The 502s stopped by Wooly’s in Des Moines midway through their “Great American Road Trip” tour, which has since expanded to include international stops. When their Iowa fans entered the Wooly's in late August, they were met with a grand stage design full of vintage-inspired roadside signs and flashes of orange and blue.
“It’s the first time we were able to have any kind of real production on stage. And we're like, ‘It would be great with the road trip, it's like the motels and the hotels you stay at.’ So that's kind of where the idea with the big lit-up motel-type sign came from,” bandleader Ed Isola explained.
“And in terms of the colors, the oranges and the blues and stuff like that, we just realized, ‘Hey, we like wearing colorful stuff.’ You'll see it in our clothing tonight, and there's waves on the stage and everything like that [...] We just realized we like beachy. We're from Florida, and we kind of put it into everything we do,” he said.
Isola, a Maitland, FL native, formed the band back in 2016.
When asked who he thought was the best live band out there, Isola pointed to Mumford and Sons, one of his biggest musical inspirations. So it seems fitting that the 502s got their first break when they won a contest to perform alongside Mumford and Sons at the Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival soon after the band formed. Later in 2016, they released their debut EP, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The 502s really arrived to the global music scene in late 2021 though, when a song from their sophomore full-length album Could It Get Better Than This went viral on TikTok. “Just A Little While” racked up over 10 million streams from December 2021 to January 2022, much to the band’s surprise.
“My wife was the first person to see the video usage on TikTok going and she was like, ‘Hey, you guys know this is at 5,000 videos?’ And the next morning it was 30 or 40,000 uses. And we're like, ‘What the heck's going on? This is crazy.’
“At that time, we've been touring, but we had really been playing to, you know, 50 capacity people. It's like not too many people, and that really changed with ‘Just A Little While.’ A lot changed a lot overnight. And I just remember the excitement, really not being able to sleep and then all of us being on FaceTime and like, endless text messages [...]. It was a really cool, really special moment to make this a real thing,” Isola said.
Nearly two years after their viral moment, the 502s are still gaining momentum. Isola said that their self-titled third album reflects their recent growth and confidence as they evolve from their folksy Americana background to a genre all their own. They call this sound “beach folk” — music that encapsulates their laid-back, sunny Florida vibe.
“Over the last five years, we've realized, ‘Oh, this is who we are'... and so we kind of realized that we really are making what we've been calling beach folk, and that's what the artwork reflects. That's what the songs reflect, and also an appreciation for the aftermath in a positive way of ‘Just A Little While.’ ... Doing this as a living, we're on a tour bus, all these things that three years ago we were dreaming about, they’re reality now, even down to the little thing of working out in the hotel gym together... So that's kind of what the album's about, is just appreciating the time that we're in right now,” Isola said.
The band is a product of the Orlando folk scene, a circle Isola described as “supportive and connected.” He recruited the rest of the 502s’ members from the local Florida music community, even starting with his cousins on guitar and bass. While the band is no longer a family affair, the group’s name still derives from the street number of Isola’s childhood home.
Isola said that he dreams of the ensemble playing iconic venues like the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado one day. In the meantime, Isola and the rest of his six-piece act are still hustling around the world, playing high-energy “beach folk” both old and new to their enthusiastic fanbase.
