Secret Stages 2016 Spotlight: BUNCH Carries Mobile’s Music to Birmingham

When Secret Stages returned to Birmingham on August 5 and 6, one band brought a slice of the Mobile music scene to new listeners. BUNCH — forged from the ashes of the popular Azalea City act El Cantador — was set to perform at Rogue Tavern on August 6 at 8 p.m., one of dozens of acts filling the two-day festival’s downtown stages.

Secret Stages has built its reputation as a discovery festival: a curated lineup of original bands from around the region, staged in the bars and venues of downtown Birmingham rather than on a single sprawling festival ground. For Mobile acts, the trip north is both a booking and a bridge — a chance to carry the Port City’s sound to an audience that rarely sees it.

Mobilians had already seen BUNCH live, including at SouthSounds 2016, but the band was still revealing new material at its own pace. That deliberate roll-out has become part of the project’s identity: songs introduced in small batches, on the band’s schedule, in front of audiences close to home.

From El Cantador to BUNCH

Vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist Heath Underwood said the project grew from a “residual kindred thing” left over among former El Cantador members, with Alan Anderson brought in on keys. El Cantador had been one of Mobile’s most talked-about independent acts, known for textured, guitar-driven songwriting and a live show that earned slots at regional festivals, and BUNCH carries forward the chemistry that band developed without simply repeating it.

The addition of keyboards marked the clearest departure. Anderson’s parts fill out the arrangements with the kind of atmospheric color that guitar-and-drums lineups struggle to produce, pushing the new material toward a sound that is unmistakably its own rather than an El Cantador continuation.

The debut single, “Forever My Sparring Partner,” was available on iTunes and Spotify. The title captures something of the band’s dynamic — songs built on interplay between voices, instruments and rhythm sections that push against one another without breaking apart.

Underwood said he was sitting on the record until the right moment, sensing a “weird magic” in the new songs. That instinct — to hold finished work until it can be presented the right way — is rarer than it sounds in an era of constant release schedules, and it signals a band treating its first full statement as an event rather than content.

Our team planned to be on site at Secret Stages as official press for the first time, documenting the two-day festival across its downtown venues.

Mobile Energy in Birmingham

Underwood, back in Mobile after three years away, said he sensed a new energy in the city’s arts. That observation carries weight from someone who lived through one of the Mobile scene’s more fertile stretches: the years when El Cantador and bands like them turned small venues into launch pads and made the city a stop that regional touring acts wanted on their routes.

He called Birmingham “nice as hell” and welcoming to original music — and was eager to give Bham a taste of what Mobile’s scene had been brewing. The compliment cuts both ways. Birmingham’s venues and audiences have long been hospitable to original acts, and a Mobile band playing Rogue Tavern on a festival Saturday is the kind of cross-pollination both cities’ scenes depend on: out-of-town listeners converted into fans, and new ideas carried home along I-65.

Downtown Birmingham is a straight shot up I-65, less than four hours from Mobile, with day passes at $20 and weekend passes at $35. That accessibility is part of the festival’s pitch — an affordable weekend of new music in a walkable downtown, close enough to the Gulf Coast for a Mobile fan to make the drive and still be home Sunday night.

Two Scenes, One Corridor

The relationship between Mobile and Birmingham’s music communities runs deep in Alabama’s independent scene. Both cities host discovery-focused festivals — Mobile with SouthSounds, Birmingham with Secret Stages — and their lineups overlap by design, with acts from each city headlining the other’s stages. The corridor between them, running through Montgomery, functions as the state’s unofficial music highway.

For a band like BUNCH, a Secret Stages slot does work that hometown shows cannot. Festival audiences arrive specifically to hear bands they have not heard, and venue-bookers across the region send scouts to these weekends. A strong set in Birmingham can translate into out-of-town bookings months later, which is how regional acts grow beyond their home market.

The timing also matters within Mobile’s own calendar. SouthSounds earlier in 2016 had already showcased the city’s newer acts downtown, and Secret Stages a few months later gave the strongest of them a second regional audience. BUNCH’s appearance at both framed 2016 as the project’s introduction year — the stretch in which a band formed from a previous act’s remains stepped out as its own entity.

