Artist Profile: That Graduate

That Graduate, the artistic moniker of indie-pop instrumentalist and songwriter Charlie Peacock, found its roots (as the name might indicate) in the strange vocational abyss that followed the artist’s graduation from college and return to his hometown. But since then, through his days performing with Portland outfit Hard Yes and his own trio of solo releases, he’s dialed into a unique, reverberating, guitar-driven pop sound— one that, in its instant recognizability, has given him a chance to truly carve out an identity as an artist.

For Peacock, much of his life’s ties to music, at least in the early days, are linked to his older brother. While Peacock played the drums throughout his childhood, his brother was always the one with the obsession over music, continuously buying new instruments and gear and establishing his identity, in a sense, as the “musical one” of the family. As a child and an adolescent, music never fully appealed to Peacock, at least in the sense of direct participation.

His life wasn’t completely devoid of music, of course. As he went through high school and entered college, he began developing a taste for the fuzzed-out ramblings of acts like Mac DeMarco and King Krule, which ultimately led him into deeper encounters with bands like Ulrika Spacek, Snowmine, and Kins.

Yet the notion of making music didn’t truly pop into Peacock’s head until after he graduated college, when he moved back home and was in search of a way to fill his time. His brother bought him a Scarlett audio interface, and partially out of sheer boredom, Peacock picked up one of his brother’s guitars and started playing.

“I just always thought I was somebody that had this like musical inclination, but only really ever drummed and never had the know-how to start recording. And Jack, my older brother, bought me a little Scarlett DI setup to start recording. And I taught myself guitar during the heat of COVID and started recording my ideas I had. That was the beginning of what That Graduate has become.”

Over time, Peacock began etching out his first song ideas and slowly gained proficiency on his new instrument. But the true next step in his musical education took place only when he moved to Portland to be with his brother, where they formed Hard Yes, a full-band indie outfit that quickly grew to have a sizable following in the region. 

With Hard Yes, Peacock learned not only the technicalities of his instrument but also saw firsthand what a collaborative music-making environment looked like. Although Peacock often wasn’t directly involved in the songwriting process for Hard Yes, he was officially bitten by the bug— he knew he wanted to become a musician in whatever capacity he could make it happen.

But eventually, when his brother moved away from Portland, Peacock was left with yet another void. Hard Yes had come to an end, and he no longer had a way to pursue this newfound vision.

After a period of frustration (and a healthy degree of apathy), though, Peacock set about recreating the circumstances in which he had sketched out his first full-fledged musical ideas. He got the gear he needed for a bedroom studio, and he went to work hashing out a number of the riffs and melodies that had been placed into his mental catalogue during his work with Hard Yes.

With this transition, though, came a certain degree of anxiety. Although Peacock had improved exponentially as a musician, one question lingered— was he capable of making music in an individual context, pulling solely from his own ideas and working only within the confines of his own technical knowledge?

When he completed his first track— “Cape Fear”, which now has over 1.5 million streams on Spotify— that question was answered with a resounding ‘yes’.

“It was a weird moment. I finished the song, [and] I had to go pick up my girlfriend from the airport. I listened to the first bounce in my truck, and I had played it maybe 10 times, and each time I was just screaming in excitement…When I listen to my music, I don't even hear Charlie. I hear this artist version of myself, and it was a big moment. I thought that maybe I could actually make music that people like, outside of working with my brother. I just ran with that feeling and hit this like flow state of just creating every song thereafter for the EP”

That first project under the ‘That Graduate’ moniker, Peacock’s 2023 self-titled EP, contains only six tracks. It carries its weight, however, not only in its musical ambitions but in the clear progression of Peacock’s musical sensibilities. 

Peacock first achieved his signature, reverberating vocal sound through a mixture of presets in Ableton. Because he wasn’t entirely sure how to re-create it, each new song would be made in the same project file, keeping the sound remarkably consistent— partially through necessity and partially through a clear vision on Peacock’s part. He etched out the remaining five tracks attempting to capture the same elation that “Cape Fear” gave him, and from an outside perspective, that pursuit was a clear success. Each track, while carrying its own individual qualities, also possesses that quintessential ‘That Graduate’ sound— bouncy and guitar-driven without sacrificing its atmospheric depth and sonic complexity.

When Peacock began work on his first album, 2025’s Promotion Tendencies, therefore, he knew that he wanted to pursue much of that same sound. In a way, it was the only natural step forward from the niche he settled into on his self-titled EP.

“People always say you can't really stop the music that you end up making. No matter what influences you have or what you know, if you go into a project hearing a song that you really like and [letting that] inspire you… That kind of all goes out the window because, at the end of the day, you're just going to end up making what you were going to make anyways. That usually turns out to be a guitar-driven pop song for me.”

While Peacock may downplay his artistic evolution between projects, at the very least, the massive strides he took in executing his unique vision on his second project are clear. Across the infectious grooves of the title track, the dreamy, floating particles of tracks like “Your High”, and the insistent strummings of the closer “Sunday”, Promotion Tendencies is, in many ways, a full realization of what Peacock first set out to achieve in his solo sessions after the dissolution of Hard Yes.

A group of B-sides for Promotion Tendencies— humorously entitled Bromotion Bendencies— were released on June 26. 

Now, as Peacock has completed his move to Brooklyn and assembled a band to accompany him at That Graduate’s live shows, he plans to continue to push his project forward, finding new modes of expression within the deeply identifiable and accessible sound he’s slowly welded together since those first, fated post-graduation tinkerings.