WMUC Watchlist: Good Deli

Andrew Dell Isola steps out onto the stage wearing a sheer button up, flowy pants and a bolo tie. Better known to friends, fans, and bandmates as just Deli, his sound matches his appearance perfectly as sleepy, reverbed notes come out of his bass as he plays with his Brooklyn surf rock band, Deep Sea Peach Tree. He stands out during his performance, fully immersing himself in the music and dancing along as he plays.

Deep Sea Peach Tree was Deli’s first legit endeavor into the music scene, with the band developing over 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and their hit track, “Strawberry Milk,” nearing 3 million streams. His start as a musician came much earlier though, as a child.

“[I was] going through some traumatic life events— moving around, and I lost my mom as a kid. That was kind of the big push to find something to do,” he said.

So, he started playing piano. Then, he picked up guitar because he wanted to be a rockstar, naturally. At age 10, he started recording music on his dad’s old Mac using GarageBand. Throughout high school he played little shows with his friends until he ended up where he is today as the sleepy music sweetheart of Brooklyn.

Outside of his work in Deep Sea, Deli began working on a side project under the name Good Deli, which released its first album, “Rob Rockley and the Vegetables Present: I Found Love In A Lunchbox,” in 2022. The album is a whimsical anthology of short songs complete with all the twangs and bangs typically associated with surf rock and peppered with flecks of garage and indietronica influence.

The sounds of Good Deli are self-described as “sponge rock,” a heavily-saturated rock subgenre inspired by Hawaiian jazz, similar to the music featured in Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob Squarepants.” Deli formed this sonic aesthetic with “I Found Love In A Lunchbox” and is continuing to refine it with a new album to be released this year: DELIVISION.

“It’s a very personal album, but in a way that’s relatable to the masses,” he said. “It’s sort of a journey from beginning to end.”

Atop vintage and upbeat reverb licks sit lyrics about Deli’s human experience. He released two singles complementary of each other earlier this year. The first, “Before My Day,” hit streaming services on Feb. 10, followed by “Hand Me Your Bags,” which came out on March 18. The pair provides listeners with a taste of what’s to come with DELIVISION, which is set to release in the next few months.

The tracks have a more analog sound than the project’s last album, drawing upon influences like Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads, found in the whimsical slice-of-life lyricism, and Django Reinhardt and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, which undoubtedly inspired the singles’ bold instrumentation.

According to Deli, the best is yet to come. Another pair of A/B side singles, “Erotomania” and “Kwyjibo,” are set to come out in May and June, respectively, before the glory that is DELIVISION is dropped later this summer.