Chester French

Rock duo Chester French want to get in, but they're still figuring out where they fit in. "Indie rock people don't like us," explains D.A. Wallach, who teamed up with fellow Harvard alum Max Drummey to form Chester French in 2003. With their fusion of '60s pop, hip hop and orchestral music, the pair are closer to being the next Hall & Oates rather than White Stripes.

Named after sculptor Daniel Chester French, the band recorded their demo in their dorm. In 2007, Wallach and Drummey set off a bidding war between hip hop heavyweights Kanye West, Jermaine Dupri and Pharrell Williams. The then college seniors went with Williams’s label, Star Trak/Interscope and by summertime, their single She Loves Everybody was featured in the closing credits of the popular HBO show Entourage. In 2008, a pilgrimage to the SXSW music festival only increased the hype around the bass-driven track about a promiscuous girl.

After dropping their Jacques Jams Vol. 1: Endurance mix-tape earlier this year, Chester French released their highly-anticipated and very eclectic debut, Love the Future. The song The Jimmy Choos sounds like Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo (strangely, also a Harvard alum) channeling The Beatles, while Neal is an Andre 3000-inspired toe-tapper and Come On (On My Own) is a rock number that sounds like the ending theme of an '80s popcorn flick.

But 23-year-old Wallach and 24-year-old Drummey insist they aren't being different for the sake of being different: "We look at our music as not being experimental, but being the result of a variety of experiments – what we distilled from doing outlandish things, what are the best ideas.”