Mild Universe: 'Connected Endlessly'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

San Francisco’s Mild Universe is a “six- to seven-piece” band that combines funk, disco, jazz, and psychedelic music. Based in the city, the band formed in 2019 and is made up of a collective of musicians who all grew up in the Bay Area.

“We’re all kind of like long-term friends,” drummer Sam Jones said.

Jones’s background is primarily in rock music, but he eventually began to listen to more jazz, R&B and dance. That led to him experimenting with different sounds and forming a band.

“I kind of hand-selected some of my favorite musicians and curated, like a ‘super group’ of sorts,” Jones said. “We all know each other either through growing up in the city, going to the same high school, or just through adjacent music circles and music communities.”

He describes Mild Universe’s sound as music that makes people dance with a retro aesthetic that pulls from some origins of disco music, 90s techno, and house influences. The lyrics for the song “Connected Endlessly” allude to a sort of interconnectedness while still being intentionally vague.

“I guess the way I interpret it is being at odds with being connected through these greater circles of people you don’t even know on the other side of the planet,” he said. “And just how that tool of interconnectedness could be used for positivity and bringing people together.”

The band plans to debut their next single, “Your Love,” on March 29, which Jones describes as “a really fun song” with “repetitive and vibey moments” that was written a long time ago. The single will lead up to Mild Universe’s full-length album, “Everything Must Change,” which will be released during the summer.

“I guess [the album] was kind of inspired in a way by the city of San Francisco, which is constantly changing [as well as] acceptance of change,” Jones said. “I’m very, very happy with how it came out, and of any project I’ve been involved with, it’s probably the most fully realized that I’ve worked on.”

To hear them live, Mild Universe will perform at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco on Sunday, March 24, at 8:00 p.m.