WATCH: These Lucky Monkeys are eager to ‘Evolve’

From a small garage studio on the side of Knox Mountain, the sound of crunching energetic rock echoes lightly.

Inside, Josh Evans leads the way on the drums, as he and the three other members of Lucky Monkey rhythmically run through a set.

The Kelowna band is preparing for the release of their debut album, “Evolve.”

“We wrote a bunch of songs early in the pandemic, probably in the first six months, then kind of filtered them out,” guitarist Ryan Zeleznik told Kelowna10, speaking about the new album. “Then we started recording last summer, pretty much one year ago.”

The writing process is rather quick for the band, they said, with the quartet spending the bulk of their time on production. The band only finished mixing the songs about six weeks ago.

“I’m pretty proud too, that we were able to actually do a full album finally,” bassist Dylan Losell said. “We normally come out with five song EPs.”

Losell is the member behind the band’s name, and the art for the upcoming album.

“I thought of Lucky Monkey as kind of a comment on the human condition,” he explained. “Just the fact that we’re the only animal that has big brains, we’re basically super advanced monkeys.”

And speaking of advancements, vocalist Cassidy Hritzuk is rather pleased with the quality of their new songs.

“The production is way better, everything is just next level for us, but I think we just wrote better songs,” Hritzuk remarked. “I’m sure it’s a natural thing, you just get better as you do it more often.”

The group has spent several late nights practicing in the studio for their upcoming debut, balancing band time with family and work commitments.

Lucky Monkey will be playing songs from “Evolve” at Mission Taphouse on July 23. The show will be opened by Hot Sax.