Exploring BEV: Indie Rock’s Emotional Journey

November 1, 2026

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with BEV

BEV is a Minneapolis-based indie rock and power-pop project led by singer-songwriter and guitarist Niki Beverly, whose music moves between moody introspection, melodic guitar pop, and the restless energy of ’90s alternative rock. Built around swirling guitars, engaging rhythms, intricate harmonies, and emotionally direct lyrics, BEV creates songs that can sound immediately familiar before suddenly veering somewhere unexpected.

Beverly has been writing, recording, and performing in the Minneapolis music scene since 2010. Earlier in her career, she performed under the name Niki Becker before taking the surname Beverly in honor of her late mother and eventually shortening the musical identity to BEV. That evolution coincided with a period of major personal change and became part of a broader artistic reset, giving Beverly a new framework for songs centered on identity, relationships, loss, and the complicated process of figuring out who you are when life changes underneath you.

BEV’s music is rooted in a love of songs themselves. Melody matters. Lyrics matter. So does atmosphere. Beverly has described an attraction to music that appears simple on the surface but then slips slightly off course, and that instinct runs through the project’s catalog. Power-pop hooks can give way to darker indie-rock textures, dreamy passages can suddenly acquire sharp edges, and classic-rock influences occasionally surface without turning the music into nostalgia.

The album Static Elastic, released in September 2018, helped establish BEV’s melodic indie-rock identity, but 2021’s Crusher marked a particularly important creative chapter. Written largely in the aftermath of Beverly’s 2018 divorce, Crusher explored heartbreak, rediscovery, new relationships, and the unsettling realization that a person can lose part of themselves without noticing it happening.

Produced, engineered, and mixed by Holly Hansen at Salon Sonics in St. Paul and mastered by Huntley Miller, Crusher expanded BEV’s sonic range across eleven songs. The record moves from quiet, dreamlike passages into power pop, indie rock, flashes of ’70s-influenced glam and classic rock, and even touches of jazz. The sessions featured drummer JT Bates, drummer Dan Elston-Jones, bassist Megan Mahoney, Hansen on lead guitar, and Addie Strei on flute and saxophone.

What ties those different colors together is Beverly’s songwriting. Her lyrics often look directly at love without romanticizing it, finding equal inspiration in attraction, heartbreak, excitement, resentment, uncertainty, and the strange ways relationships can reshape a person. Rather than writing tidy emotional conclusions, BEV tends to live in the contradictions.

That approach continues with Expectations, BEV’s forthcoming album scheduled for release November 6, 2026. The record features Beverly on vocals and guitar, “Doc” on lead guitars and piano, Bart Boutwell on bass, and Dan Elston-Jones on drums and percussion. Produced by BEV and Jacques Wait, the album was recorded at The Terrarium in Minneapolis, with Wait engineering and mixing and Dave Gardner mastering the project at DSG Mastering in Los Angeles.

The title Expectations reflects a recurring idea running through the project: the distance between what people imagine life, love, and relationships will become and what actually happens when they arrive there. Even the album artwork centers on people looking toward places and situations with expectation, reinforcing the sense that anticipation itself can be both hopeful and dangerous.

BEV has remained an active part of the Minneapolis live music community, appearing at venues including Palmer’s Bar, Zhora Darling, Turf Club, and Cloudland Theater, as well as regional events such as Mid West Music Fest. The project’s live sound carries the same dynamic contrast as the recordings, moving between melodic restraint and louder guitar-driven release.

With Expectations, BEV continues to refine a sound that sits comfortably between power pop, indie rock, and alternative guitar music without becoming predictable. There are traces of the ’90s, flashes of classic rock, and plenty of pop instinct, but the project ultimately belongs to Beverly’s own songwriting world.

BEV makes music about what happens when expectations collide with reality: when love changes shape, when identities shift, when familiar things disappear, and when something new begins growing in the space they leave behind. The songs may twist and turn along the way, but that emotional honesty remains the constant.