REVIEW: Weston Estate Takes Their Sound Further With ‘Open Season’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY ALICIA ZAMORA ☆
WESTON ESTATE ENTERS A NEW ERA WITH OPEN SEASON—Weston Estate is getting louder. The North Carolina-bred, NYC-based band is stepping into their debut album with Open Season, a record that trades some of the softer edges of their earlier work for guitars, live instrumentation and a much more immediate energy. After years of building an audience through genre-blurring releases, the band is letting themselves lean into a sound they have been circling for a while.
There’s a looseness to Open Season that makes it feel different from Weston Estate’s previous releases. The vocals still carry the layered quality that has become part of the band’s identity, but the arrangements are bigger and rougher around the edges. The influence of The Strokes, Peter Cat Recording Co. and Red Hot Chili Peppers is there, but the album doesn’t feel like an exercise in recreating those sounds. It feels like Weston Estate figuring out what they can do with them.
That shift comes at an important point for the band. Since forming in 2017, Weston Estate has gone from a young group making music in North Carolina to a NYC-based act with 282.5 million streams worldwide. “Pears,” from the band's 2022 debut EP Maggie Valley, became a breakout hit, surpassing 40 million streams, reaching the Top 15 of Spotify’s U.S. Viral Chart and appearing in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever. Their second EP, SUPERBLOOM, followed in June 2025.
Now comes their debut album.
Open Season grew out of the band's desire to make a live rock record, an idea that took shape over several months of recording and trips to places including Asheville, Shenandoah and Blakeslee. That process seems to have given the album some of its character. Rather than sounding overly constructed, the songs have a sense of motion and a little more room to breathe.
For Weston Estate, the album isn't about leaving their earlier sound behind. It’s about seeing how far they can stretch.
