In the days before they took the Green Key stage, members of the student band Avalanche kept a light atmosphere in the practice room as they riffed off of each other. Members threw out ideas for songs to cover, offered advice about each other’s technique and cracked jokes before starting up on their setlist. The pressure of opening for one of Dartmouth’s biggest events seemed not to be a burden.
Avalanche has been performing on campus since the band formed in the fall, playing a mix of rock and pop. The band is composed of vocalist Sarah Hochman ’28, bassist Ben Floman ’28, pianist Noah Pilnitz ’28, drummer William Laws ’29 and electric guitarists Ryan Peterson ’28 and Sayan Bhattacharya ’28. What sets them apart from other bands is that all are friends before they are bandmates.
Hochman pulled the group together from friends she had made across campus, with some connections dating back to her first-year orientation week.
“Sayan, Ryan, and I would jam last year, and I met Noah [during] o-week and knew he played piano,” Hochman said. “Floman and I met over the summer in D.C., and I proposed the idea to him because we had talked last spring about making a band. And then Will showed up.”
The members’ musical backgrounds vary. Some have played their instruments since childhood, and others come from Dartmouth ensembles like jazz band. For Pilnitz, Avalanche has meant branching into new genres.
“The band was my first venture into pop and rock, and I feel like personally, it’s helped me grow as a musician to learn different genres,” he said.
The band’s first performance was just three weeks after their first practice together: a 15-minute show at the Top of the Hop. Members said they had modest expectations going in.
“Before we played, we all just wanted our friends and our roommates to show up,” Laws said.
“Our friends and our roommates are gonna be in the front row, and that’s gonna be the only row in the house, and it’s gonna be awesome,” Hochman added.
Floman said one of his only initial goals was to have an email blast go out on the campus Listserv so “people would have some sort of idea about what we [Avalanche] were about.”
That first show was where the band started to find their groove. “That was the first time I was like, wait, we sound decent,” Floman said. Despite only expecting their close friends to show up, they drew in more people than they had ever hoped.
Avalanche’s first major show, at Sigma Nu fraternity last winter term, drew a larger crowd.
“The crowd energy was huge,” Hochman said. “It's just so fun to get that kind of audience feedback and to interact with the crowd — especially when it’s your friends, but also when it's people you don't know.”
Since then, the band has performed a string of shows at fraternity-hosted events. Despite their unexpected success, the band tries to keep things low-pressure.
“Our biggest goal is just to have fun and be a group of friends that get on stage and play together,” Bhattacharya said. “Maintaining that, I think, has been the most important thing.”
That approach extends to how the band picks songs. Members float suggestions — a process Floman described as “pitching an unbelievable amount of ideas” — and drop what doesn't work and move on. He added that they also incorporate feedback from their friends outside of the band.
“We’ll also ask a lot of our friends, and they suggest things to us. We sometimes bring them to our practices, and they’ll just give us feedback on what they liked and didn’t like,” Pilnitz said.
The members said decisions regarding music and the band’s goals often come down to a mutual trust among the band members.
“The good thing about us all being friends is, I think we all trust each other’s judgment,” Floman said.
Heading into Green Key, the band said their experience with smaller venues left them more at ease about taking the bigger stage.
“Even though the scales are a little larger just from our end, the work that's done is the same,” Floman said.
One of the unique challenges the band faced while preparing for their mainstage performance was choosing songs that appealed to the entire school rather than a single, crowded room of attendees.
“A bit of that is the musicianship side — what’s going to make sense musically to play in that space,” Hochman said. “And part of it is also, ‘How are you going to interact with that kind of crowd, and what song works for that level of interaction?’”
Scheduling has proven to be another issue for the band as each member leads a different, busy life that can conflict with practice time and other obligations.
“Getting six schedules together [of people] who all do very different things on campus can definitely be challenging, but our practice times are better this term than they were last term,” Hochman said.
Even so, the band keeps focus on enjoyment over ambition.
“One of my friends said to me after a BG [Bones Gate fraternity] show, ‘I love watching you guys because it’s just so easy to have fun when you're having fun.’ I think as long as we keep taking ourselves kind of unseriously, seriously enough, we’re going to do a good job,” Hochman said.
