In a biweekly series of features, we’re inviting Minnesota artists to introduce themselves to our audience. Today: Durry, a Burnsville sibling rock duo who exploded out of quarantine.

Austin Durry: We are one of the many products of the whole pandemic. We were quarantined together in the house, and I started goofing around with some new music and learning to use Logic — the program that I work in for music, and started playing around with sounds and stuff. I brought Taryn in to bounce ideas off of and get her opinion on things, and it kind of snowballed into her being pretty involved in the writing process. So we just kind of decided to make it official, make it a team effort. After a while, we had some songs that we felt like were really solid and kind of launched it. This last summer was when our first single came out, so now we have six songs out.

Taryn Durry: I've never taken on a music project like this. Austin's been doing it for, like, 10 years. He has another band — but this is our first time joining forces and coming together. Our dad is a music teacher and our mom is an art teacher, so that's kind of the dynamic that we grew up in. I've grown up playing music, but I've never taken on a project myself.

Austin Durry: Yeah, I've been playing in a band called Coyote Kid since I was a teenager. We've been around in the Minneapolis scene for for a long time, but it's been fun switching things up with this project…and it's been taking off like crazy.

Early on, we came up with the title of “nostalgic indie pop”; that's what we call it. The word “nostalgic”…there's no sound equivalent to it, necessarily, but everyone seems to get it when they hear it. Sounds like early 2000s pop rock stuff.

We put up the song “Who’s Laughing Now”; it's kind of been our main single. We just posted a little snippet of it on TikTok; it blew up like crazy. We ended up recording it, doing the album art, and posting on Spotify within three days of writing the very first part of it. That song has really been our our blast-off career maker.

I feel like that song was very specific. It's very specific experiences that a lot of people have had. We hear a lot of people that are like, “You're singing my life.” And it's like, no, that's my life! We all have similar experiences. I wrote it thinking of just very specific things that I was told, not really thinking of being relatable. And it turned out everyone had those same experiences.

Taryn Durry: It was crazy. The first time we played it live, everyone knew the words…every single word. That was awesome.

Austin Durry: The last show we did was sold out at 7th St [Entry] and the energy and the crowd everyone shouting those words all together…it's kind of a shouty kind of song too, and it was just like, it gives you goosebumps.

We've had just tons and tons of record labels knocking our door down. Managers and bigwigs in L.A. and in New York…all these people from all over the place, trying to get on board. It's seems like every day, some crazy new opportunity pops up or some…or some new piece of fan art, or a version of our song.

Taryn Durry: It’s been crazy having to sort through a lot of that: sit down and pick what our priorities are.

Austin Durry: Right, when a couple months ago, any one of those things would have been, “Oh, my gosh!” The best thing. Whatever. It's nice to keep perspective. It's all amazing. We actually just this week, began the process of bringing on a manager, and so hopefully things will ease up. Now we have some other some other cooks in the kitchen. But it's been, like, back to back Zoom meetings every day for over a month now.

Taryn Durry: It’s finally starting to settle down.

Austin Durry: We have a bunch of new music that's coming down the pipeline, we're gonna be releasing it. However, we have some announcements we can make in this in this interview! Breaking news! We have a new single coming out the night of the Best New Bands showcase. It's called “Sand Trap Town.”

Update 1/5: Best New Bands has been postponed to March 4.

And then if everything goes according to plan, we will have a whole shipment of cassette tapes with a collection of all of our singles on them. It's like a little EP that we put together, called Welcome to the Losers Club. We'll have a limited run of 300 cassettes that will be available at the show.

I can't wait to see all the other bands. Every single one is like, “Oh my gosh, they're so good!” It's gonna be quite a night.