Crooked Coast Grew Up Without Leaving the Island

Most bands from a place like Martha's Vineyard eventually treat the island as a launch pad — cut the record in Boston or L.A., move, look back fondly in interviews. Crooked Coast did the opposite. They got bigger and stayed exactly where the ferry drops you.

Their album "Nothing Before & Nothing After," released April 3, 2025, is the sound of a DIY beach-bar band deciding it wants the big rooms without sanding off the salt. The band brought in outside producers to sharpen it — a notable step up in polish from their scrappier catalog — and it landed. In November 2025, Crooked Coast walked away from the New England Music Awards as one of the night's big winners, taking home the region's top act honor.

What keeps the record honest is that you can hear the island in it — not as postcard imagery but as circumstance. This is music made by people who learned to play for crowds that are half locals, half day-trippers, in rooms where the off-season is a cliff. The songs have the loose, sunburned looseness of a band that came up playing dive bars by the water, tightened by a decade of actually meaning it. They came up on bills that once included the Vineyard's own Beach Road Weekend, back when the island still had a festival; they've since graduated to the kind of touring that used to require leaving.

The through-line to right now: Crooked Coast still plays the island through the summer, and the homecoming shows are where the new material gets its loudest reception — a hometown singing its own band's words back at it.

Why it matters: the Cape and Islands export a lot of talent and re-import very little. A band that scales up while keeping its home base here is a small argument that you don't have to leave to make it — that the scene can be a career and not just a summer job. That argument is worth more to the next Vineyard teenager with a guitar than any award.

Play it driving down-island with the windows open. It was built for exactly that.

Sources: Crooked Coast — "Nothing Before & Nothing After" (Bandcamp); 2025 NEMA Winners; Boston.com — Mass. musicians who swept the 2025 New England Music Awards; MV Times — Crooked Coast headlines the Loft