In December, during the finale of Shindig 2025, I watched Kyler Young, Chopping Spree’s saxophonist, climb a tower of storage boxes mid-performance. Hands flailed up from the crowd. Posing, face contorted with passion, he wailed the chorus of “Koi Fish,” the second of two contagiously energetic singles put out by the band since October. Jazz morphed into funk, then into blues. Hayden Cohen, the keyboardist, ditched his post and, leaping down from the stage, began rapping. Heavy metal ensued. The crowd lurched. A mosh pit formed, and I had to remind myself that the music I was hearing — which had galvanized the most energetic crowd of the night — had its roots in jazz.
“Chopping Spree is everything they say they are,” I texted my friend after the show, electrified, bussing home a new fan.
I meet Chopping Spree at their studio, a room on the second floor of a nondescript building in the industrial district of Vancouver. It is small, yet lived-in and cozy. A lamp sits on a mixer with knobs and switches; a dartboard hangs above a whiteboard with the night’s agenda; a couch, minifridge and bar stools outfit the end of the room, by the shuttered window. A sheet is draped over the ceiling light, dimming the studio, lending it an intimate quality. “This is our first time having a place,” Eddie Naranjo, the drummer, tells me. “Before, we were doing whatever we could.” They inform me that “Crayola” — their bright, CASIOPEA-esque single with over 30,000 Spotify streams — was not created here, but written, rehearsed and recorded around the UBC School of Music, Young’s house and a barn in Langley. “So it’s actually nice to have the space.”
All five members, gear in tow, set up their instruments. Junny Chen, the guitarist, is much calmer than he was at Shindig — his on-stage presence is defined by manic yelling and burning solos — but his hair is as I recognize it, long and dark and the best in the band. Olivier Leclerc, the bassist, is also a parkour hobbyist, a graduate of Capilano University’s jazz program and the only one in the band who’s out of school working a job (“One of us is actually making money,” Naranjo jokes). Naranjo, adjusting the drumset, I admire not only for his fluency around the kit, but also for his commitment to a political science and history degree alongside playing for two bands.
Cohen moves around the studio, rearranging seats and stands, configuring his two keyboards. The room is filled with amps, microphones and pedals, as well as a drumpad for use by Colm McIntosh, who substituted for Naranjo while he was on exchange in Spain and has since stuck with the band as their secondary percussionist. Young, beaming as he greets me, is wearing a Geese t-shirt, and I can’t help but think about the similarities between that Brooklyn sensation and the band assembling before me now: in their kinetic stage presence, in their cohesiveness as a musical unit, in their thrillingly distinctive artistic vision. But Chopping Spree may have the edge in that last category, considering the eclectic nature of their jazz-fusion ethos, and the quickness with which it matured.
Before we sit down, there is an air of playfulness in the room. Beers and Timbits are passed around; YouTube videos on mixing are discussed; darts is practiced. “I’m just gonna get insane at darts by the time the album comes out,” says Young, scoring a bullseye. As Cohen and Naranjo exchange musical ideas — Cohen rolling up and down scales, Naranjo matching him with frenetic barks of his hi-hat — I realize how the band has reached such heights in the local scene: their chops are just as strong as their friendship, and their dedication (“The love of the game,” Chen says) is balanced with a heady openness to fun.
“The origin story,” says Naranjo, prefacing the tale of how the band formed. In early 2024, Chen, Naranjo, Cohen and Young met in the UBC Jazz Ensemble. Seeing a lack of jazz in the Vancouver music scene, Chen and Naranjo, who already knew each other through the metal band Reverend Ape, sought a new creative outlet. “The music scene is so vibrant out here,” Chen tells me. “There’s a lot of indie, there’s a lot of punk, a lot of metal. The jazz scene is tight, though, in comparison. And the scene overall is very small compared to the electronic music nightlife, club music, rave life, all that shit. So I just wanted to bring something different.”
And Chopping Spree is. Compared to the other bands that performed at Shindig — many of whom offered an expansion on a single genre, like shoegaze, indie pop or emo — Chopping Spree boasts a kaleidoscopic set of influences, and is willing to innovate on any of them. When I ask them about the music they listen to, the band members list everything from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, an Australian experimental band, to Balkan music, which inspired the outro to their heavy metal original, “Portrait of Zahora.” For the band members, that freedom is stimulating. “I think that inspired me with Chopping Spree where it’s like, we could do whatever we want because we’re all ADHD,” Young says. “Let’s just grab onto whatever’s interesting to us at the moment. We could do a rap song at a show. We could do a fucking jazz fusion song. We could do a metal song. We could do whatever the fuck we want.” The band members jokingly suggest K-pop as another genre to add to their resumé, but I get the sense that none of them dismiss the possibility.