The Festival’s Place in Birmingham

Secret Stages came to define a particular strand of Birmingham’s cultural revival: the effort to fill downtown blocks — historically busy, then quieter for decades — with music, foot traffic and late-night crowds. Rogue Tavern, the Second Avenue North venue where BUNCH was set to play, sits in the heart of that revival, one of several rooms within a few blocks’ walk that let festivalgoers move from act to act without a car.

The festival’s format — dozens of bands across two nights, passes priced at $20 for a day and $35 for the weekend — deliberately keeps the barrier low. Organizers have described the event as a way for Birmingham audiences to hear the region’s next wave before it arrives, and Mobile’s scene has been a reliable source of exactly that.

For Underwood and BUNCH, the August 6 set was both a homecoming of sorts — the band’s members have histories with Birmingham audiences from their El Cantador days — and a statement of intent: new name, new songs, and a first record held back until it can land with full force. When the set ended, the drive back down I-65 carried the message the band wanted to leave behind — that Mobile’s scene, in its current burst of energy, has something worth hearing four hours north.

Inside the BUNCH Sound

What distinguishes BUNCH from its predecessor is texture. El Cantador earned its following on the strength of layered guitars and propulsive rhythms, the kind of songcraft that filled rooms in midsize venues across the Gulf Coast. BUNCH keeps that foundation but builds upward with Anderson’s keyboards, which slide beneath the guitars as a bed of atmosphere or step forward as melodic lines in their own right. The result is a wider canvas — songs that can breathe in a way the older material could not.

Underwood’s songwriting anchors the project. His voice and guitar work carry the emotional throughline, and the single “Forever My Sparring Partner” offers the clearest early statement of what the band is after: a title that suggests contest and partnership at once, a song about two forces pushing against each other until they find balance. Listeners who download the track on iTunes or stream it on Spotify get a compressed version of what the live set delivers — but only a version, which is why the band has leaned on festival stages to make its case.

The decision to hold the record until the right moment reflects a philosophy about how albums should enter the world. Underwood’s sense of “weird magic” in the new songs suggests material that behaves differently from the band’s earlier work, and rushing it out would waste the surprise. Bands that survive transitions from one identity to the next tend to be the ones that control their own reveal, and BUNCH has done exactly that — a few songs at SouthSounds, another batch at Secret Stages, with the full picture still in reserve.

Why Discovery Festivals Matter

Secret Stages occupies a specific niche in the festival landscape. It is not a headliner-driven event; there is no single act whose name alone sells the passes. Instead, the festival sells the promise of discovery — the chance to walk into a downtown bar on a Friday night and walk out with a new favorite band. That model depends entirely on booking quality, and it has made the festival a fixture for listeners across Alabama who want to hear what is next rather than what is famous.

The economics reflect that mission. At $20 for a day pass and $35 for the weekend, the festival prices itself as an impulse decision rather than a budgeted event, and the compact downtown footprint keeps the experience inexpensive once inside. For bands, the trade is straightforward: modest appearance fees, but an audience of listeners primed to hear something new and a credential that bookers across the region recognize.

Mobile’s SouthSounds operates on the same discovery logic, and the two festivals have effectively become bookends of Alabama’s independent music calendar. Acts that appear at both — as BUNCH did in 2016 — reach the state’s two largest concentration of original-music listeners within a single year, a routing that no amount of one-off gigging could replicate.

Mobile’s Scene, Three Years On

Underwood’s return to Mobile after three years away gave him the perspective to compare the scene he left with the one he found. Cities change slowly enough that residents miss the drift, but returning artists see it immediately — which venues have strengthened, which have closed, whether new bands are forming and whether audiences show up for them. His verdict, that there was new energy in the city’s arts, matched what festival organizers and venue owners had been saying throughout 2016.

That energy is what BUNCH carried north to Birmingham. A band formed from the residue of a beloved predecessor could easily have stayed a hometown concern — a project that plays Mobile a few times a year and lives on memory. Instead, the members took the material on the road, booked a festival slot four hours away, and put a single into the streaming ecosystem where discovery happens daily.

When BUNCH took the Rogue Tavern stage at 8 p.m. that Saturday night, the stakes were modest and real at once: a second regional audience in a single summer, a festival crowd that had never heard of El Cantador, and a band deciding for itself when its record would arrive. For Mobile music, it was another proof point in the case the city’s scene has been building — that the Gulf Coast produces original music worth driving four hours to hear.