“When you’re friends with talented people and you want to start a band, it's basically a question that answers itself,” says Justin Schaefers, guitarist and vocalist for Winkler. The Boston-based, surf-rock band released their first ever album, For You, Now on Feb. 17, experimenting with their sound in ways the constraints of mainly live performances have restricted them from doing before.

Winkler is composed of the aforementioned Schaefers, Christian Schmidt on drums, Ava Connaughton on bass, Alex Massey on guitar, and Madison (Maddy) Simpson on vocals. The band initially started with Schaefers and Schmidt, who both were interested in the four-track cassette style of recording and curating a similar sound. The others became friends with the pair first, eventually getting invited to join the band over their shared love of music.

“Most of us have other stuff besides Winkler going on too,” said Schaefers. Massey, for example, is in another Boston-based band, Dino Gala, as well as Simpson, who is in Sweet Petunia.

This album is a long time coming for the group after releasing exclusively singles since their creation. An album has always been part of their plan, with Schmidt and Schaefers having originally written the majority of these tracks in 2018 and 2019. “We knew a lot of these songs had to go on our first album, especially since they were a lot slower than possible live,” Schaefers said. “House shows in Allston, where we usually perform, tend to prefer the faster, more upbeat stuff, so this album gave us an outlet to finally get these out.”

Schaefers commented on Harry Nilsson and Johnathan Richman, who are some of his favorite artists that inspired him sonically in the creation of the album. Their influence is present throughout the album with a more lofi twist. The band takes care to explore different parts of the song’s editing process in ways that had not been possible with their mostly live shows.

“Nothing But Time (if you want it)” leans into a very classic sound, with the voices faded out just slightly and includes more traditional instruments that the band hadn’t played with before. In fact, their release show at The Lilypad in Cambridge had additional instrumentalists such as keyboard, horns, and strings so the song’s full effect could be experienced in person.

“Call it Good Times,” my personal favorite track, also plays with production quality to achieve an out-of-focus sound. The song describes a free spirit who still longs for a certain relationship, with the lyric, “I must be somebody’s problem, you know it, why can’t that someone be you?”

When asking Schaefers the reason for the album title, he explained it is simply because of how long these songs have been on the back burner, and that they are, finally, for us listeners, right now. If you’d like the chance to be that audience, listen to the album on Spotify or follow the band on Instagram.

Winkler’s "For You, Now" is For You, Now!