Artist Spotlight: melotheory’s Journey From Home Recordings to the Sad-Boi Disco

melotheory, the Austin-based duo of Patrick Insull and Austin Pedersen, started recording singles in the throes of college before pursuing a music career. The collaboration settled into a six-date residency at The Oven, leaving listeners wondering: What’s next for this local band fresh off of a long string of performances? 

Written by Rachel Joy Thomas 

Photos by Kris Amaya

A shimmering disco ball cascaded pale light across the floor at The Oven on Nov 22, 2024, marking Melotheory’s last residency date in avid supporters’ calendars. Band members Austin Pedersen and Patrick Insull forayed to the stage quietly after tweaking tiny sonic settings for their performance. Voices slowly dimmed, and eyes slowly turned toward the band, which, despite performing countless times before, vibrated with quiet nervousness.

For the soft piano player and his technical guitar fellow, that night rested their laurels, cementing a cinematic finish to the “sophomore era” of their budding careers. Pedersen plucked the beginning notes of “Rain, Pt. 1” on his guitar and let the song wash over the venue. Nervousness, then, floated away.  

From then on, most challenges floated by with ease. Pedersen flaunted technical virtuosity during tracks like “Alone With/out You,” pairing beachy riffs with playful intervals. The track’s solemn lyrics nicely juxtaposed its mellow yet enthused delivery, with crowd members bobbing their heads and holding Lone Star beers in the air.

Switching between funkier tracks (“Tonight”) and more somber interludes (“Suburban Melancholy Complex”) the band navigated technical difficulties — like occasional guitar cable breaks or slight pauses — with the help of three additional band members. Christian Kelly smoothly added funky basslines and occasional quiet quips, matching the duo's harmonic precision. Van Shepetofsky forayed from guitar strumming to occasional kazoo playing, while Julian Jaco added technical drum fills.

Insull’s heavy Arturia keyboard barely jostled as he looked up toward the microphone to sing refrained vocals. With a cover of “Cigarette Daydreams” by Cage the Elephant reeling from Pedersen’s guitar, the band cemented the last night of the residency with stunning vigor. 

However, the pair ended the show with “After the Beep,” melotheory’s newest single from its upcoming EP. Insull leaned into the microphone, pulling every ounce of bravado and stamina as he sang, “It’s a mental battle between me and the dial tone.” He hit the high notes with gusto, yelling, “I’m chasing ghosts / they're wasting all my time.”

After the show, both bandmates took a silent moment of reprieve. Surrounded by their supporters, they could finally say: “It’s over.” 

Before the residency, Insull and Pedersen started off as strangers who met at a UT Austin West Campus party. Their brief meeting developed into a fruitful friendship weeks later when they reconnected online. In later weeks, Pedersen and Insull began writing music in their free time, eventually releasing the singles “Breathe” and “A World Away.” 

Then, the pair surprised many by developing a full-length album, melotheory, while still finishing their degrees. They then tried their hand at performing as a duo at a few other local venues. During one of the pair’s outdoor shows at the Glassmith, they attracted a sizable crowd. That’s where Yi, former keyboardist and vocalist for Beatnik Bandits, found them. 

When thinking of a funny punchline to refer to meeting Insull, Yi cleverly coined “Great Value Dayglow,” referring to Austin-hailing indie singer Sloan Struble. He later redacted the phrasing. “He isn’t exactly like Dayglow. Maybe he looks like him, but that’s about it.” 

In contrast, Pedersen cuts straight from the early stages of pop lore. Swept-up brown hair curls into itself like a wave over his framed glasses. When sitting in a room with a guitar, it's a betting game as to when he’ll pick up the instrument and canoodle with the strings, laser-focused on the instrument except when answering questions. Yi noticed that both members could perform extremely well, but each remained focused on his instrument of choice. So, after the show, he grabbed Insull’s contact information, and the collaborators later reached out for advice. 

The group members’s initial inability to look up from their instruments destroyed any semblance of stage presence despite their obvious charm. Sitting in their apartment weeks later, Yi watched them perform and gave pertinent tips, the most important being to “move around!”

“I sat in on a band rehearsal and was like, why y'all are so stiff? Nobody's doing anything other than playing an instrument,” Yi recounted. He encouraged the men to consider thinking about the feeling of their movements rather than sitting idly. Their next performances immediately improved, with Insull and Pedersen taking time to look at the audience, ask incisive questions, make jokes, and walk around the stage. 

After taking Yi’s performance advice, melotheory decided to expand its lineup, courting friends and forums for a bassist, drummer, and additional guitarist. At the same time, they reevaluated their approach to recording, asking for feedback on the fully recorded debut they had available on Spotify.

“I had to preface with, ‘Do you want me to be honest and nice? Or do you want brutal, straight up honesty?’ And they're like, ‘go for the brutal one — destroy us.’ So, I told them the mix sounds like shit,” Yi later recalled. 

The original mix, indeed, sounds muddy. Insull’s vocals maintain a lo-fi quality that struggles to meld with the polished sound of Logic Pro’s software, leaving tracks entirely uneven. Playing one song from the mix out loud in their shared apartment, Pedersen remembered: “It just wasn’t full the way we wanted it to be. It didn’t sound like this,” pulling up a song on Apple Music from Daft Punk, one of the band’s role models, for reference. 

