The Boys in Trueblood Came to Rock

Like so many young rockers, the members of the band Trueblood have a rebellious streak. “Don’t tell our parents, but we did watch two movies last night,” said Dylan Trueblood, the band’s 16-year-old lead guitarist.

He squeezed onto a bench at a beer hall in Manhattan with his bandmates: Ethan, 13, a bassist; Mason, 15, a singer and guitarist; and Cameron, 18, a drummer. The four teenagers address each other as “bro” because they are from Southern California and because they are actually brothers.

It was the day before their first show in New York, and the boys were visiting the bar with their parents to enjoy its foosball table, not its selection of pilsners. They lit up at the arrival of sliders and cheese fries.

They acted like typical teenagers. But they have built a ravenous following on social media by playing songs that, by their standards, are practically oldies: “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, “Adventure of a Lifetime” by Coldplay. Floppy-haired and baggy-jeaned, the brothers smash cymbals, rip guitar solos and bang their heads in easy unison, like synchronized swimmers with a deep appreciation for Weezer.

The videos are filmed by their father in the garage of their family’s home just outside San Diego. Each one seems to reassure the band’s more than six million followers on TikTok that members of Gen Alpha and Gen Z still know how to have fun without Roblox. “Wait … kids still do this?” one commenter wrote.

The Truebloods have been playing instruments and writing music together since childhood. Mason, the band’s frontman and a freshman in high school, realized they had struck a nerve soon after they posted their first TikTok video, a Linkin Park cover, in November 2024.

“I was in the car with Dylan, and he opened his phone and was like, ‘Bro, the video already has 3,000 views,’” Mason said.

Soon, Coldplay invited them to a show, and Maroon 5 dropped a fire emoji in their Instagram comments. “I go to school, and my friends are like, Dylan, why are you on Lizzo’s Instagram story?” added Dylan, a senior who wore a Hello Kitty baseball cap and carried a backpack full of Rubik’s Cubes. “It was just the weirdest thing ever.”

Then it got weirder. In January, they signed with Mercury Records, a label within Universal Music Group. Now they were in New York to play a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom, as part of an East Coast tour that included covers and some original songs.

They didn’t have much time for stage fright, because there was already a lot going on in high school. That week, Dylan had been required to dissect a sheep’s brain for his anatomy class.

The Partridge Family, With iPhones

The Truebloods seem well aware that the image of four kids in a garage stirs up nostalgia. Maybe it’s for the garage rock of the 1960s, when puckish amateurs picked up guitars to see if they could become the next Beatles, or for that movement’s long line of inheritors: the Strokes, the Hives, the White Stripes. Perhaps it’s for the teen boy band, which rears its immaculately styled head at least once per generation, or for the surname-sibling band, a narrow but influential category that includes The Jackson 5, Hanson and Haim.

For Charlie Harding, the host of the music podcast “Switched On Pop,” the appeal of Trueblood is simple: “Doesn’t everybody want to have a garage where they can play music with their best friends?” he said.

The brothers grew up in Culver City, Calif., the sons of Amber Trueblood, a marriage and family therapist, and Jaimie Trueblood, a stills photographer for the movie industry. (Yes, Trueblood is actually the family’s last name.)

Neither parent was musical, but they got their oldest son, Cameron, a Toys “R” Us drum set when he was a toddler that he broke with his enthusiasm. Next came a real drum set from a yard sale that he was discouraged from playing loudly before 10 a.m. “It sounds ridiculous, but even back then, I was like, ‘That’s pretty good for someone in diapers,’” Jaimie, 54, said.

In 2017, Amber heard that the national tour of “School of Rock” was looking for young drummers. Cameron joined the cast in 2018 and worked his way up to play Freddy, a boisterous student who finds himself among the high-hats and snares. His younger brothers accompanied the family on the road; Dylan eventually became part of the cast, too, and Mason took bass lessons from one of the pit musicians.

Covid brought a change of pace. The family holed up in the San Diego area, where they had moved in 2019. The brothers watched the Foo Fighters documentary “Back and Forth” and spent more and more time jamming in the family’s garage, settling into their current configuration of guitar, percussion, vocals and bass.

“For a while, we were a Foo Fighters cover band,” said Ethan, an outgoing youngest child whom his brothers described as “the king of seventh grade.”

The siblings said they pushed one another to try out more challenging material: “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers, for instance. They knew that 1990s and 2000s rock was not exactly top of mind for members of their generation. But it was what they had grown up listening to with their parents, and they had fun playing it together.

“We’ve been playing music with each other for so long that it’s sort of instinctual, that connection,” Cameron said.

Initially, their parents were wary of letting the band post on TikTok. “I mean, it’s obvious with music that social media is where a lot of musicians start to gain exposure, but they were so young,” Amber, 51, said.

Nervous that the app would add unnecessary pressure to their kids’ lives, the parents spent a few months watching the comments sections of other bands that were active on the platform. The replies seemed mostly supportive, Amber said, and at the end of 2024, she and Jaimie let the band start a parent-run account.

The brothers post the occasional skit, such as “showing our bassist things he’s never seen before,” in which Ethan is jokingly introduced to sunlight, the shower and girls. Mixed in with their covers are original songs that Mason writes in his bedroom before bringing them to the garage for brotherly improvisation. (The band has released seven so far, and is planning for more.)

“Honestly a lot of what I write about is feeling stressed — feeling not at your greatest,” Mason said. “Not only is that what comes naturally to me, but I think a lot of kids my age can relate.” One of his earliest songwriting efforts, around 2021, was titled “Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”

“I guess it was just about parents, and being mad, and just being a rebellious tweenager,” he said.

They’ve ‘Got This’

The next evening, a line of young Trueblood fans huddled under umbrellas in a line down Delancey Street in Manhattan. They were mostly tween and teen girls. They had brought friendship bracelets and Hello Kitty T-shirts, a nod to Dylan’s favorite onstage attire. One 10-year-old sipped a Shirley Temple next to her dad.

The brothers were posing for photos in the balcony of the Bowery Ballroom, pretending to impale one another with Cameron’s drumsticks. When they went backstage to do some push-ups and snack on preshow salami, they could hear their fans’ high-pitched shrieks.

Lily McCarthy, 13, who lives in Brooklyn, wore a black Trueblood sweatshirt she had gotten as a Christmas present. She said she liked the band, which she had found on Instagram, because its members were similar in age to her.

Her mother, Erin Finnigan-McCarthy, 47, prefers heavy metal. Even so, Trueblood’s music choices are “solid,” she said. “And they’re cute — that’s obviously a big lure for girls.”

Amber, whom fans call “Momma Trueblood,” was recognized by some concertgoers, too. The parents now help coordinate the business side of the band. But she said she saw their main job as ensuring normal childhoods for their teenagers, despite an unusual level of visibility. “We’re still the parents, obviously, and we keep a very close eye, but they’ve kind of got this,” she said.

When the brothers took the stage, the screaming reached a new frequency. They played “Never Let You Down,” an energetic original song with the lyrics “Last summer at the ice cream shop/He looked at her and the world seemed to stop.”

The tweens in the audience seemed to know every word.

“Kids my age, they listen to Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift — but there’s other ranges of kids that don’t want to listen to that music,” said Sofia Equihua, 11, who had come to the show from San Diego with a friend, Sophia Cardona, and their mothers.

Through Trueblood, the two girls have discovered that there is a lot more music out there than they ever realized, Sofia added. Lately, the two friends have been listening to Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead.