Poached may have emerged from the late shifts and dim corners of Seattle’s Capitol Hill bars, but their music feels anything but incidental. Formed in the summer of 2024 by Lilli Burgy and Mitchell Taylor, the duo first met not in a rehearsal room but behind a bartop, swapping shifts and stories after connecting through the service-industry platform Poached. What began as shared hours navigating the city’s nocturnal hum gradually morphed into a creative alliance, the kind that reveals itself slowly and then all at once. In the stolen moments between last call and lock-up, their writing found an unexpected momentum, a partnership defined by instinct rather than intention.
Drawing on the sweeping emotional heft of Florence + The Machine, the stoic brooding of The National, and the cinematic grit of Wolf Alice, Poached inhabit a sound that is both towering and tender. Their songs play with scale: one moment drenched in atmospheric grandeur, the next stripped bare to reveal something more intimate, more fragile. Tracks like “Getting Older” pulse with a driving rhythmic urgency, while their forthcoming material leans into taut, shadowy textures, creating a sense of tension that never fully resolves. It’s music that mirrors the push and pull of internal landscapes, brooding lows giving way to cathartic, skyward choruses.
That emotional duality anchors their debut EP, ‘Steady Risers’, a project shaped by the quiet turbulence of growing up, pulling away, and starting again. The duo describe the record as an exploration of the “inbetween”: the places where relationships shift, where old patterns fall away, where new versions of the self begin to emerge.
We sat down with this unbecoming duo to learn all about the debut EP, the story behind them and much more, here at Music Crowns!
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You two originally met while bar-tending in Capitol Hill. At what point did your working relationship shift into a creative one?
I would say it began about 2 years into it. We started by just collaborating on playlists to fit the flow of service working in a bar. We both have made music in the past, both privately and publicly. We immediately bonded on our music tastes and influences, and the cowrites went pretty flawlessly from there. It was originally started to create some songs for Lill’s solo endeavors, but quickly the realization came that it needed to be something more concrete between the two of us collaboratively.
How did you come up with the name Poached?
From the service industry jobs marketplace called Poached Jobs. I was running a bar program and Lilli applied through that service. Felt like a very fun approach to moniker the project.
Congrats on the EP! What were some of the most significant life lessons that fed into these songs?
Growing up is the biggest one, and all that comes with it – family struggles, relationships coming in and out, and learning about who you are out on your own.
Is there a track on the EP that feels like the emotional centerpiece for you, and why?
I think Getting Older and Steady Risers would be those for us. It’s both a staple of the ethos behind the EP and a really cute staple of the platonic love it takes to make art together.
How do you hope listeners see themselves in the stories you tell?
However they need to. Definitely not us to dictate, all we can hope for is that it builds folks up when it needs to, and exposes those parts of us that might need rebuilding or healing. It’s funny, because once songs are out in the world they kind of don’t belong to you anymore.
What sonic experiments or risks did you take on this EP that you hadn’t tried before?
Just throwing so much at the wall and seeing how the songs shaped themselves. It’s really important to us to simply hold onto the message and the DNA of the songs, and then leave the rest up to the artist/producer relationship. Things always flow quite beautifully when there aren’t rigid guidelines in place.
How has Seattle’s indie rock scene shaped your evolution as a project so far?
It’s really wide open right now. There’s a lot of cool things happening out here, and a lot of resources for artists for support. Bands really love other bands. I cut my teeth in the Nashville music scene where things are quite a bit more cliquey and business-forward, and the scene out here is really raw and experimental, where both artists and listeners are extremely open for creativity and trying/supporting new things, as long as its done with passion and coming from a genuine place. And obviously the history of the scene out here is really inspiring to call home.
And finally – as you look beyond ‘Steady Risers’, where do you feel the next chapter of Poached is headed?
We’re back in the studio now tracking with the Seattle legend Andy Park (Death Cab for Cutie, Deep Sea Diver, Pedro The Lion, Now Now, Macklemore, Now, Now, Noah Gundersen, etc.), so we’re trying to keep creating and recording songs as they come to us – then hope to be much more active on the live front in 2026. We’re nothing but hopeful and excited!
