The Hip Snacks may be a relatively new band, but within two short years the band finds themselves on a nationwide tour, their second full-length album coming in the near future and most importantly — they’ve found the magic most bands only dream about. This rising band has crafted a sound of joyous soul, classic rock and funk that gets its audience moving and soon they’ll be unleashing this sound on the East Coast.
We caught with Ben Suarez, bassist of The Hip Snacks, to discuss the story behind the band’s name, how quickly the band has found its groove, the Colorado music scene, performing in a band with your partner [in this case Ben’s wife Kara Durante is the lead singer] and five things they’re excited for in 2025. They play Asbury Jams at the Wonder Bar on Thursday August 10 and Maplewoodstock in Maplewood, NJ on Sunday July 13.
Let’s get started with the easiest question — tell me the story behind the name of the band because it’s certainly catchy.
I’m glad to hear it’s got that appeal. We came up with The Hip Snacks [because] we just always wanted to have something that’s alluding to getting people dancing, getting people moving. We’ve been music fans our whole lives. We’ve been going to festivals our whole lives. We just wanted something that kinda conjured up the love of soul music and groove, and just get people moving — a snack for your hips kind of thing.
Speaking of snacks, as my brain always goes to food first, I saw on your social media that you guys are known for great barbecue. What’s your definition of good barbecue and what do you all literally bring to the table?
We are lifelong fans of barbecue. My dad’s the chef in the family and taught us all how to cook a little bit. He helped me get a Traeger Pro 34 about four years ago, when I first got into [barbecue] three years ago. We threw one party back in Maryland before moving to Denver, where we started the band. And that’s actually how we got the bang off the ground. Before we were booking venues, or before we had any songs, we were just throwing parties in our backyard. I can fit about 50 pounds on [the Traeger], and so we would just tell everybody that we’ve met in the scene like, ‘Hey, we’re having a party, free food, free music, free booze just come through.’
And I got really into really long smokes. It’s a little different at an elevation of 5,000 feet. You have to pull things about 5 to 10 degrees early [because if you don’t] when you’re resting it in the cooler for a few hours after it’ll come up too high in temperature. So I was learning my first barbecue out there. We had a small party. After that we started throwing bigger and bigger parties, and we just kept that up because it’s just a great way to get people to come out to a show … even when we started throwing more events at venues and started growing. On May 10th we threw another barbecue, and I did four pork butts, probably 25 pounds of chicken on the grill separate from the Traeger. We are always thinking about food as well.
I was gonna say, Colorado is not exactly known for its barbecue, but you’re from Maryland. So obviously, there’s going to be burnt ends gonna be happening as well.
[Barbecue is] not only to get people out to the shows, I still do it every chance I get. Whenever we have a full, really important rehearsal, we are usually gonna do something like that. Pork belly burnt ends or brisket burnt ends are a staple, because those are super easy to [make]. You finish the process, put them back in at whatever low temperature, and then we go to the full rehearsal, and you have hot, fresh barbecue ready every time.
The Hip Snack are in Asbury on Thursday for Asbury Jams, the first time in town for the band … but it’s not your personal first time performing in Asbury Park.
We played The Saint with a project I was in [Bencoolen] for a festival [called] Light of Day. We also played Langosta Lounge [now Palmetto] with Waiting on Mongo once. We did Jams on the Sands [the precursor to Asbury Jams] before, opening for Mihali of Twiddle back in 2017 or 2018.
Tell us a little bit about the difference between the East Coast music scene and what’s happening in the Denver scene.
I enjoyed the East Coast. I probably did five or six years of touring on the East Coast before we [Ben and Kara] moved [to Colorado] around July of 2022. We were just looking for a new adventure; so we moved out there. It just feels like we’ve been spoiled ever since we got here. Every aspect of it has been really receptive and positive. All the venues are just really supportive. You can get onto the circuit pretty well. There’s built-in crowds at a lot of these places. You get music lovers that are still able to commit a lot of time to it. And there’s an ease with which to get around as you can go to two or three shows a night pretty comfortably, which is different from here.
It’s been amazingly rewarding. If you build your community there and you go to other people’s shows they’re really supportive and come to yours. I definitely think that’s how it’s the hidden gem thing where we knew we were drawn to it, and then we got really lucky. We got introduced to our drummer, Dylan [French], and our guitarist, Felipe [Cantuaria] almost the 1st day we moved there through a mutual friend. There’s just these big music groups of people that all come together because they like bands and they like to see a lot of improv. So you have to definitely push the envelope and be ready to play. But it’s a great scene out there.
Talk about the dynamic of being in a band with your wife, Kara. How does it work being in a life and musical partnership?
Well, we have been living in the same house where we both work remote jobs for several years now. So we’ve been pretty used to being on top of each other, and in each other’s space all day. We have a pretty good system with the band where she’s always had this killer voice, and has always been really good at interpreting what I write and or what we all write, I should clarify. We all contribute to basically every song. I put a lot of the bones together for the first album, and then everyone helped a ton. Our system works where I just hand her lyrics, and she interprets them and fits it to the groove. And she works with our keyboardist/lead backup singer Adam [Schini]. Adam is just such a strong musical mind. He can come up with all the harmonies right on the spot.
We’ve only been married about eight months, so I probably can answer that better a little bit later. But it’s been going really great so far. And if I get to take my family with us … it’s just what I wanted to prioritize this time around. So we get to bring our Australian shepherd Zora around with us a lot and just kinda keep the focus more on the music, the show, and then get to the next one. It’s really nice that if I had to coach any part of it, maybe that’d be a challenge. But, she already blows me out of the water with all the singing. I just write some lyrics, write some bass lines and hand it off to her.
