any formality just a bit more sweaty, K9 rips through with sharp guitars, conversational movements and pairs of sweet melodies as they embrace an instinctual type of looseness and pop song fascination. It’s a quick album, but its impact is in no way brief.  And as they push on, K9 continues to play show after show, finding space beyond their home of Richmond, and becoming a conversational piece, a connecting thread when this band is brought up, “oh, yeah, K9? They rock.”

We recently got to chat with Jake about the project, keeping things open and starting a label.

You recently released your debut LP Thrills this past year. How has it been sitting with you since you shared it?  

Good, I guess! We’re glad that people are coming across it and enjoying it. We had recorded Thrills back in the spring of 2024 and it took a while for it to come out, so the songs feel older to us having been playing them for years at this point. It’s been fun to hear what people think of the record and what kinds of descriptions and comparisons we’ve been getting. I feel like a project needs to be out in the world for a while before I’m able to hear it for what it is, instead of just hearing the mix, or whatever.

Having spent time coming up through the Richmond hard core scene, playing in the band Reckoning Force, why did something like K9 come about in your world? Did it open up anything for you in terms of how you approached songwriting or being in a band? 

Absolutely. Hardcore punk is what got me started going to shows, writing songs and playing in bands – it’s still a big part of my life. I started writing songs and the project came organically out of a desire to record and perform those songs. We think of K9 as a punk band, but we try to keep the project free and loose in terms of genre and just make what we want to make, or what comes to us. Everything we’ve done with the band is informed by punk, and I hope that shines through even when we’re doing a sing-songy tune. 

What were those organic components that you noticed were building around these K9 songs? Did you want to try to make something apart from Reckoning Force or did they naturally feel like their own thing?

It sprung from a few things that had been bubbling for a while. Brenna and I would drink a bunch of beers and record covers at my apartment, Christian and I would jam and I’d do the same with Ian which turned into writing and playing songs together. I didn’t set out to make anything really, just in writing and playing together the project solidified. We have similar tastes and sensibilities that have steered our style all around and generally away from straight-up hardcore. 

You first shared the project with the EP Harmony Kills back in 2022. What was that initial debut of the project like and how have you seen it grow leading up to Thrills?

We actually had a demo out in 2020 that Brenna and I recorded in 2019, so it has been a slow burn. I was not aware of much that sounded like Harmony Kills at the time of its release, and I wondered what the punks would make of it, but our friends in Virginia liked it and the tape has found its crowd in time. Thrills has definitely garnered more attention, but it’s great that people are getting hip to our other stuff as a result. We started playing live between those two releases and that had a big impact on the sound and makeup of Thrills. Ian also started contributing songs and riffs following Harmony Kills, and we’ve developed a writing partnership as a band that feels really nice. We want our releases to sound unique from each other, but we have ended up having some themes that keep a through-line; recording live, raw sound, room sound, etc. K9’s music is going to be wide in scope because we can’t help it. 

Creating these writing partnerships amongst the group, what sort of things do you all bounce off of each other? Especially with the mission of making each release unique, how do you push each other as collaborators in order to meet that mark?

Songs, riffs, parts, art; a lot of times it’s as simple as everyone liking or not liking an idea. We find ourselves getting interested in the same kinds of things for inspiration and I like to think we share a vision for what K9 is, and we try to stay true to that vision and to stay honest. I feel like we just go with our gut; the direction of the project changes and we have never felt like we had to reign it in. Maybe saying that we are okay with releases being different from each other is more apt. 

Thrills marks the second of three releases off of the label Who Ya Know records, including two releases of some experimental and ambient work of yours, No Mystique and Bug the Cat Mix. What does having this label mean for what you put out, or even decide to explore for that matter?

We knew, even before recording Thrills, that we wanted it to come out as an LP, and Who Ya Know Records was a result of that inclination. Like many bands before us, we were not going to let anyone decide for us if that was going to happen or not, so we did it ourselves (with a lot of help from many people, especially Green-o at Not for the Weak Records). We were admittedly impatient in the ‘sending it off to labels’ phase, but the more time passes the happier we feel that it happened this way. I’m sure we will have relationships with labels in the future, but it’s fun to have an umbrella to put our ideas and our friends’ projects under, even if they aren’t all in the same lane.

Anything coming up for k9 in the future? 

Yeah! We’re planning a midwest tour set to start this June, a promo tape will go along with that. We’re finishing up tracking for a collection of songs we’d like to see on a 7”. We’ve been writing a lot and we want to go play all over, all in due time.

You can listen to K9’s catalog now as well as purchase Thrills on a limited-edition vinyl pressing.