Over the summer of 2024, Chopping Spree played their debut gigs around Vancouver — among them Koerner's Pub and a frat house (“He’s got a fucking laundry rack as his stand,” Young says, recounting the conditions) — but were having trouble finding their sound. Their setlists consisted of covers of old Japanese jazz songs, and they couldn’t find a bassist that stuck. It was only in the fall, during Blank Vinyl Project’s battle of the bands event, Versus, that they embraced the Chopping Spree of today. “[Versus] is when we really started finding the Chopping Spree style,” Young says. “The direction for the band.” They worked tirelessly at their audition tapes, finalizing early versions of their original compositions. One of them was “Zahora,” which tapped into their underground influences, fusing their jazz roots with the essence of the Vancouver music scene.
“We really wanted to have something that was a shock to the audience,” Naranjo explains. “So [‘Zahora’] turned into this really crazy proggy song. It was still jazz fusion-y, but it definitely had a lot more metal influence.” Chopping Spree won the event. “The energy was super different. That was the moment that we were all kind of like, this is something special for sure.”
The band also played “Caravan,” a jazz standard. In its traditional form, it is not the kind of song you would associate with the realm of nightlife inhabited by the Vancouver underground. But Chopping Spree made it their own. “I distinctly remember the first show I played with you guys,” Leclerc says. Leclerc, who received an education in jazz, had performed “Caravan” before — but in solemn, academic settings, where he paid more attention to the accuracy of his bass playing than anything else. With Chopping Spree, “Caravan” has a different effect. “Playing that tune and then watching people fucking ramming into each other … I was kind of smiling. Everybody was smiling. I was like, what the fuck is going on?”
Categorizing Chopping Spree is difficult. Jazz fusion, the genre most often ascribed to their musical diversity, captures their inventiveness but misses their wildness, the danceable energies of their underground influences. “We do a fusion of the jazz framework,” Leclerc offers. “We do not function like a jazz band. We do not play jazz music. But we play the framework.” That framework — improvisation, instrumental dexterity, all of jazz’s conversational looseness between musician and musician — vibrates beneath every Chopping Spree performance. But their crowd invigoration, their exhilarating showmanship, comes from elsewhere. “It’s all the ideas of [jazz combined with] the high-energy shit that us three — Junny, Eddie and I — come from with punk bands,” Leclerc says, “and the endless stream of influences that we have.” The word “democratic” comes up a couple times while we are talking, a word that perfectly encapsulates the Chopping Spree method: it is underground music democratized, jazz music transcribed onto the underground scene.
“People want that jazz framework,” Young says. “They want to see music occurring as it’s being made. We have the same songs that we play at our shows, but each show we’re always doing different.”
It wasn’t always this way. “Definitely in early Chopping Spree shows, looking back, our performances [weren’t] super crazy or energetic,” Cohen says. “But the more you look at it, the more intense it gets, because it’s a reaction to the crowd.” Since forming, Chopping Spree has performed at Red Gate, the Rickshaw Theatre, the Biltmore, Tyrant Studios, the Pearl, Green Auto and Hero’s Welcome — venues where Vancouver’s music scene convenes. Playing in front of these crowds helped develop Chopping Spree’s stage presence. “That’s where the moshing and the partying and stuff came out,” Cohen says. “That was something that we realized was essential to our shows.”
When I ask what makes our music scene so special, the band members tell stories of appreciation. “It’s so flavourful, man,” Chen tells me. “It’s so vibrant. Super wholesome, and the community is dope. I’ve met some of the dopest people in my life through the music scene. There’s something special about it being … not secretive, but definitely a very underground community. A lot of the venues we know and love are on the verge of being shut down.” People keep the scene alive, and Chopping Spree, with upwards of 8,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and an album release show booked at the Fox Cabaret on Jan. 10, keeps the people coming.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the band is the way their genre-bending is expanding the scope of what underground bands can play — and where they can perform. Young recounts their performance at Tyrant Studios, a mellow, low-key venue with a reputation for traditional jazz shows. Past performers include Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington, and attendees spectate the stage from candlelit tables. When Chopping Spree arrived, they had all the tables removed, intending to make space for a dance floor. Needless to say, people danced. “I’ve never seen anybody stand up at Tyrant,” Young says.
