NASCENT

Oakland band Maldroid announced yesterday it has signed to progressive San Francisco “music company” Fuzz. While the group did receive major label attention in the aftermath of its YouTube music video victory in November, it opted to sign with a like-minded indie in order to retain complete control over its image and products.

Maldroid has designs on some unusual steps in the future, such as releasing a full-length album as a series of singles and ultimately packaging the record as a DVD, with each song having its own video. Fuzz, for its part, goes by the slogan “Music Uprising” and hopes to “revolutionize the music industry,” so chances are good that many of Maldroid’s new ideas will be seen to fruition. Of course, some of the band’s plans, such as more elaborate music video production, will require increased financial backing that Fuzz may or may not be able to provide — certainly not to the extent that a major could.

Lead singer Ryan Divine reports that Maldroid, especially founding members Divine and Johnny Genius, will play a role in steering the small company, an arrangement that notably deviates from the master/slave relationship they could’ve expected at a major. All in all, Fuzz sounds like a great fit for the creative and ambitious young band. Maldroid are joined at Fuzz by Brooklyn’s CocoRosie, NYC’s Greg Garing, Nashville’s USSA, and fellow Oaklanders the Lovemakers. This partnership has been in the works for a while — since well before the band played SXSW two weeks ago — but the official announcement was made just yesterday. Here’s the full MySpace blog post from Divine.