{"id":393773,"date":"2026-07-31T18:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T18:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/393773\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T18:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T18:48:08","slug":"dallas-band-softly-emerges-as-the-future-of-rock-in-north-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/393773\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas band Softly emerges as the future of rock in North Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some bands arrive with a marching band, top-shelf gear and a press release the size of a phone book. Softly showed up<\/a> quietly, which is either a cruel irony or the whole point.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing about the Dallas-Fort Worth rock scene: it rewards the patient, the stubborn and the genuinely good<\/a>. Softly is all three. And after spending an afternoon with Isaac Chavez and Harrison Castleberry, we\u2019re ready to say something a music writer isn\u2019t supposed to say without a hedge or a footnote: This might be the most exciting rock band to come out of North Texas<\/a> in years.<\/p>\n

Big claim. Allow us to back it up.<\/p>\n

A band before the band<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Music newsletter to get the latest stories delivered to your inbox<\/p>\n

THANK YOU!<\/p>\n

You’re all set.<\/p>\n

CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Softly didn\u2019t spring fully formed from a garage. The story starts in elementary school, where Chavez and Castleberry first met and eventually competed together in classical guitar competitions. By high school, they were spending a weekly passion project period the way most kids spent study hall, except instead of homework, they were building something.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Years of playing under a different name followed, including a prior project with a different lineup and a different feel. After about three years on that path, something shifted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to start something fresh and new with just us,\u201d Castleberry says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, they did. They rebuilt themselves as Softly around the start of 2024.<\/p>\n

\"\"From a quiet house frame to a floor-level set swallowed by the crowd, a Softly show sounds exactly like it looks. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s something honest about a band willing to bury its first act. Plenty of musicians cling to a name long after the music has moved on. These two took the harder challenge \u2014 they let the project go, kept the friendship and rebuilt from the studs. The change of direction was more of a reckoning than it was a rebrand.<\/p>\n

What emerged was leaner and more sure of itself. Chavez stepped to the front with vocals and bass for the low-end anchor that gives the songs their heartbeat. Castleberry handled guitar and production, shaping the sound twice, once on the strings and once at the board. Rounding out the trio, Rafael Ibanez adds a second guitar tone that fills out the band\u2019s sonic footprint and gives Castleberry the freedom to push the instrumentation further. And because Castleberry doesn\u2019t sing lead, he\u2019s found another way in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI try to express my emotions and feelings through what kind of tones I play and what kind of guitar parts I lean into,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a compact operation, and that tightness shows. Two people who\u2019ve been listening to each other since childhood tend to finish each other\u2019s musical sentences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

DFW keeps the dream alive<\/p>\n

Ask most artists about their hometown and you get a polite \u201cthank you.\u201d Ask Softly and you get something closer to devotion.<\/p>\n

For a while, that relationship with the local scene was complicated. Castleberry is candid about it: they had previously kept their distance because their creative goals didn\u2019t quite align with what was happening in the scene around them. But Softly changed that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been focused on building this community that we longed for in the beginning by bringing other local artists into our studio to co-write and collaborate,\u201d Castleberry says.<\/p>\n

That studio isn\u2019t a rented rehearsal room. The band built a 350-square-foot space from the ground up in their drummer\u2019s backyard, starting from a concrete slab, framing the walls themselves and packing it with accumulated gear until it became a creative hub. It\u2019s the kind of detail that tells you everything about a band\u2019s priorities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a great deal of support from friends in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that help keep our dream alive,\u201d Chavez adds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That gratitude isn\u2019t a formality. Fort Worth has always been Dallas\u2019 scruffier, more earnest sibling, and a place where scenes grow in living rooms and back rooms rather than boardrooms. No algorithm sold a single ticket to Softly\u2019s first shows. People did.<\/p>\n

The arc of the catalog<\/p>\n

The discography reads like a band figuring out exactly how good it can be.<\/p>\n

\u201cKim, Colorado<\/a>\u201d dropped in spring 2024 as their first single, is a confident opening statement with a spoken-poetry feel and math-rocky guitar work that put the sound on the map. \u201cMOURN WITH ME<\/a>\u201d followed later in 2024, leaning into the melancholy that runs like a river through their work.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the \u201cSay a Prayer, and Wish Me Well\u201d EP arrived in November 2025, gathering the band\u2019s momentum into a single, cohesive breath. It\u2019s the kind of record that turns casual listeners into fans. \u201cHemphill<\/a>\u201d is the kind of song that sounds like the closing credits of a film you\u2019re not ready to end \u2014 atmospheric, melodic, unhurried.<\/p>\n

Then came \u201cStay<\/a>,\u201d which carries perhaps the most personal moment in their catalog. The voicemail woven into the track was left by Castleberry\u2019s father after the passing of his grandmother, someone he describes as \u201cessentially like my mom growing up.\u201d He notes with a quiet laugh that listeners often assume the voicemail is about his dad\u2019s death. Still, the grief in it is real. <\/p>\n

\u201cDads don\u2019t really like to share their feelings,\u201d Castleberry says. This one did.<\/p>\n

That instinct \u2014 to let something genuine and unrepeatable into the frame \u2014 is what separates Softly from the pack. They\u2019re not afraid of tenderness. They\u2019re not afraid of the messy, human artifact that makes a song impossible to fake.<\/p>\n

Two new singles, one bold summer<\/p>\n

This summer brought two fresh tracks, and even the titles tell you these guys have a sense of humor about their heartache. The songs, titled \u201chum that song!<\/a>\u201d and \u201csrry i wasted yr time<\/a>,\u201d landed with all the lowercase, texting-at-2-a.m. intimacy their names suggest.<\/p>\n

The latter title\u2019s missing vowels weren\u2019t an accident or an afterthought. Chavez says it was \u201can intuition standpoint,\u201d as the stripped-down spelling matched the edgy feel of the cover art. It\u2019s a small detail, but one that reveals something about how deliberately Softly thinks about every layer of what they put out.<\/p>\n

One song is a plea to remember, while the other is an apology dressed as a shrug. Together they show a band comfortable holding two moods at once: the ache and the wink. That\u2019s a hard balance to strike, and Softly makes it look easy. There\u2019s poetry in \u201csrry i wasted yr time\u201d that absolutely does not waste yours.<\/p>\n

The studio, the woods and what comes next<\/p>\n

The best news comes last. Softly is heading back into the studio, and there\u2019s a full album on the way early next year.<\/p>\n

While they build and demo tracks in their backyard studio, the finishing work happens with producer Jackson Baker in Austin, whom Castleberry credits with sharpening \u201cthe vision of understanding when things need to go up, when they need to go down.\u201d It\u2019s a process that balances the raw and the refined, the handmade and the deliberate. They\u2019ve done some of their best writing off the grid, \u201cjust writing and recording music in the woods,\u201d as they put it. That unhurried, hand-built quality comes through in everything they release.<\/p>\n

If the new album carries the same DNA, the local scene is about to get a rock record worth arguing about at every dive bar from Deep Ellum to the Near Southside.<\/p>\n

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