Yi didn’t expect them to take down the project from Spotify, but Insull and Pedersen took the feedback to heart, removed it, and started fresh, rerecording small segments of melotheory to match the sonic depth of their favorite bands: Coldplay, Daft Punk, Tame Impala, and others. In 2024, the electronic band re-released the album with polish, removing some of the more lo-fi elements to augment their artistic vision. 

Now, the band’s live and studio qualities align with its goals. Both collaborators strive for what every musician covets — a full-time job playing guitar or piano. melotheory developed its niche by leaning into polished instrumentation on “Rain Pt. 1” and gravitating heavily into funk for tracks like “Tonight” and “A World Away.” They occasionally dabble into acoustic indie (“Suburban Melancholy Complex”), especially when they perform covers. All of it ties together neatly due to Insull’s delicate vocal phrasing and Pedersen’s technical guitar wizardry. 

The band developed a genuine stride, performing across Austin, Houston, and even Dallas. This growth culminated in new projects, singles, and upcoming releases.

However, as the band grew so did the need for understanding the marketing, managing, and business side of the music industry. melotheory’s desire to make it's sound a full-time job came with sunken costs and difficult situations.

At one point, the band nearly lost $1,000 due to a shady contract for a microfestival at Valhalla, which stipulated that they sell a large quantity of tickets to play without paying. For that hefty price tag, The organizers only promised the pair a short 20-30 minute set. The band luckily realized a week before its performance that the deal didn’t hold up if they didn’t play. Other performances required melotheory to “put up or shut up,” — fronting expenses for merch, marketing, and venue fees to make sure they can get onstage. 

In that regard, melotheory’s ensemble quickly realized that its residency may have numerous pitfalls. Yi noticed that the band may not “have the numbers” for a full six-date residency, but he hoped the band could find a good outcome. “When you're still deep in the infancy stage of your brand it's a really big ask … for an independent artist and having to put in the money to front it,” he supplied.

melotheory hit the ground running by booking friends like East of Eado and Yi, as well as newcomers like Sweet Dreams & Failed Machines, for its residency dates. 

Many band connections for the residency developed through genuine friendships. East of Eado’s lead singer, Alex Gefers, met Insull through family. Gefers decided to check out melotheory’s discography, and both groups chatted about trading shows. After the first show trade in April, the two bands decided to meet again for melotheory’s residencies. 

The groups worked perfectly together, with East of Eado adding more rock to its pop sound and melotheory balancing it out with mellow disco. 

“We're a grittier version of what they're doing,” Gefers said. “I love their vision and pursuit of music and am happy for where they are. At its core, it's pop with live instrumentation, but we go one way, and they go another.”

When discussing melotheory’s openness, Gefers added, "It's easy to have a crab mentality, where if someone starts to do well, you look for ways to tear them down to make yourself feel better. But in music, it's not a competition."  In total, the disco-pop outfit welcomed 12 local bands, each with varying experience and genres. melotheory set itself up for success, reaching out to journalistic organizations to publicize the events. 

When the residency started, difficulties ensued immediately — especially when it came to drawing crowds. Performing for unique audiences every other week started to feel daunting and perilous. The band came up with marketing strategies to get the word out but ultimately felt stifled by its continuous need to manage business tasks — messaging other bands, setting up the venue, purchasing food and drinks for certain nights, and selling merch all grew into mountains to overcome each week. The effort resulted in good turnouts for some nights but a larger battle for others. 

melotheory’s final residency date pulled a 24-person audience — a major feat considering they had already performed at the venue five times prior. 

Before and after the final performance at The Oven, the duo expressed equal relief that the residency finally ended, feeling free from the expectations of putting on a show. As Pedersen put it, they spent months acting as “[their] own record label.” Every detail, from curating “mindful and demure” cocktails to art galleries, took continuous prodding, and the band never received a big break. 

“This residency was a really big bite … a really big step forward with the band,” Insull commented. “But it has shown the weak links in the business that Austin and I are trying to run.”

melotheory’s business side eventually percolated into Insull and Pedersen’s creative exploration. Both felt drained by the energy it consistently took to plan their cataloged events, despite the personal growth they’d achieved. Ultimately, this culmination of stress led to the twosome concluding that they needed a hiatus. 

“It's almost lost a little bit of the magic. I am spending so much time just messaging vendors to try to come and do a pop up at the residency or messaging other bands,” Insull reiterated, “I haven't played the piano for pleasure in weeks — it's just been either practice or administrative stuff.”

To its frontmen, the easiest solution for the band’s problem would be a cash injection of $50,000, but that’s not possible. Instead, melotheory wants to take time to figure out how to better balance the different hats they have to put on — an act they’re more than willing to do if given time to decompress. 

“We're at a point of reflection. [We’re] digesting the last few months.” Pedersen continued, “I've learned that I just want to play guitar all day, every day. And I want to somehow figure out how to make that happen.”

For now, the band rests in a transitionary period that may illuminate its future direction. Whether melotheory remains a local Austin band or plays stadiums, which Pedersen cited as a potential goal, depends on the group’s future ingenuity. One thing remains clear: the band’s past, present, and future lie in the tireless drive they present, which shows no signs of stopping. 

“When you are listening to melotheory, you are listening to the shit they’ve gone through,” Yi added as a last comment. “You don’t just see their individual beings. You see the friendship that blossomed between them and how they’ve come together as musical partners.” 

He continued, “To witness something so genuine and so real is a special and unique thing. It makes you think you can be a part of that, too.” 

You can follow melotheory’s Instagram or stream its music on Apple Music and Spotify.