After over a year of recruitment, songwriting and promotion, a UVM band is ready to take the next step.

Jeddy will release its first studio album, “I’ll Do It Anyway,” April 8.

Jeddy has been slowly building steam since junior Drew Steinberg founded the band in November 2015.

The band started out playing basement shows, then booked larger and larger gigs until they landed a residency at Nectar’s lounge in the fall of 2016.

“The question after that was, ‘What’s the next big thing?’” Steinberg said, sitting on the couches of the Wings Davis Wilks complex practice room, among the other members of Jeddy: sophomores Lindsay Ross, Tanner Schanzlin, Elias Levinson and first-year Ben Schnier.

“I had a dream of meeting this dragon from Gazzelroth, and he said, ‘you have to make an album,’” joked Levinson, one of Jeddy’s guitarists.

The room breaks into casual laughter. The band had gathered to rehearse, squeezing in an interview beforehand. Even with the busy day, Jeddy is all jokes, awkward puns and good-natured jabs here and there.

The levity in the room hinted at Jeddy’s energy in the recording studio.

“The actual process of recording and the entire weekend, even if you take out the music, was one of the weirdest, funniest and most bats— crazy weekends ever,” Steinberg said.

Only two members of Jeddy, Schanzlin and Schnier, had ever been in a recording studio before. Most of the band didn’t quite know what to expect, and what they found was an experience quite different from playing together live.

The move from live to recording means comprising the looseness of live performance for the sake of getting to the last track, Levinson said.

The pressure is on every member to play their part just right, because one mistake could mean scrapping the track and starting over.

“I was definitely nervous,” said Ross, Jeddy’s lead singer. “All your friends are going to listen to it; people you don’t know are going to listen to it. Even though we’ve performed it so many times, we just had to come down to one version of it. I was nervous that the one version wasn’t going to be something I was satisfied with.”

Any anxiety about the project, however, was soothed with the help of the staff of
Gnome Haus, the studio where Jeddy recorded its album. The sound engineers who worked with Jeddy brought years of expertise helping musicians lay down their tracks.

According to Steinberg, working with these professionals was far from intimidating. On the contrary, Ross said, after a weekend of Vietnamese food and recording, the sound engineers knew Jeddy’s music and had even picked their favorite songs.

By the end of the weekend, Jeddy had recorded the seven songs that will appear on their album, “I’ll Do It Anyway.”

“If we had all the money in the world, we would have recorded all of our songs,” Ross said.

Recording an album would be the high point of the year for a student band, and according to Steinberg Jeddy is excited to take a moment to celebrate its success. The band is throwing an album release party for “I’ll Do It Anyway” from 8:30 to 11 p.m. April 8 at the Skinny Pancake on the waterfront.

The release party is just the cherry on top for Jeddy’s year of accomplishments. Yet, sitting with the band before its rehearsal, one gets the feeling that it won’t be long before Jeddy sets its eye on the next “next big thing.”