Capital Soiree

Fourth grade, then a decade of it

Capital Soirée's timeline starts before the band does. James Kourafas and Max Romero began writing songs together in fourth grade as an acoustic duo. Steven Rejdukowski arrived in high school, put behind a drum kit he had no experience on, and later moved to lead guitar, where he has stayed. The band dates itself to 2013.

When three of them spoke to ANCHR Magazine in September 2017, the drum stool belonged to Griffin Shaw, the back catalogue amounted to two EPs called Next Weekend and Take Me Anywhere, and the names that came up when they were asked what they were listening to were Tame Impala, Hoops and Phoenix. Kourafas said then that it had taken the band a while to work out how much of a record's sound comes down to how it was recorded and produced — a remark that reads now like a statement of intent.

Dean Sinclair joined on drums in 2018. The band treats that as the start of what it calls its modern era, and the 2017 single "Second Home" as the first recording that sounds like the group it turned into. All four are from the Chicago area, and the rooms they name as formative — Schubas, Subterranean, Lincoln Hall — are rooms they went to as teenagers and later headlined. On 22 August 2025, with Audiotree presenting, they headlined Lincoln Hall for the release of the Right Time EP, doors at seven and stage at eight, 18-plus, with Oceanic and Cousin Simple below them.

Two EPs, both made in-house

The work that defines the band is two short EPs, four years apart, both produced by its own singer. Reruns came out on 27 April 2023: five songs, about fourteen and a half minutes, running "Lead Me On", "More Like You", "be ok", the title track and "Like I Always Knew". Kourafas produced and mixed it, Drew Polovick co-produced "More Like You", and Joe Causey mastered at Voyager Mastering.

Right Time followed on 18 July 2025 — again five songs, again under seventeen minutes: "Right Time", "Carsick", "Too Far Gone", "Instead" and "More". Kourafas produced, Causey mastered again, and the credits are as plain as the line-up: Kourafas on vocals and guitar, Rejdukowski on guitar, Romero on bass, Sinclair on drums.

The self-production was not an aesthetic position to begin with. Kourafas told Atwood Magazine in 2025 that they did it because they had to — no money, and nobody around who knew how. Romero described the method in 2017 as the whole band sitting around the computer with one person driving and everybody else commenting. It has since become a trade: Kourafas produces for other Chicago acts, Friday Pilots Club among them.

Around the EPs sits a long run of standalone singles, roughly one a year, which is how most people have found the band: "Dancing Off My Sins" in 2019, "Side of Town" in 2020, "Would I Want To?" in 2021, "Oxygen!" in 2022, "KEROSENE" in 2023, "keep it in the dark" in 2024.

"Working-class pop"

Asked by Atwood Magazine in 2025 where they sit, Sinclair landed on "working-class pop", and Kourafas claimed the trademark on the spot. The phrase does two jobs. It marks the band out as pop in a city whose guitar scene has leaned emo and post-rock, and it describes the economics — a band that writes, records, produces and mixes itself, and has done so for over a decade without the structure that usually comes with rooms this size.

The other engine has been short video. A 2023 performance inside a Jewel-Osco supermarket travelled widely, and they went back to the format at the chain's Roscoe Village store in 2024. It is of a piece with the records: cheap to make, made by the band, and leaning on the fact that four people who have known each other since primary school are interesting to watch even when nothing much is happening.

Where they stand, autumn 2026

The last eighteen months have been the busiest of the band's life. Right Time arrived in July 2025 and was followed into the shops by Capital Soirée on Audiotree Live, a five-song session EP released through Audiotree Music later that year. The Right Time Tour, their first headline run, went out in the autumn of 2025 and has kept its name through 2026; Apple Music's alternative editors even maintain a playlist of its set list, sixteen songs and 51 minutes.

Their most recent studio release is the single "I'm Your Boy", out on 27 February 2026. Around the same time they were playing their own shows in small rooms — a date at the Cat in the Cream in Oberlin, Ohio, with Game Seven opening, reviewed in the Oberlin Review on 6 March 2026. The band has talked about starting a first full-length album; nothing has been announced.

The current run is not a headline tour. Through September and October 2026 Capital Soirée are the second act on a three-band package topped by INOHA, with Pretoria also on the bill, and the rooms are a step up from anything they could sell alone: Warsaw in Brooklyn, the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, the Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia, the Opera House in Toronto, the Vogue in Indianapolis, the Majestic in Madison. Eight of those dates were still on sale as of 1 October 2026, running from Brooklyn on 30 September to Madison on 11 October, via Boston on the 1st, Philadelphia on the 3rd, Toronto on the 4th, Mahall's in Lakewood on the 7th, Detroit on the 8th and Indianapolis on the 9th. Songkick lists 2,380 people tracking them.

The set as it stands

The support slot has forced a decision most bands at this stage avoid: what to cut. At Union Stage in Washington on 29 September 2026 they were on at 8.10pm and off at 8.45 — thirty-five minutes, twelve songs, which means almost nothing is allowed to breathe. The order was "Too Far Gone", "Instead", "keep it in the dark", "Lights Out", "Right Time", "Reruns", "Dancing Off My Sins", "Accidentally in Love", "More Like You", "Bounce House", "Oxygen!" and "Kerosene".

That is the shape of the thing: two from the new EP to open, the 2024 single early, the title track in the middle, and the two most-played songs in their history held back to the end. Across the 43 shows logged on setlist.fm, "Kerosene" and "More Like You" have each been played 18 times and "Oxygen!" and "Reruns" 17 — and on current evidence the first of those is the closer.

Reviews of their own headline dates point at the same thing the touring slot is built on. Writing up the Oberlin show in March 2026, the Oberlin Review described a high-energy set that ran without seams, singled out Romero's movement on bass as the thing that pulled people forward, and noted that the four of them spend the set talking to each other rather than at the room — the friendship, the reviewer wrote, was immediately apparent. "Carsick" was the pick of the night. The crowd, by that account, danced as though the night were endless.