By Maura Mulvihill
Crotona Avenue is a street just off of Fordham Road. Head a couple of blocks past Belmont Avenue; stop before you hit the Bronx Zoo, and you’ll find it. Crotona Avenue shares a name with a high school, a park, and now Fordham’s newest band who made their live debut on November 18th at Rodrigue’s Coffee House, opening for headlining band Smushie.
When I sat down with one of Crotona’s guitarists Áine Mullaly, I was eager to get to the bottom of the band’s backstory. I decided to start by asking about the band’s name. In inquiring about the name, I learned a little bit of history about Fordham’s music scene. Mullaly started off by telling me about her super impressive capstone research project, in which she is creating an archive of Fordham’s house and DIY music venue scene over the course of the last 3 decades. In her research, she came across a now-defunct venue, lovingly referred to as the “Meat Shop,” that booked an impressive lineup of bands, including names you might know like Soccer Mommy and Diet Cig, in the 2010s.
The “Meat Shop” – it was in the basement of an apartment located on Crotona Avenue. Áine said when naming the band, “It was so hard to figure out something that we didn’t hate after like, a day, but Crotona we liked a lot, and it’s kinda inspired by that”.
Áine talked a lot about these basement shows and how they really served as part of the inspiration for the formation of the band. She said, “My favorite experiences at Fordham as a freshman and sophomore were going to the Thunderdome, because it felt like a secret, but all my friends would be there.” The “Thunderdome” refers to another Fordham basement venue, the Jurassic Thunderdome, which has since also become a thing of the past. I remember going to a couple of Jurassic Thunderdome shows myself, and I think Áine is right when she says we really don’t have much of anything like that at Fordham anymore. She says that to her and other members of the band, Crotona “is our way of getting back to that.”
Áine says that her and lead vocalist Meghana Goli have talked about forming a band together since their freshman year in 2019. Momentum to form a band grew when Áine and bassist Annika Haakonsen began writing songs together in January of 2022. Together, Goli, Haakonsen, and Mullaly started writing and playing music through the winter and spring. But they were missing a drummer.
In the fall of this year, the three reached out to drummer Aidan Drouse and guitarist Hugo Keith (you might recognize them as members of another Fordham student band, Faculty). All together, they played “Butter”, that first song written by Mullaly and Haakonsen the previous winter, liked the way it sounded, and decided to come together to create what is now Crotona.
Leading up to the concert, Drouse and Keith were a comforting presence to the other members of the band as seasoned performers. Áine says she was nervous, but not because she doubted the band. The anxiety came from not knowing what an audience would bring to performing. “It is a little jarring to go up in front of people and look them in the eye when you’re playing something you wrote.”
That first song they ever wrote and played together, “Butter” would become the very first song they ever played for a live audience. In addition, Crotona played a mix of originals and covers, including another original song titled “Allen Wang” and covers of “Sports” by Viagra Boys and “Hold On We’re Going Home” by Drake.
Waiting for the performance, I really didn’t know what to expect, but I was excited. To say I enjoyed it was an understatement. Every member of the band seriously impressed me. It is so amazing to watch people you know
erform and even better to watch them completely knock it out of the park. To be honest, one of my favorite parts of their set was the Drake cover, partly because of all the ways they made it their own. It was such a cool feeling being able to sing along to a band at their first live performance.
After the show, Áine says she and the band are ready to keep performing. “It makes me want to do more, because I think we’ve worked really well together as a band, and we all care equally about what is going on. I just want to see how far we can take this in terms of what we can write… We’re not doing this to get big; it’s just so fun to play music with your friends.”
You can watch Crotona for yourself at upcoming basement shows around Belmont.
