Today we’d like to introduce you to Megafaunaa.
Hi Megafaunaa, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Megafaunaa (often stylized in all lowercase “megafaunaa”) started out as highschool friends coming together to play music in a teenage hobby garage band. The four members are: Klaus Stafford (frontwoman vocalist and bassist), Brennan Martin (guitarist), Carlos Castillo (guitarist), and Judah Speece (drummer).
Klaus, Brennan and Carlos all attended Central Magnet highschool together 2020-2024. We were all fairly slow to end up becoming friends, with all of us only becoming close the second half of senior year. It was around the summer after highschool graduation where Brennan, Klaus and Carlos began playing with the idea of making music together. Unfortunately, this plan was stunted since each person ended up attending different colleges around the state. Klaus went to UT Chattanooga, Brennan went to UT Knoxville, and Carlos attended Middle Tennessee State University. Due to all living hours from eachother, the idea of making music was put on the backburner till the end of the college freshman year. Brennan and Klaus had what could best be described as a rough time at their respective colleges and ended up transferring home to Murfreesboro’s Middle Tennessee State University, resparking our interests to pursue music.
We only made the jump when Brennan and Klaus reconnected with Carlos. The summer after freshman year we workshopped and rehearsed till we played our first show on Halloween night 2025 at a house venue in Nashville.
We played this next few shows with ex drummer Hannah Sherrod till 2026, where we eventually separated with her due to creative differences. Since then we met Judah Speece, our incredibly talented and awesome drummer.
Through our shows we’ve played at venues, house parties, parking garages, and rooftops. We aren’t super big on anything that feels corporate, we like it when our shows are on a whim. We’ve had the cops called to shut shows down a few times, we even had someone pull the fire alarm at a show forcing a full evacuation (we just moved across the road and kept playing). This outlook on our band and music in general has really made it hard to stay true to what we want for ourselves. We don’t want to be famous, we don’t want to get caught up in trying to market to some algorithm, or force outselves to do some trend and hope people notice us. We really just don’t care about all that. We want to find an authentic way to enjoy the kind of art we make, and make it without changing outselves to fit what others want or what some app might pick up quicker. We aren’t going to dilute ourselves for the sake of that sort of thing.
We are also really passionate about authenic and real ways of enjoying media. We try to keep a lot of the stuff we do analog. For example we take footage on handicams and handheld digicams, we dont use instrument synthesizers when we can use real equipment our recordings and shows, we plan to put our music on physical media like MP3 players, vinyls, and CDs, etc. When you do things like this you know what you’re listening to is real. You know that when you have it in your hands, things you enjoy can’t be taken away by some company’s new licensing agreement, or the art you make can’t be fed into a generative system. You know what you’re buying is yours, and not just the temporary right to listen, or consume. That is what drives our band, and motivates us to do what we do; preserving what is human, what is real, in a digital age.
We don’t know if people enjoy us for that or anything, but we’ve gotten a strange amount of attention in the local music scene and beyond. We don’t think we deserve any of the kind of attention we’ve gotten from people asking to have us play at shows, asking to record our first releases, or even from the people trying to interview us as of recent. It’s all super cool, but we would be doing the exact same thing even if we hadn’t gotten this sort of attention.
In the future we have a few things planned. We are currently working on our first EP or album release. There are also a few media bodies interested in speaking to us in the near future which is wild. We’ve been asked to visit out of state like in North Carolina, Alabama, and Illinois. There’s also a lovely studio in North Carolina interested in doing a live recording of us sometime in the future which is super neat. There have been talks of a regional tour with a few people as well.
Fun facts that may or may not be helpful or interesting:
– Judah, Brennan, and Carlos were always the people mostly interested in professionally pursuing the audio production industry, Klaus is actually a taxidermist and pursuing wildlife biology, and picked up the music stuff for fun, enjoying it a lot!
– Brennan has been playing guitar since he was 13.
– Carlos is second generation from El Salvador, originally born in New York!
– Klaus lost her sense of smell in a traumatic head injury as a child, making her anosmic.
– Judah has lived all over the country, and tries to visit skateparks in every place they travel to (they’re a great skateboarder).
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It wasn’t always super easy. Like I said before we were all fairly slow to end up becoming friends, with all of us only becoming close the second half of senior year. It was around the summer after highschool graduation where Brennan, Klaus and Carlos began playing with the idea of making music together. Unfortunately, this plan was stunted since each person ended up attending different colleges around the state. Klaus went to UT Chattanooga, Brennan went to UT Knoxville, and Carlos attended Middle Tennessee State University. Due to all living hours from eachother, the idea of making music was put on the backburner till the end of the college freshman year.
Even when we were finally all together, juggling time and responsibilities like work to afford basics in an ever worsening economy, on top of rehearsals and shows has been tough. It’s been growing harder and harder for most people to support and become apart of their local scene in this day and age.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
megafaunaa is a is an alt rock band in middle tennessee. We tend to specilize in shows that aren’t just good for the music, but also good for the performance itself, we really try hard to make the experience intimate and fun for everyone.
We usually play the shoegaze, grunge, and twee pop genres live. All of our original music is withing the realm of those genres. In the past people have said they come to see us for our stage presence.
One of the things we are most proud of is being able to contribute to the underground and often secret Do It Yourself communities of artists and creatives here. Supporting that expression so close to home is one of the best things we’ve ever done, and we hope we can inspire more people to join in and seek out these third spaces!
What sets us apart from other bands is the heavy art direction we put a lot of focus in. Our shows and pages are mean’t to have a certain focus on aesthetic. We feel like it’s important our audience can invest themselves in the mythos of our stage presence and art, just as much as the music. We’re also known for being one of the few female fronting alternative bands in the music scene here!
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck has played a huge role in our popularity. From the first show we ever performed, we’ve been lucky. In fact we only stumbled upon our first show by chance. A few weeks before halloween we saw someone looking for people to play, and happened to reach out. Lucky for us, the organizers thought we’d be a good fit for opening the show, and we played our first show october 31st at 8pm. From there we’ve been invited to play at more shows, completely out of nowhere.
Our social media luck is also complete chance. Since we’ve made a point to not really feed into trends or market ourselves, everyone who ended up finding us did by the chance of the algorithm. Which is crazy to us, since we never ever expected to find the success we did in the music scene so soon, or even at all.
We are also super lucky to live in the same time and place as eachother. We are so lucky to all be a group of people that gets along and is driven to create.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megafaunaa.invld/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@megafaunaa_invld
- Other: mailto:courtingspurfowl2006@gmail.com
Image Credits
Deme Webster, and Zach MArtin
