One year ago, Orono Noguchi was in the home stretch of her senior year at John Bapst High School in Bangor.
On Monday night, she and her band, London-based Superorganism, launched their first U.S. tour, with a sold-out show in Los Angeles. There’s another sold-out show Tuesday in San Francisco. Later this summer, the band will play some of the biggest music festivals in the world, like Primavera Sound in Spain and the Melt Festival in Germany.
For Noguchi, 18, life has taken a head-spinning turn over the past year — she’s gone from unknown high school student in Maine to lead singer for one of the hottest up-and-coming indie rock bands in the world.
“At this time last year I would never have thought I’d have just gotten done playing South by Southwest,” Noguchi said, referring to the Austin, Texas-based music festival. “I’ve already been all over the world in the past few months. It’s intense. It’s bizarre. It’s amazing.”
Superorganism released its debut self-titled album on March 2, which debuted last week at 47 on the Billboard charts. Two singles, “Everybody Wants To Be Famous” and “Something For Your M.I.N.D,” have each gotten millions of plays on Spotify, buoyed by the eight-piece band’s laconic, sample-heavy pop sound, and Noguchi’s deadpan, effortlessly cool vocals, which echo both the early days of Beck and the contemporary psych-rock of MGMT.
Before joining Superorganism, Noguchi was a musically inclined kid living in her home country of Japan, with two parents who had fond memories of their time studying at the University of Maine in Orono, where they met. So fond, in fact, that they named their daughter after the town where their relationship began.
When she turned 14, Noguchi decided that she wanted to go to high school in the U.S. She and her parents landed on John Bapst — after all, they already had connections to the Bangor area.
“They knew it here, they loved it here. They knew it was a great place for students, because it’s quiet and surrounded by nature,” Noguchi said. “What’s cool about Bapst is that it’s not really a private school, but it’s not really a public school, either. There’s a ton of international students, and yet it’s like a public high school. It’s the best of both worlds, really.”
As a Bapst student, she immersed herself in the arts, taking part in the University of Maine Museum of Art’s Young Curators program, and recording covers of songs from bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Weezer and Pavement, which she posted on Soundcloud.
In 2015, Noguchi stumbled across music online made by the New Zealand-based band, the Eversons. Four of its members (known only as Harry, Emily, Tucan and Robert) would later become her bandmates in Superorganism. When the Eversons toured Japan while she was home for the summer, Noguchi went to the show and the five became friends, keeping in touch over Facebook for the next two years and sharing and collaborating on music.
In January 2017, they decided that when Noguchi graduated from Bapst, she’d move to London to join them and three other new musicians in their brand new U.K.-based project — Superorganism. In June 2017, she moved into a large, commune-style home in London with her new bandmates. By September of last year, the band was signed to Domino Records, home to bands like the Arctic Monkeys, Animal Collective and Franz Ferdinand.
Noguchi says she does eventually want to go to college, but for now she’s growing more accustomed to the role of front person for an eight-piece rock band. As the lone 18-year-old in a band full of 20- and 30-somethings, she’s growing up, quickly.
“I think it had always secretly been my plan to do music, but I also thought that, you know, I’d go to college and start a band and maybe get a record deal or something by the time I was 30,” Noguchi said. “But it’s all happening now. It’s really intense.”
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