soma's "T. Hoisington" Is the Sound of a Yakima Band Finding Its Powers
Every so often a local record shows up that makes you sit up and reconsider what your town is capable of. soma's new album, "T. Hoisington," is one of those. The Yakima four-piece — drummer Nico Gambito, bassist Max Schiefelbein, and guitarist-vocalists Riley Verbrugge and Kyle Benjamin — spent June introducing the record on the main stage at Chinook Fest up SR-410 in Naches, and it's the kind of debut that travels well beyond the Valley.
The band takes its name from a Strokes song, which is your first clue that these four know their record collections. "T. Hoisington" wears its influences openly and then does something more interesting than imitate them — the Yakima Herald's June profile clocked echoes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Elliott Smith, even the Dukes of Stratosphear and Ween. What holds it together is the twin-frontman vocal blend: Verbrugge and Benjamin trade leads and stack harmonies that slide from easy unison into deliberate tension before resolving somewhere you didn't see coming.
The songwriting split is worth knowing because you can hear it. Benjamin and Verbrugge build the structures around melody and chord movement; Gambito and Schiefelbein write rhythms that run counter to the tune rather than under it — companions, not cushions. Schiefelbein has described every version of every song as an improvisation, which is why the band frames the album itself as a time capsule: a favorite take of songs they love, knowing the next live version will mutate into something they'll only recognize as it happens.
Formed in 2023, soma emerged from the tangle of overlapping Yakima bands — the members crossed paths through outfits like Take Caution and Soup Creek and a Bale Breaker open mic, the sort of small-scene lore where everybody has played in everybody's band. That's not a knock; that's the ecosystem working.
Why it matters: a town knows its scene is real when the young bands stop trying to sound like they're from somewhere else and start sounding like themselves. "T. Hoisington" is ambitious, funny and unmistakably a Yakima record — proof that transcendent live music can happen 140 miles from Seattle on a Tuesday, no stadium required.
Stream it, sure, but do the band an actual favor and buy it on Bandcamp. Then go find the next show, because by soma's own logic, that version will never exist again.
Sources: Yakima's soma channels classic influences into something all its own — Yakima Herald-Republic; Chinook Fest 2026