Volcano Boys and Easy Fruit will team up for a free show at DG’s Tap House on Friday to commemorate the release of their debut recordings.

The show will be the second of two release parties for the bands, the first of which took place at the Vaudeville Mews in Des Moines in December. It will also be a homecoming gig of sorts for Volcano Boys frontman Jordan Mayland, a longtime member of the Ames music scene who now resides in Des Moines. 

“I lived in Ames for seven or eight years, so it’s just as much of a home as Des Moines is,” Mayland said. “It’s always good to come back.”

The Volcano Boys’ self-titled album is the product of several years of work by Mayland and the band. 

In late 2010, Mayland was in the middle of the second and final breakup of his first band, Keepers of the Carpet. He was keeping himself busy by working on solo material and with several other bands including the Wheelers and Nuclear Rodeo. He was also occasionally jamming with drummer Trent Derby of Wolves in the Attic. 

“We always said, ‘Man, we’ve gotta do something real sometime instead of coming home from the bar and jamming for a couple hours,'” Mayland said. 

Eventually, Mayland asked guitarist Eric Moffitt [Wolves in the Attic, Keepers of the Carpet] and bassist Erik Knudtson to take join in on the jam sessions with Derby. With that, Mayland had a new band and a new home for songs he had originally intended for Keepers of the Carpet.

“Volcano Boys just seemed like a refocused machine,” Mayland said. “New songs, new vision. It [was] real.”

The band began recording an album in Knutson’s studio in Ames. Soon after, Knutson left the band and moved to Des Moines, taking his studio with him.  He was replaced on bass by Mayland’s roommate Tom Reneker, but the work that they had done on the album up to that point was scrapped. 

“We pretty much lost the album at that point,” Mayland said. “We put an EP out of four of the songs, but that was supposed to be a 12 or 13 song album. We just started from scratch in Des Moines a couple years ago and finally got it [done].”

The band worked on the second round of recordings at Redd No. 7 Studio in Des Moines with engineer Kevin Neal. Sessions were slow going, which Mayland attributes in part to the fact that he and the other band members were so busy with other bands, making it difficult to focus on one project.

Once principal recording was complete, the band set about mixing the album at Wabi Sound. 

“I lived like a block away [from Wabi], so I could [go] down whenever we wanted to mix for a while,” Mayland said. “But it was still meticulous and it still took a long time.”

The finished album was released in December, and features many songs about Mayland’s time and experiences while living in Ames. 

“I think every single song on the Volcano Boys album was written in Ames, about Ames events, Ames women, Ames parties, and Ames relationships,” Mayland said. “‘Look Up at Me’ is about the Boheme and the Bali Satay [two now-closed Ames music venues].”

“It’s about a weekend, partying with your friends. We’ve got a weekend, we’re gonna waste it like some kids. Get dressed up and go dancing. I don’t know what the kids do these days. Do they still have underwear dance parties? I don’t know. And at the end of it, we all still respected each other. ‘You can look up at me. It’s cool it’s fine.’”

If the Volcano Boys’ album is the culmination of years of studio time, Easy Fruit’s EP is at the opposite end of the recording spectrum. 

“I think we’d been a band for four or five months when we recorded it,” said Easy Fruit drummer Chris Marshall.

The band was formed early in 2014 to fulfill the New Year’s resolution of singer and guitarist Thomas Oldham. 

“I think it was  New Year’s night, and [Oldham] was like, ‘My New Year’s resolution is to start a band, do you wanna do it?'” Marshall said. 

Marshall jumped on board. The two recruited Brad Turk, who had previously worked with Oldham in Big American Party and Family Unity, to share guitar and vocal duties and Joe Horn to play bass. The band scraped together their first material from songs that Turk and Oldham had written while in-between bands. 

After playing gigs around Des Moines for a few months, Easy Fruit headed to Wabi Sound to record their first EP. The sessions were wrapped up quickly, though the band sat on the material for a few months before releasing it. 

“We recorded it over the course of maybe a week, and we were trying to figure out when we were going to put it out,” Marshall said. “Volcano Boys had an album coming out, so we were like, ‘This is the time to do it. We can do a double release show and have a big party.'”

Friday’s show at DG’s will be the final Easy Fruit gig for bassist Joe Horn, who is moving to Florida. Going forward, he will be replaced by Cory Wendell, who previously worked with Marshall electronic noise band TIRES. 

While Friday’s show officially marks the release of the first material for the two bands, they aren’t dwelling on the moment. Both groups have a fresh batch of material that they are ready to record. 

“We probably have a couple EPs worth of tunes,” Marshall said. “We’re actually getting together today to record a couple singles…and we’ll probably start working on another EP soon.”

Likewise, Mayland is eager to get back in the studio. Arguably one of the busiest musicians in Iowa, he has plans to record and release a new Volcano Boys EP and an album by Jordan Mayland and The Thermal Detonators by the end of 2015.

“I’m not sure if I’m winding down quite yet…but I’ve got a certain amount of songs I’m desperate to get out,” Mayland said. “I think about a lot of stuff – mortality and shit like that. I want to get it all out and settle down.”

Volcano Boys & Easy Fruit w/Bombardier

Friday, Feb. 20 @ 9 PM 

DG’s Tap House, 125 Main St. 

Free, 21+