Ones Loved: What Happens When Phoenix's Veterans Start a New Band

There's a certain kind of Phoenix band that arrives already knowing where the bodies are buried. Not because they're new to any of this — because they've done all of it before, in other rooms, under other names, for years. Ones Loved is that kind of band, and their EP "Oleander" is what happens when a group of scene lifers decides the most interesting thing they can do is start over together.

The center of it is Jim Andreas, a name that carries weight if you've paid any attention to Phoenix music over the last couple of decades. Andreas has passed through No Volcano, Trunk Federation, and The Hoodwinks — a résumé that reads like a walking history of the local underground. Ones Loved is his newest chapter, and he didn't build it alone.

The lineup is a small map of interconnected Phoenix projects. Jenny Tamura brings cello, and Jeremy Randall is here too — both of them also anchor the dream-pop act Timber Giant, which tells you something about the textures they're after. Robert Smith rounds out the group, as does Jon Utter, who also plays in Flower Festival. These aren't session players assembled for a lark. They're musicians with their own bands, their own followings, choosing to pool it all into one more thing.

And the sound follows the personnel. Ones Loved trades in psychedelic folk-rock — call it daydream-pop, call it shoegaze, call it whatever gets across the idea of songs that drift and shimmer more than they punch. The presence of cello in the mix isn't a decoration; it's a signal. This is music built for atmosphere and slow bloom, the kind of thing that rewards a second and third listen more than it grabs you by the collar on the first.

Phoenix New Times covered the EP on Feb 11, 2026, which is how a lot of the city first got word that this particular constellation of players had aligned. The exact release date of "Oleander" isn't something we're going to pin down for you here — but the coverage marked the moment the project stepped out of the practice space and into public view.

What makes Ones Loved worth writing about isn't novelty. It's the opposite. It's the veteran move — the thing that happens in a healthy music town when the people who've already built reputations decide those reputations are just raw material for the next idea. Andreas doesn't need to prove he can front a band. Tamura and Randall don't need Ones Loved to have a creative outlet; they've got Timber Giant. Utter's got Flower Festival. Every person in this room came in with somewhere else to be. They showed up anyway.

That's the quiet strength of a scene with real roots. The famous version of "local music" is always about the hungry newcomer, the first EP, the breakout. But the durable version — the one that keeps a city's music alive across decades — is this: experienced hands starting fresh projects because making things together is the actual point, not a means to some other end.

"Oleander" is a short document of that impulse. A few songs, a handful of players who've earned the right to coast and declined to, and a sound that asks you to slow down and drift with it. In a Phoenix summer, drifting sounds about right.

Ones Loved could have rested on everything they'd already done. Instead they made something new and called it a beginning. That's the veteran move — and it's the one worth watching.

Sources: Phoenix New Times — New Phoenix Band Ones Loved Drops Daydreamy Pop-Rock EP "Oleander"