If someone had told me The Greeting Committee would be where it is today after I saw the band play at Llewelyn’s in Overland Park in March, I wouldn’t have believed so much could have happened in so little time. But it did.

The band went from performing at small venues filled with high school students in its hometown of Kansas City to opening for popular alternative artists across the Midwest. The Greeting Committee also signed to a major label and re-recorded its debut extended play, all while also having a popular radio single in Kansas City. Despite its success, the band is still trying to improve.

“I feel like we still need to put a lot of work in to get where we want to be,” guitarist Brandon Yangmi said. “So, [we’ll] just keep going with it and keep working hard.”

This hard work takes many forms. When I walked into The Greeting Committee’s practice room, after being welcomed by lead vocalist/guitarist Addie Sartino, I noticed Yangmi and bassist Pierce Turcotte composing a guitar riff to play during part of the band’s live show. As I watched for the next 10 minutes or so, the composition became a collaborative effort, with Sartino giving suggestions and drummer Austin Fraser accompanying on piano.

Collaborating isn’t new for The Greeting Committee — it’s how the band makes its music, from working together on songwriting to recording music live, with all instruments playing together.

“I know what [a part] sounds like on drums when I play it on guitar,” Yangmi said. “I’m like, ‘I know how this drum part’s going to go.’ I never put it in full form, I usually bring it here and then I’m like, ‘What can you do with this?’”

The varying influences that come together when the band’s members make music make the end product sound original, and somewhat hard to describe. When I try to explain The Greeting Committee, I find myself piecing together aspects of many other artists’ music, but it still doesn’t adequately capture what the band sounds like.

Among individual songs, there are enough differences to make things interesting. New music — like “Your Side,” the unreleased “She’s a Gun” and another unreleased song I happened to hear after our interview — keep with these changes.

“It all has a correlation to it,” Yangmi said. “It’s going in a little bit of a different direction, but it’s like, when you hear it, you’ll still know it’s us.”

Given the band’s beginnings, its collaborative spirit makes sense. After making music on her own, Sartino wanted people to share the stage with, so she asked Yangmi about starting a band. He had been friends with Fraser for a while — both played drums before Yangmi decided to switch to guitar. The two knew Turcotte, a former guitarist, from marching band and jazz band at Blue Valley High School, where Sartino also attended. (Turcotte graduated in 2015 and is now a college freshman.) The four came together to form The Greeting Committee around August of 2014.

“I decided that it was boring for me to be onstage alone,” Sartino said. “Not that I’m against vulnerability, because I still try to put that into … The Greeting Committee shows now. But, I just like didn’t enjoy it as much — it was way too nerve-wrecking — and now I have fun onstage.”

It would take a bit before The Greeting Committee became recognizable, though. The band didn’t release its debut EP, “It’s Not All That Bad,” until late March. That was the same day I saw the band live for the first time, after alternative radio station 96.5 The Buzz played “Hands Down,” the band’s debut single.

“We have traveled a little bit and you can see, other radio stations, they just don’t really compare to 96.5,” Sartino said. “I think that our situation, and how quickly we’ve gotten to see some success, I don’t think that would’ve happened without 96.5 The Buzz, or Kansas City and how much Kansas City appreciates their local artists.”

Since then, The Greeting Committee became the poster child local bands becoming popular with The Buzz’s help. The band played multiple Buzz-sponsored shows: a headlining show at The Tank Room, an opening performance for Kansas City artists Outsides and Hembree at The Buzz’s “Homegrown Showcase” and — most notably — the first set of the day at Buzz Beach Ball, the station’s one-day, two-stage music festival at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas.

“For me, the first time it like actually hit me was right before we went on stage at Buzz Beach Ball,” Sartino said. “I started crying before we went on ’cause I was so overwhelmed and excited for everything. Even then, that was only like 30 seconds of it hitting me. I have to think about it for it all to catch up, because every time you do something that’s very surreal, something else will happen a couple weeks later that takes its place.”

This proved true. Not long after, The Greeting Committee signed to Harvest Records, joining the likes of Matt and Kim, Glass Animals and Best Coast. This led to the band playing a Harvest showcase as part of this year’s CMJ Music Marathon in New York City, not too long after a three-show stint opening for Saint Motel in Newport, Kentucky, Des Moines, Iowa, and Madison, Wisconsin.

Playing these shows motivated the band to improve, as most of the new audiences didn’t know much about The Greeting Committee.

“It was cool to play for complete strangers again, and it’s like you have to win everybody over all over again,” Sartino said. “For me, it made me want to work a lot harder and make our live show a lot better.”

All this led to the re-release of “It’s Not All That Bad,” consisting of re-recorded versions of “Out of My Head,” “I Don’t Mind” and “Make It Right,” along with the original version of “Hands Down” and newly recorded song “Your Side.” Despite the band’s success and the resources that come with a major label, The Greeting Committee decided to record the re-release in a basement, just like the original EP.

“We kind of wanted to keep the same sound,” Turcotte said. “We didn’t want to re-record ‘Hands Down’ because ‘Hands Down’ was already really, really good. So, we didn’t want to have like this like really strange dichotomy between the newer songs we recorded and ‘Hands Down.’”

Now, The Greeting Committee is preparing to end the year strong with a performance at The Buzz’s “The Night The Buzz Stole XXXXmas” Thursday, Dec. 17, at the Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland. The band will perform second, after Hembree, to open for Bastille and The Wombats.

The members agree this show is exciting because the show is at night, the venue is indoors and the band is won’t play first. Sartino hopes to not stress about the show.

“I feel like when we aren’t nervous for shows, we almost like play a lot better,” Sartino said. “For The Midland I’m just going to try to not be nervous at all. I already had a nightmare about it.”

After “The Night The Buzz Stole XXXXmas,” the band has some big plans for 2016 — supporting a band on tour and playing South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, before recording a full-length album and playing more music festivals.

I’m genuinely excited to see what the next year brings for The Greeting Committee, and I’m looking forward to the band and its members doing some awesome things. As the band moves into the future, its members hope to accomplish this through more change and improvement.

“I want to constantly be evolving,” Sartino said. “Hopefully … the last few songs we write for an album will kind of lead into the first few songs we write for the next one, but like it’ll just like keep changing, and if you put them next to each other, you’ll see the development that happened.”

Senior Justin Curto is an avid music lover whose tastes range from alternative rock to dance pop. He enjoys supporting the Kansas City music scene by listening longer to 96.5 The Buzz, rocking out to local music and seeing artists live at his favorite venues in the area.