Ripe has earned its stripes as a Boston band — even if none of its individual members call the city home anymore. The funky pop group (or poppy funk group, depending on the track) first came together at Berklee College of Music in 2011 and has since blossomed into a highlight of the national festival scene, performing at Bonnaroo, Firefly, and Austin City Limits, among others.
Yet despite relocating to the West Coast to nurture their 2023 sophomore album, “Bright Blues,” Ripe’s hometown pride can never be uprooted. Following a repeat appearance at Marshfield’s Levitate Music and Arts Festival in July, the band returns to Massachusetts on Saturday to headline the 21st annual Riverfest at Salisbury Beach.
We chatted with singer Robbie Wulfsohn ahead of this next entry in Ripe’s juicy saga.
Q. What’s your relationship with Riverfest? Are you a newbie or have you been before?
A. I’m a total newbie, but a newbie with a healthy awareness that he’s doing something cool. I’m currently in the midst of having a huge soft spot for the stuff that’s local to places where we understand the culture.
Q. Do you have a typical festival routine?
A. Honestly, my favorite thing to do at a festival is be at the festival. I will always be catching music, and if there’s any friends of ours that are attending or playing, we’ll connect with them. It’s fun to hang out in the middle of things. It’s not like I can really do that at our own concerts. To just be a part of the mob is a real joy.
Q. What is your proudest accomplishment in Boston or New England?
A. We played MGM [Music Hall at Fenway] in April. We’ve seen that room since it was being constructed. Getting to do things that are on the bucket list of a band that came up playing Allston basements, feeling present, and not feeling jaded — that, to me, is the big accomplishment.
Q. Tell me how you went from being a “college band” to a Boston band.
A. For us it was about starting to play events around cities and towns that had more built-in audiences. It was about getting the small set at the first Levitate that we played [in 2017], and starting to pivot away from the scene that we’d been a part of, and play things that face the city or the region at large. Now when we play a Boston show, it’s not just people that are our age, it’s people of all ages, younger and older than us, and it’s not just people from the Back Bay area that we went to school [with] or the Allston-Brighton area we moved to right after. It’s people from the entire region.
Q. The producers and co-writers [of “Bright Blues”] are also from Berklee. What about them made you trust them to work with you on the new album?
A. Noah Conrad and Ryan Linvill are people that we’ve known very well since the undergrad days. In the very first iteration of Ripe, if we ever had horn players that couldn’t make a show, we would call them for trumpet and saxophone specifically. These are guys that had left Berklee, moved to California, and started spending every waking hour trying to refine the way they created recorded studio music. These people that knew us really well, that had this intuitive grasp of pop music, were really careful in the way that we wanted with our sound.
Q. “Bright Blues” is your first album with Glassnote Records. Who are you most excited to call your new labelmate?
A. Phoenix kicks ass. They’ve been able to carve their own lane so impressively. Their music is so evocative and so singular, and manages to resonate to the point where Alan Braxe is doing a remix, Clairo is jumping on a feature, but they’re still very much their own band. And of course, like every other musician with delusions of grandeur, if it’s possible to be as big as [labelmates] Mumford & Sons, I’m not gonna say no.
Q. How does it feel to have Boston as a hometown, even though none of you live here anymore?
A. I think it’s this very loud understanding that home is the relationships that you build and the thing that you wake up every day and choose. We wouldn’t exist without it [Boston], and it’s still the only place that has that honor. If you took us away from California, we’d still have every single part of our ethos, but if you took us away from Boston, it just wouldn’t be the same. This is still the place that shaped us more than anywhere else, and this is still the place that we want to identify as being from. If someone wants to challenge us, we’re happy to be aggressive and Bostonian and defend ourselves.
Q. What did success mean to you at Berklee, and what does it mean to you now?
A. We had a moment where we actively had to choose whether or not we wanted to keep the band going after college. I think that success then looked like being able to continue to believe in this thing that was built on friendship, love, and things that we cared about and wanted to continue to bring into the world. Obviously at that point, it also included being able to sell 500 tickets in Boston.
A lot of the details have changed — the next steps of material success are obviously further down the line, thank heavens. But success still looks like being able to make a life of this, and still having it trace its history all the way back to friends making an almost arbitrary decision in a practice room that this was going to be the rest of our lives. Every day continues to prove that this thing that we’ve been betting on for 12 years is still the right thing to bet on.
RIVERFEST
Featuring Ripe, Ryan Montbleau Band, Air Traffic Controller, and Steve Rondo. Broadway Boardwalk at Salisbury Beach. Aug. 26, noon-6 p.m. Free. theriverboston.com
Interview was edited and condensed. Victoria Wasylak can be reached at vmwasylak@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @VickiWasylak.