Breaking boundaries means more people entering the scene. “Introducing jazz to the metal scene is expanding the [number] of people and the amount of reach,” Cohen says, telling me about an audience member who rarely attended live shows, but was drawn to Chopping Spree because they liked video game music — a genre the band tapped into with “Crayola,” which has traces of Mario Kart’s “Coconut Mall.”
“You get to make personal connections with the people,” Naranjo says. “It’s like we feed off the energy of the audience. That’s such an important part of us having fun on stage. You don’t want to play a show where everybody’s just sitting down, just watching us. We always want to have people dancing.”
Outside of Chopping Spree, the band members have responsibilities: Cohen, Chen and Young are pursuing degrees in music, and Naranjo a political science and history degree. Cohen, Chen and Leclerc offer music lessons. When I ask how they juggle their lives alongside the band, they don’t hold back in their eagerness to commit fully to Chopping Spree. “It’s easy to put a lot of effort into this band because we all love it,” says Naranjo. “It is hard to balance everything.”
“It’s like an endless time sink in the best way,” Young adds. “We could put all our time and all our energy into Chopping Spree. There’s nothing stopping us but our actual studies and personal time. I think Chopping Spree will take on an even stronger, more beautiful form after we’re all out of school, because we’ll be able to more readily focus our time on it.”
For Cohen, Chopping Spree is an outlet for his prolific songwriting. (Chen jokes that Cohen has a MuseScore application in his brain.) “I have notepads full of fully completed songs and ideas,” he says. “I love songwriting, and that's why I'm in school for it. I've been writing songs since I was a kid.” However, Cohen never labels himself as the principal songwriter; creating with Chopping Spree, he explains, is a communal exercise. “I’ll bring a small idea, or I’ll bring a more fully-formed song, and I’ll just be like, ‘this kind of vibe.’ And then we’ll launch into a song that way. But in other cases, we’ll just start jamming something, and then we’re like, ‘Let’s turn this into a song.’”
This kind of spontaneous, authentic creative process — writing in between shows, bringing a new song to every crowd, iterating further in rehearsals — culminated in their debut album, Anemoia, set to release on Jan. 9. According to Young, the album’s title means “manufactured nostalgia.” The idea has personal significance: not only does nostalgia capture the way Chopping Spree revives and refashions old music, it charts the band’s evolution as well. “In a sense, it is nostalgia for our old playing,” Cohen says, reflecting on the way the band began as an ode to Japanese jazz fusion and transformed, over a year of endless experimenting, into the celebration of genres they now represent.
I ask them to describe the album in one word. “Colourful.” “Explorative.” “Lush.” “Goated.” One sticks out: “Honest.”
I end the interview, and the band members get to practicing. With the same amazement I felt at Shindig, I listen as they shift from a stank-worthy funk piece, complete with vocals from Cohen and a disgustingly flavourful bassline from Leclerc (“What’d I just do?” he exclaims), to a bone-chilling, apocalyptic heavy metal piece whose ambient screeches, guttural guitar and spoken word poetry transport me to the hellscapes of Doom. Chopping Spree’s process is on full display, and I’m reminded of the emphasis on “democracy” and “communal” in our interview as the band members pause to talk, discussing time signatures, riffs, the colour of chords; Cohen is usually the one to introduce new directions, the rest of the band responding with their ideas.
The songs I am hearing, they tell me, will be revealed in future projects, so I do my best not to pry. But I do ask them what the future holds.
“Big things coming!” they say, telling me that 2026 will be a year of singles and festivals.
Practice ends on the later side, around 10 p.m. As we head outside to our cars, I remember a moment from Shindig. I was trying to get the best view of Chopping Spree through the crowd, dense and swaying. Sifting through the darkened heads, I spotted a woman holding a toddler. For the volume, the toddler wore earmuffs. For the music, the woman bobbed up and down. Both of them, as far as I could tell, were happy with what they were hearing.
“If Chopping Spree ended tomorrow,” Young told me earlier, “I could be proud of the fact that we were able to get old heads, who go to the Infidels Jazz shows, and young folks, who go to these YVR underground shows, in the same room. Some of them are moshing. Some of them are standing like this. But everybody is enjoying the show.”
