The rising indie artist is turning to t-shirt design, accentuating his music’s unmistakably DIY vibe and low-fashion aesthetic.
On the surface of Justus Proffit’s music, there’s a looseness that almost suggests apathy — a kinship to that ‘90s indie attitude whose goal was aloofness and whose enemy was the appearance of effort. “Oh, I made a song,” it sometimes seems to suggest. “I wonder how that happened.” But dig a little deeper and it’s obvious that Proffit, at 26, is a seeker whose laconic style betrays his hustle: He’s been playing music half his life, culminating in a gorgeous collab with fellow singer-songwriter Jay Som in 2018 (the Nothing’s Changed EP) and last year’s fuzzy, fantastic full-length, L.A.’s Got Me Down. Their common thread: pretty pop songs hiding under sound and melancholy. Like a lot of unrelenting talents before him, though, Proffit found himself frozen by world events in early 2020. He and his band were set to start a three-week tour at South By Southwest just before the pandemic hit; instead of spending the year next to and in front of the bandmates and fans that sustain him, he was in the warehouse/art space/erstwhile DIY club he’s called home for the last four years. “It was a venue for years, called Top Space,” he tells me over the phone, “but we eventually stopped doing shows because it was just getting crazy. It’s hard to run a venue in the same place you live. Sometimes we’d get like 400 people up there. It’s a very warehouse-y kind of space.” But after a brief COVID time in that big space, Proffit got antsy and inspired enough to reignite an old passion that scratched the dual itches of creativity and cashflow. In the past he had made some money and supported the scene by screenprinting flyers and shirts for other artists, so he had the equipment and the knowledge right in front of him to spawn a low-key fashion label he dubbed Magic Club House.
