Soap Box Derby

A coffee house on North Mills Avenue

Soap Box Derby's trail starts in a coffee house. On Saturday 22 June 2024 the band played Framework Craft Coffee House at 1201 N. Mills Ave in Orlando, third on a bill beneath Bloom Dream and Flowers for Emily, with tickets at $12 to $15. Orlando Weekly's write-up called them some of the newest local shoegaze hopefuls and the evening a fine sampler of promising young bands packing some big, woolly sonics. The setting is part of the story: Orlando's new loud-guitar bands have been breaking in through coffee houses and small rooms rather than the city's established clubs, and this band came up that way.

The line-up is a quartet — lily wednesday minks on vocals and bass, nickolai rushka and zeke morton on guitars, kai rodriguez on drums — credited, like the band name itself, in lower case. Putting the singer behind a bass rather than a guitar shapes the records: the voice sits with the rhythm section while both guitars are free to work as texture, which is why the loud passages read as mass rather than as riff.

By early 2025 they were playing often enough locally for Orlando Weekly to treat an increased live presence as part of the case for them. One documented show from that period is 6 February 2025 at Stardust Video & Coffee, a 7pm start on a bill with Wells — the night after the paper ran its piece on the band's debut single.

Four songs and a demo

The first release was "anniversary". Apple Music dates it to 2024; Orlando Weekly wrote it up on 5 February 2025 as the band's debut single, describing it as a towering monolith of fuzz and heart that is as commanding an introduction as they come, and placing it where shoegaze, grunge, screamo and emo meet. It went to the streaming services and onto Bandcamp as a name-your-price download, where it sits next to a demo called "to be eaten by rabbits".

"twelve hours" followed on 21 February 2025, a fortnight after that write-up. Then came nine months of quiet before "a window between us / bitter apparition" arrived on 28 November 2025 — a double A-side rather than a single with a B-side, the two songs running about six minutes between them.

That is the whole published catalogue: four songs plus a demo, roughly a quarter of an hour of recorded music, self-released with no label credit attached. There is no album and no EP. For a band already taking national support slots the recorded body of work is unusually small, and it is worth holding in mind when reading the press: every judgement made about Soap Box Derby so far rests on those four songs and on the shows.

A regional accent, not a local copy

They emerged inside a cluster of Orlando acts working similar ground — Flowers for Emily, Bloom Dream, Backstep and Saucers Over Washington among them — all re-reading the 1990s rather than inventing from scratch. By 15 May 2026 the music site Elienis was framing it as something with its own character, writing that bands like soap box derby and easterlin are designing a regional shoegaze style with heavy screamo overtones. That is a different claim from the usual revival notice: it credits Florida with an accent rather than an imitation.

The clearest marker of how the band is read outside the state came on 13 January 2026, when Boolin Tunes placed Soap Box Derby fourth in its Top 25 Bands To Watch In 2026. The entry named the double single as its evidence and argued the band could front a screamo revival with wider reach, contrasting old-school screamo shrieks against atmospheric playing. Fourth on a 25-band list, for an act with three releases to its name, is a lot of weight to put on very little tape.

Beyond that the written record is thin. The Orlando Weekly pieces are short items, the Elienis reference is a clause inside a review of another band, and no substantial interview with the group has been published. The shape of the work gives a hint of where the band's instincts sit: six minutes for two songs is screamo economy rather than shoegaze sprawl, the fuzz used as pressure instead of as a long tail.

Out of Florida with Faetooth

The step up was announced on 6 January 2026, when the Los Angeles trio Faetooth — who bill themselves as fairy-doom — set out a spring North American headline tour with support rotating by leg. Soap Box Derby took the first block, eight shows alongside Latter: Phoenix on 14 April at The Rebel Lounge, Albuquerque on the 15th at Sister, Austin on the 17th at Brushy Street Commons, Denton on the 18th at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio, Houston on the 19th at White Oak Music Hall, Atlanta on the 21st at the Altar at The Masquerade, Nashville on the 22nd at The Blue Room and Asheville on the 23rd at Eulogy. Tickets went on general sale on 9 January 2026 at 10am local time.

From Baltimore on 24 April the support changed over: Bosses handled the eastern and midwestern run through New York, Montreal, Toronto and Chicago, Nightosphere came in at Denver on 7 May, and Iress joined for the west-coast dates up to the finish in Santa Ana on 17 May. So Soap Box Derby's involvement was a defined block — the southern and south-western half — rather than the full six weeks, and the rooms on it were small clubs rather than theatres.

Where it stands, October 2026

The Atlanta show did not go ahead as booked. The 21 April date at the Altar at The Masquerade was postponed, and as of late October 2026 it remains the only Soap Box Derby date listed on Ticketmaster, with no replacement date announced. That one pending listing is the band's entire public diary.

There has also been no new release since 28 November 2025 — eleven months of silence from a group that put out three records in its first fourteen. Nothing has been announced about a label, an album or further touring. The position is that of a young band between things: a run of singles that earned early notice, one completed tour leg, and an unresolved date left over from it.