PORTSMOUTH, NH – Every creative endeavor has its own series of changes where new chapters are written and new techniques are embraced. For a band, this could be a slight tweak in sound to keep things fresh, or something major with a new lineup and a new name. The latter has been the case for the Portsmouth funk-soul-hip hop group Harsh, who folks around the scene might know by their previous name of Harsh Armadillo. The release of the band’s self-titled EP signaled this progression, along with the inclusion of a couple new members. On January 4, Harsh is going to be headlining a hometown gig at The Press Room with soul-funk dynamos Fox and The Flamingos starting things off at 8 p.m.
I had a talk with drummer Dan Tauriello ahead of the show about the EP that came out last year, changes within the band and new music that’s on the way for later in 2025.
IF YOU GO
THE PRESSROOM 77 Daniel St., Portmouth, NH
Rob Duguay: Back in November, you and the rest of the band released a new EP that signals a new chapter with the name change going from Harsh Armadillo to Harsh while also having two new vocalists with Adrienne Mack-Davis and Sig Shalome. What was the experience like making this record with this brand-new lineup?
Dan Tauriello: The experience was fantastic. We write music collaboratively as a group, so we all get together every Wednesday evening and we’ve done it religiously for a decade now. The four songs on the EP are truly collaborative efforts that have come from all of us sitting in a room together and spitballing ideas, so they’re the first batch of songs that came out of us in the past year since we put together this iteration of the lineup. The music continues to flow, which has been really amazing, especially through collaborating with the new singers. They push myself and the rest of the instrumentalists in the group to explore a lot of new territory and it’s been really inspiring.
We got a full album’s worth of music that we’re polishing up and hoping to release later this year, but we recorded the EP at Blackheart Sound in Manchester and that was really fantastic. We collaborated with Mike LeClair, also known as “Ammo”, over at Studio New Hampshire as well, so the actual recording process at both of those studios was really amazing. We got the whole group together, there was a really good vibe in the room and we had a lot of fun doing it.
RD: How did you go about bringing both Adrienne and Sig into the fold to have them involved as dual vocalists?
DT: The band has been around for a long time before those two came into the picture, and when COVID hit, Andrea Belaidi, who was our previous vocalist, kind of ran out of steam in music and decided that she wanted to focus on other things in her life. It was an amicable departure, but we were really eager to continue pursuing our passions for music and our love for making original music together. We ended up doing a thing called the “No Clique Sessions”, which was a residency at The Press Room in Portsmouth where we just invited any and all artists, instrumentalists and singers who we thought were amazing. They were all from around the Northeast scene as people we’ve come in contact with over the years, so we did a bunch of those sessions with a whole lot of different and really incredible artists. We would essentially have them come up on stage and just improvise with us, and when we started it, we connected with Sig and we had a really amazing session with him.
Then I ended up seeing Adrienne sort of on a whim when she was singing with another group and she just blew my mind. I knew that we had to work with her, so we ended up managing to get her in for a session as well and both of them were the standouts at the end of it all. We all had really good connections as people and musically, so we invited them into the fold and it’s been a really amazing and positive collaborative experience.
RD: From these sessions that you just talked about, do you feel that this upcoming show at The Press Room is a full circle moment for the band?
DT: Yeah, I think it’ll be really cool to return to that room now that we have a solid year under our belt working together with this current group. We’ve got a lot of new music that we’ve come up with and I think it’ll be a really positive experience, it’s going to be a really great show.
RD: Going forward, is the Harsh Armadillo name officially being left in the past? What’s the reasoning behind the shortening of the name to just Harsh?
DT: We wanted to signal that there was change because it’s obviously not the same band. There’s different faces, there’s different sounds and we’ve evolved both personnel wise and as musicians individually, so part of it was to just signal some change and the other part was that we felt like everyone was just calling us “Harsh” to begin with. We figured that we’d just embrace it and make it short and sweet, so that was it.
RD: You mentioned how the band is working on a new album for this year, so what’s the current status of it?
DT: We honestly haven’t fully fleshed out what our recording strategy is. We’re going to be doing another session later this month where we plan on recording one of the new songs. We might release it as a single, but we’re going to see how it goes first, and the rest of it is sort of up for debate so far. We got a solid eight or 10 songs that are very close to the level of polish in order to start recording them, so we’re really trying to get those honed in with the string of shows that we got planned for the winter and I think we’re eventually going to shoot for a full-album release.