Local band When She Dreams nears new album release, set to perform at People’s Town Hall event
Before becoming one of the most consistent live bands in the Spokane scene, When She Dreams was a middle school talent show trio. A decade later, they are preparing their third album.
While in sixth-grade band class, Jaxon Leyde, lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and Sam Hurlbert, co-founding guitarist, decided they wanted to perform in an upcoming school talent show on a whim. They acquired another classmate to play drums and performed a “cruddy” Twenty One Pilots cover that will probably go down in the books as Leyde’s most questionable musical display.
“We just wanted to keep making music after that, even though the performance was terrible,” Leyde said.
The young band was known as the Golden Hour for a short time before Leyde moved to Phoenix. While attending middle school in Arizona, he met an interesting classmate that wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and often spoke of seemingly random yet compelling concepts.
“Really randomly, I was talking to somebody and I was like, ‘She says the craziest things, I wonder what she thinks about when she dreams,’ ” Leyde said. “That’s basically it.”
After about a year in Phoenix, Leyde moved back north to Post Falls. He joined a different band that fell through, which left him with multiple songs and nothing to do with them. This resulted in When She Dreams’ first record, “Your Gravity All Mighty,” in 2022.
Around this time, Leyde met Elijah Kidd, who was already well versed in the area and soon became the band’s bassist, co-vocalist and manager.
Three years after their first album, the band released their second, “This Town Hates Pedestrians,” in 2025. The self-described electronic rock group took a much different approach to the recording process, in which they focused on recreating a more rock-influenced live sound than the celestial, synth-rooted sound of the first record.
“The first album was just a lot of experimentation and testing the waters with what we already had,” Leyde said. “You’ll hear on the first album a lot more ethereal tracks with less of a consistent structure and the second you’ll get a lot more scene-inspired rock … We wanted to up the professionalism for the second album.”
The first album derived from the band wanting to create a somewhat loose, “goofy” concept album in which a sentient planet uses mind control to force a human to travel to it and be consumed. When She Dreams took a more literal route with “This Town Hates Pedestrians,” a title that stems from Leyde attempting to walk to work in Post Falls but consistently struggling to find a direct route with sidewalks. Overall, the pens of Leyde and Kidd often tackle topics with retrospect and a sense of nostalgia through the album.
Less than a year since the release of their second record, a third is roughly 75% complete and expected to be released as soon as August. The project features aspects of both records as the band continues to evolve, but will specifically bring back the more outright electronic synth sound of “Your Gravity All Mighty.”
“I think this next album is going to be like the great culmination of all of our skills, and really help define us and define our sound,” Leyde said. “I think that’ll be fun.”
Although the band has become a staple of venues such as the Big Dipper in recent months, When She Dreams will take to the Spokane Central Library to perform at the People’s Town Hall event on Sunday.
Candidates running for Congressional District 5 and Legislative Districts 3, 4, and 6 are invited to participate in the event that aims to create a space for community members to hear directly from candidates and engage with questions.
“We’re not straight edge, we’re not looking for a label, we’re not really a hard core band, we don’t try to blend with a genre, we just try to create and make what makes us happy,” Leyde said before Kidd added, “We don’t have any rules.”