This is a pretty intensive run of shows you guys are on. You’re the grizzled young veteran of the band with touring and she’s new to the band scene. What’s been her impression of the touring life?
Her dad is a great singer, and has been singing in bar bands and he played in college. He was a drummer, and sang and led some bands so she always had that pedigree. She was in high school choir and stuff like that too.We got her to sing for her very first show, which was actually on a tiny island in Panama, because my friends own a hostel down there.
She came out and sang. We did two originals, and 15 covers like “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder and “Whipping Post” by The Allman Brothers which is one of my favorite songs of all time, if not my favorite song of all time. Everyone had been kind of begging her to sing at my graduation parties and stuff, for, like my 30th birthday. The first time she opened her mouth, everyone was saying, ‘Yeah, build around that.’ So we started building around that. This is our second project. We had one band back home that was original, called Miss Monster back in ’21 and ’22. That was hindered by the pandemic. We could practice, but we couldn’t get gigs, really. We played one gig and then moved out here. Music does run in her family. Her cousin’s a singer down in Nashville named Maggie Rose and it’s a strong musical family. She just rises to any occasion, any challenge, and almost does better the more pressure there is. It’s a really positive thing for us. She’s developed her skill set performing.
You have a new song which I really really like called “Shouldn’t Have To.” I see that Allman influence you were talking about in this song. Can you talk about this song and if this is a taste of things to come?
We had a funny experience where we booked two studios a week apart when we did the first album. We finished recording the first 8-10 songs on the first album and we were super stoked on them. Then we had to go into the studio a week later, and we didn’t have the material for it. So Felipe, one of our guitarists, and I would hunker down at the house and we wrote, “Shouldn’t Have To” in the space of about three days. We paired that up with two more songs on what we’re calling a more live style EP. We recorded the first album at Colorado Sound Studios which is just a legendary place. They have some of the best technology there. It’s a real studio working and we worked with this awesome producer, Steve Avidis, who we’re working on our next album with.
But in between that we booked at Color Red studios, which is Eddie Roberts from New Mastersounds, studio. We went in there, and we didn’t really have a plan and we had to write stuff pretty quick and we came up with “Shouldn’t Have To.” We’ve really loved performing that one everywhere. Everyone seems to resonate really well with it. We stretch out that middle jam that’s in the recording quite a bit, and then the ending solo, Felipe will rip and he’ll go nuts. It was just kind of a pressure situation where we had to figure out something, and it just came out, and we were super stoked on it, and that was probably the first time [a song] was not my genesis of an idea. It was Felipe’s riff that we built off, and then I took a conversation Kara and I had, and turned it into a song.
Kara posted on social media that she was performing seven new songs on the tour. Are you road testing the new album?
Exactly. We have 9 new songs on the second full length album basically done. We’re just finishing up some mixing and then sending it to mastering. We’ll have to release them a little slower than we would like just to stay current. We’re performing all these like you said — road testing them. This album is the second album but it’s been really fun. The genesis of songs come from Adam on keyboards, Ricky on guitar, and Felipe on guitar. The four of us have come in with kernels of songs and then all six members have contributed to everything. This album seems to be really showing the combination of everyone’s strengths. Everyone got their hands on the songs early. The collaboration process has been really awesome. If someone brings something to me; I already know what that whole song is about. Some of the lyrics to a song come out in four or five minutes, Then you get a whole song, and you’re just blown away. They’re all performing well.
Do you all rearrange songs for the live tour, or are song deviations more improvisational?
I’d say it’s a combination where we try to plan out the sets. We all talk about them on the drive. There’s a tiny bit of adapting on the fly. We just started using talkback mics on stage. We can adapt more if we need to use our monitors in our ears which has been a fun change, because it used to be just sticking to the plan.
We’ve only been a band for two years and everything still feels really fresh. We try to push the tempo on creation so that there’s almost always a couple new songs each month, even if it’s covers. We are definitely having the most fun every single show. We joke about how little time our feet are on the stage as we’re just jumping up and down so much. Kara brings such a crazy performer energy.
It’s still a new band — do your bandmates have the touring history you have and how are they holding up on the road?
It’s been really fun to get to [get back on the road] it again. I gotta do it in 2022 with my buddy’s band I was supporting. We’re going out with Badfish, and I got a taste of theater touring, and I was like, “Oh my God, I really want to do this again one day.” When we formed The Hip Snacks, Adam, our keyboardist, had never been on a tour.Late one night after our first gig, he’s like, “I really want to tour one day.” I was like perfect … I have a mission. So we set it up as quickly as we could. She’s handling it beautifully, I mean, all, all of us still have our daytime jobs. I was just on the call right now, setting up our hotspot internet for the van making sure we have enough connection for everyone to work while we’re touring.
It’s just been really rewarding to see that our songs are getting to places before we get there. We’ve been really lucky to open for some really cool people in the last year, like Stop Light Observations and Andy Frasco.
What are five things that you were stoked for for this band for the rest of 2025?
It’s been so much fun every time we play with someone like Waiting on Mongo, where their horn section sometimes wants to sit in with us every time we do a show which hopefully we’ll pull off once this week. Anytime that happens, that’s very exciting. Getting some of these new singles out. Releasing the rest of the EP is really important to us. We’re playing Levitt Pavilion in August with Big Something, who is a really close friends of ours. And they gave us the call, and we are pumped because that place is because it’s probably the biggest place any of us have played.
Then there’s growing this project and getting around to people. We’re really lucky we all ski and snowboard so the mountain town shows are really fun for the band, because we get an off day and get out there. So it’s just combining fun and all the life stuff happening in the band that will come out soon. Everyone’s just moving forward with their lives. And it’s really cool in positive ways.
