IN 2024, A jumble of guitar and keyboard came together in the heart of the Circle City. From the neon-bathed backstreet clubs, a three-piece band called Hathaway—with Jerry Hayes on vocals and bass, Elijah Fritz on vocals and guitar, and Aiden Smith on keyboard—emerged with a seven-track demo album clutched in its fist. The record began to trade hands around Indy. Its overdriven, fast-paced punk sound was an immediate attention grabber. Hathaway captured the essence of the jittery crowd that hangs around the late-night watering holes of Prospect Street and distilled it into a single musical experience, Demo.
In the months following the band’s debut, you could find Hathaway popping up around the city working the local circuit. If you were lucky, you had the chance to catch the guys at their best, shaking the walls of Healer on a sweltering summer night. All this live playing lit a fire under the band, getting the creative juices flowing. The end result was an EP, What’s It To You?, which dropped in April of 2025.
What’s It To You? was a substantially more ambitious undertaking than Demo. If Demo was a still of the local scene the band had crawled out of, this was of a collage of the panoply of sounds that inspired that scene. You hear traces of the 2000s garage rock revival, the driving solos of 1990s skater punk, and the melodic choruses of pop-punk. It’s a charcuterie of delight; anything you want, What’s It To You? has it.
As 2025 progressed, Hathaway kept grinding, now with new music to promote. They continued to terrorize Healer with their pulsating rock, helped christen the reopened 808 stage in Broad Ripple, and gained a new member, Robert Spaulding on drums. The activity came to a head in spring 2026 with the biggest release yet: the debut full-length studio album, Odds + Ends.
Odds + Ends has much of what made fans love What’s It To You? but with more craftsmanship, a much cleaner tone, and a more focused sound. The static fuzz on the vocals is dropped, which perhaps takes away the raw punk edge but gives the album a more produced quality. The addition of a new member and the help of Corey Standifer of Moon Goons in the studio means more synthesizer parts, more harmonies, and layered instrumentals peppered throughout. The group has since added Fin Ulm (backing vocals/dancer) and Aidan Mitchell (second guitarist to the lineup. Hathaway is no longer grinding to earn a place in the local music scene; they are now creating it.
