Montlake Avenue

Some groups are built in studios. Montlake Avenue was built on a pickleball court.

In the spring of 2021, three Seattle strangers — Marc, Kai, and Cole — ended up in the same recreational league at Green Lake, matched together by accident and kept together by something harder to explain. None of them told the others they could sing. The music came out anyway — in a parking lot, walking back from a late match, when Kai started humming Brian McKnight and the other two fell in without thinking. The harmony was immediate and undeniable.

The name comes from Montlake — the Seattle neighborhood and the Cut, the narrow channel that ties Lake Washington to Lake Union. It fit a group whose music is about the things that connect two people and hold them there. They grew up on the same records as their audience — 112, Boyz II Men, Case, Jagged Edge — but they write for the people those records helped raise, now 40-something and living inside a kind of love that first-heartbreak R&B doesn't quite reach.

Montlake Avenue's music is about what comes after the fall. The decade-long choice. The argument you survived. The quiet Tuesday morning that turns out to be the moment you realize you have everything.