For Minnesota Music Month, The Current polled local music fans for April’s edition of The Scouting Report. A total of 245 people filled out this year’s Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report ballot, and 455 unique artists were chosen overall. The top 10 artists who received the most support include Bunny Blood.

A couple of years ago, Hallie Gronquist moved to a western Twin Cities suburb. She didn’t know it at the time, but the day she snatched a vulnerable baby bunny from the jaws of a pet was the beginning of something monumental in her musical life.

With a fenced-in yard, Gronquist can keep an eye on her cats while they roam outdoors. One day, her eldest cat, Joel, found a bunny burrow. Seconds later, she heard the mother’s high-pitched cry. “So I run out, and I get to it in time,” she recalls. “I picked up this baby bunny to take to the rehab center in Roseville. And as I was holding it, this little drip of baby bunny blood came down my hand. I was like, ‘This is so sad, but also that would be a cool band name.’”

Bunny Blood formed in early 2024, with Gronquist on lead vocals and bass, Jared Jones on guitar, and Josh Fetzek on drums. Rooted in the loud, moody, and discordant trappings of alt-metal music, their output can be heavy or delicate when required — and heaviness is often what’s required. On the strength of two EPs and magnetic live sets across the metro area, they’ve built a growing community of friends and followers.

Gronquist and Fetzek knew each other as coworkers at Trader Joe’s more than a decade ago, but the trio first connected musically at City Sound rehearsal studio in Minneapolis’ Harrison neighborhood. (Gronquist grew up in Champlin, Fetzek in northern sections of Minneapolis and its surrounding suburbs, and Jones has lived all over, including Rochester.)

Gronquist’s old band, WannaBianca, and Fetzek and Jones’ previous group, Silt, had practice spaces across the hall from each other at City Sound. When those projects concluded amicably, the three decided to consolidate artistically and moved their gear into one unit.

“They started working on an unreleased WannaBianca song we hadn't recorded yet,” Gronquist says. “And it just f***ing worked. So we just became a band immediately after that. A week later, we had 10 songs in the works. Everything was insane. It was magic.”

On a recent Friday in late March, I pay a visit. Nearby, looming signifiers of gentrification — a brewery, a barbecue restaurant, and slickly designed apartments — surround the repurposed one-story warehouse building. Gronquist leads me down a winding hallway to a high-ceilinged room the size of a large closet. A string of fish-shaped lights hangs from a storage loft, and a “bunny blood” neon sign adds to the room’s dramatic lighting. Fetzek’s paintings of animal skulls are among the colorful wall decorations.

“It's like a little clubhouse,” says Fetzek. “It is so nice to have a home base. I can come down here by myself all the time and just lie on the floor, listen to music, and eat pistachios.”

As the throbbing bass of another rehearsing musician, affectionately called “techno unc,” shakes the walls, the band members sit in a wide semicircle and excitedly discuss their musical evolution.

“These two have made me a better person,” Jones says. “We've had a lot of growth, not just musically — through ups and downs in life, and incredibly brutal stuff. I've played in a lot of bands, and I've never quite had this level of love and support, and that really makes a big difference with the type of music that we're doing.”

On April 17, Bunny Blood will release a third EP, Big House. Recorded at Carpet Booth Studios in Rochester, it features their three strongest songs to date, and they know it.

Fetzek: “It’s more refinement of the ideas, and a little bit more—”

Jones: “Maturity.”

Fetzek: “More embellishment in the songwriting and production, and more—”

Gronquist: “Cohesiveness. Their metal, math-y beginnings and my more pop-infused ‘hard rock’ vibes. It’s the coming together of everything.”

Big House follows two 2025 EP releases, Watercolor and Was It Me?, also recorded at Carpet Booth. The EP opens with the title track, which is lyrically infused with undertones of class warfare. “I felt compelled to write something about the indifference of the fabulously wealthy,” Gronquist says.

Studio engineer Jack Liedel says he recorded these songs with the band in a single 10-hour session. Bunny Blood were completely unfazed and focused, he notes, all while staying playful and being open to production and creative suggestions. “They’re incredible musicians, and have a special craft when it comes to writing their unique brand of pop-infused doom/grunge,” Liedel says. “Every time I'm in a room with them, I continue to be impressed with what they are up to.”

The band members agree that the EP’s final track, “Wrong Things,” is a major departure. Fetzek says it took him almost a year to hear the song — a slower, dreamier, more vulnerable composition than their previous work — without getting choked up.

“It stabs me right in the feels every time I hear it,” Fetzek says. “It’s weird to be a part of making something that you like so well. I’ve made a lot of music before that I’ve been like, ‘This is pretty okay,’ or, ‘This is kind of dumb, but we're doing it anyway.’ But the music that we make in this band, I'm so into, and it seems people are picking up that we are really sincere in what we're doing.”

The band’s recent performances include visits to KVSC-FM in St. Cloud, and Memory Lanes, White Squirrel, and Seward Cafe in the Twin Cities — with a handful of mutual aid benefit shows thrown in. “In the last year or so, we've really tried to focus more on the all-ages shows,” Gronquist says. “At Klash Drums and Pilllar Forum, you see all these kids who are probably late teens, early 20s, and it just makes you feel like everything's going to be okay.” On Friday, April 17, Bunny Blood will celebrate the release of Big House with a performance at MPR’s UBS Forum.

Despite the alignment found on Bunny Blood’s recordings, these are three somewhat unlikely musical collaborators. Jones calls out jazz, prog rock, and folk music as his staples. Fetzek leans into jazz and death metal. One of Gronquist’s current obsessions is French alt-pop artist Oklou. The intersection of their Venn diagram: California nu-metal innovators Deftones.

When the name comes up, there are nods of agreement across the room.

“We take a little piece of a chord or a snippet of a melody, something that we like from a band that only happened for two seconds on an album from 15 years ago,” Fetzek says of their writing process. “One of those things specifically is the diminished ninth chord, where it's just a stacked power chord and octave. It's the Deftones chord. It's also the stupid chord that's in the beginning of [Foo Fighters’] "Everlong." It's just a very sad, cool-sounding chord. And any time we can squeeze it in, we do.”

Other hallmarks of Bunny Blood’s sound: Gronquist brings out vocal effects through a dual-microphone setup and plays a five-string bass. Jones builds tension and adds thorny texture to his seven-string guitar lines with a well-loved volume pedal at the center of his board. (It’s like watching a surgeon or something,” Gronquist says.) And Fetzek completes the power trio with fireworks behind a drum set dating back to 1968, handed down from his father, who played it in blues and rock bands. Beyond that, as the kids say, it’s a vibe.

“This was the band I always dreamed about being in when I was a little girl [takes on extra-dramatic affect] listening to Queens of the Stone Age with my dad and stuff like that,” Gronquist says. "‘Oh, I wanna be in a rock band.’ Now I'm here in a rock band with two real rock musicians.”

“There's no limit to the amount of rocking we're doing,” Fetzek adds, deadpan, and the room erupts in laughter.

Bunny Blood will perform with Ber and Sophie Hiroko at The Local Show Live Recording at the UBS Forum at Minnesota Public Radio on Friday, April 17. More details here

Related: Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report 2026: The top 10 new local artists