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In Grammy Race, the Band Highly Suspect Marvels at Its Surprising Double Shot

From left, Johnny Stevens, Rich Meyer and Ryan Meyer of Highly Suspect, a rock band that has been nominated for two Grammy Awards.Credit...David Burlacu

For a little-known band, one Grammy nomination might be explained away as a fluke. Scoring two simultaneous nominations is harder to comprehend, especially in mainstream categories like rock, which tend to favor household names. (Some recent winners: Beck, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Led Zeppelin.)

This year’s rock nominees include current genre leaders like Florence and the Machine, Alabama Shakes and Muse, alongside the rising pop-crossover acts James Bay and Elle King. And then there’s Highly Suspect.

“I thought it was a joke,” said Johnny Stevens, the band’s lead singer, after his trio surfaced this year in the Grammy categories for best rock album (“Mister Asylum,” Highly Suspect’s debut) and best rock song (“Lydia”). The awards will be presented on Monday in Los Angeles, with the ceremony airing live on CBS.

“At first, I definitely felt uncomfortable with it, almost embarrassed,” Mr. Stevens continued, “because for the average person, they don’t realize that we’ve been playing together for eight years. They’re going to think, who’s this band coming out of nowhere?”

A straightforward guitar-driven group somewhere between the Black Keys, Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age, Highly Suspect began as a bar cover band playing songs by Sublime, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. In 2011 the group relocated from Cape Cod, Mass., to Brooklyn — a scene where Highly Suspect, which also includes the twin brothers Rich and Ryan Meyer on bass and drums, didn’t quite fit in. “There was nobody bringing that harder sound,” Mr. Stevens said.

Still, through workman gigging and even subway busking, the telegenic band developed industry relationships and were signed by Lyor Cohen, the former president of Def Jam and chief executive of Warner Music Group, to his independent label 300 Entertainment, a start-up style company known for its use of Internet analytics. (Even at 300, Highly Suspect sticks out on a roster that includes experimental rappers like Young Thug and Fetty Wap.)

Pete Giberga, a 300 executive who courted the band, said of the signing, “We looked at it with a great deal of humility — we were putting out a rock band in 2015, and that can be a long road.”

But Highly Suspect raised its profile with appearances at festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, while “Lydia,” with its crunchy, distorted chords, picked up plays on rock radio. “Our biggest challenge with this band was to keep them as far as we could to the left, so they wouldn’t fall into that knuckle-dragger, heavy-metal sort of vibe,” said Bill Burrs, a 300 employee with a focus on radio.

“Mister Asylum,” which was released last summer, has sold about 34,000 copies to date, the label said; “Lydia” has more than 110,000 paid downloads and 3 million YouTube views and has been streamed nearly 10 million times on Spotify. The band counts around 39,000 fans on Facebook.

Highly Suspect’s competitors for the Grammys, however, dwarf those numbers many times over. For example, Mr. Bay’s “Hold Back the River” and Ms. King’s “Ex’s & Oh’s,” both nominated for best rock song, have a combined 113 million views on YouTube and more than 250 million Spotify streams.

While industry insiders say that labels and publicists often hire consultants to strategize on reaching the most Grammy voters, executives at 300 denied making any special push for Highly Suspect. “We’re a small, independent company with no resources, so to do self-aggrandizing efforts like that — ” said Mr. Cohen, trailing off. He also invoked an unprintable line from Public Enemy’s Chuck D diminishing the importance of the awards.

Todd Moscowitz, another 300 executive, said, “Unequivocally, nobody was hired by this company or anyone else as far as I know to lobby” for a Highly Suspect Grammy nomination. He added, “I wish I knew how that works — I would do it for every one of my artists.”

Bill Freimuth, a senior vice president at the Recording Academy, which oversees the Grammys, said that his organization had done “an awful lot of outreach in the rock community” over the last year, leading to nominees that are younger and more “independent-minded.” (“Mister Asylum” was distributed by Warner Music Group, which is also represented in the rock album category by Death Cab for Cutie’s “Kintsugi,” Muse’s “Drones” and Slipknot’s “The Gray Chapter.”)

The Grammys “want to support new artists, and they want to bring rock back in a serious way,” said Mr. Moscowitz, who, like Mr. Cohen, is a veteran of the major label system. “I do think they’re making a concerted effort.”

But Paul Grein, a music journalist and Grammy forecaster for more than three decades, said that while awards politicking in the music industry may occur far less than in Hollywood, business relationships do matter. For Highly Suspect, he said, “the only explanation is they aggressively whipped every vote that might possibly be coming their way into action.”

And although the Recording Academy warns voters not to be influenced by personal friendships, sales data or regional preferences, “if your friend is nominated, it’s hard to put that aside,” Mr. Grein said. As for Highly Suspect’s chance of winning, he added: “For them to be nominated was the achievement. They would be greedy to be disappointed.”

The band’s label seems to agree. “I feel like they’ve already won by getting nominated,” Mr. Giberga said.

That doesn’t mean the awards were ever too far from Mr. Stevens’s mind, albeit as a long shot. While recording “Mister Asylum,” the lead singer recalled, he would joke to his band mates: “All right, guys — this one’s going to the Grammys.”

A correction was made on 
Feb. 15, 2016

An earlier version of this article misidentified the distributor of “Mister Asylum.” It is Warner Music Group, not Universal Music.

How we handle corrections

Alec M. Priester contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Twin Grammy Nods Stun Trio. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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