The problem was that the more expansive the vision became, the harder it was to define.

“I really struggled to find my vision,” Brown says. “I think I wanted it to be like Donald Glover where it was a multimedia project, but that ultimately made it really hard for me to commit to any type of brand identity.”

The solution wasn’t to make the project bigger. It was to strip it down. With the release of his self-titled debut EP, Brown is introducing beach bown not as a rebrand, but as a reset, a deliberate step toward something more focused, more collaborative, and perhaps most importantly, more honest.

Growing up in a small town in Washington State, Brown’s first musical obsession wasn’t indie rock. It was dubstep. Specifically, Skrillex. As a teenager, he spent his time making electronic music and dreaming about becoming a DJ. Later came classic rock, then artists like Mac DeMarco and Peach Pit, whose records opened the door to a wider world of independent music. “It exposed me to this mind-blowing thing called indie rock,” he says.

After moving to Vancouver in 2019, Brown found himself surrounded by musicians who shared that same fascination. Then the pandemic arrived. Sent back home during the lockdowns, he spent months teaching himself how the records he loved were actually made, dissecting arrangements and experimenting with recording techniques from his bedroom.

The songs that emerged during that period became the foundation of Luke Beach Bown. But the songs that would eventually become beach bown arrived later, sparked by a growing sense that the world around him had fundamentally changed.

Following the 2024 U.S. election, Brown found himself approaching songwriting differently.

“My whole perspective on music changed,” he says. “I started viewing music as a vessel for protest, to voice my own feelings on the unsettling changes happening in the world.” That tension sits at the centre of beach bown’s debut EP.

Across five tracks, Brown builds songs that feel suspended between beauty and collapse. Guitars shimmer and dissolve into clouds of reverb. Drum machines pulse beneath washes of chorus and distortion. Vocals arrive half-buried in the mix, floating somewhere between a confession and a transmission from another room. The songs move with a dreamlike softness, but beneath the haze there’s a constant sense of unease. 

For Brown, that contradiction reflects the experience of living in 2026. “The world is a beautiful place that is also hell,” he says. “You can scroll for five minutes and see cute cat videos, a beautiful sunset, someone crashing their car, and a genocide happening in real time.”

Rather than trying to resolve those conflicting realities, beach bown embraces them.

The result is music that acknowledges despair without surrendering to it. Songs that recognize loneliness, disillusionment, and uncertainty, but still reach toward something hopeful. It’s one of the qualities Brown admires most in artists like The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Molchat Doma, and King Krule.

“I need music to recognize that I’m feeling low before it pulls me up,” he says. That same philosophy extends to his creative process. While beach bown has evolved into a full live band featuring guitarist Gio Filice, bassist Ryan Ng, and drummer Zak Windy, nearly everything begins with Brown alone in his bedroom studio.

The setup is intentionally simple. Most songs are written while they’re being recorded. Ideas appear quickly, often taking shape before they’ve been fully understood. Without the pressure of studio rates or scheduled sessions, Brown can follow a song wherever it leads.

“I like the simplicity of a bedroom studio,” he says. “It makes it easier to get ideas out into a demo rather than being distracted by the excess of a studio.”

Still, bringing the songs into a band environment has changed his perspective in unexpected ways. Where he once felt protective of every detail, collaboration has taught him to let go. “The transition to a full band project has really made me see collaboration as an essential piece for growth,” he says. “We really try to make it fun to play and that usually means making it more energetic live.”

That emphasis on live performance feels particularly significant in Vancouver, a city whose music scene has long thrived on experimentation, community, and artists operating slightly outside the mainstream.

Brown is quick to point out that beach bown is proudly a Vancouver band. Not because it sounds like Vancouver, whatever that might mean, but because the city taught him that authenticity matters more than perfection. “People care more about a raw genuine performance than someone technically gifted who played their songs perfectly,” he says.

For an artist standing at the beginning of a new chapter, success remains surprisingly simple. He wants beach bown to become an experience. He wants audiences to leave shows feeling like they’ve witnessed something memorable. He wants the freedom to devote more time to the project and collaborate with artists he admires.

Mostly, though, he wants to keep chasing the feeling that led him here in the first place.

“I’ve definitely questioned what the hell I am doing,” Brown says. “But I just have to make music. I don’t know what else to do with my time.”