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“We came together because we all love music,” says vocalist Yusef Idris of Parma, Ohio’s Crookshanks. “It’s literally all we know and all we have, aside from shitty part-time jobs. It’s what we love and want to do forever.” After years of jamming in basements and garages under different band names with a slew of different sounds, styles, members and equipment, Crookshanks came together last year. Idris says the band’s main goal is to avoid being “your typical, cookie-cutter, local pop-punk-hardcore band. A lot of the stuff you hear these days is all the same songs, with predictable drum beats and bland power-chord progressions. We want to write unrecognizable melodies with full complementing rhythms and bass lines.”