On the Verge: marQ Takes on The Sultan Room

marQ steps onto the stage at The Sultan Room in Brooklyn—his first-ever show in New York City. The venue, tucked beneath the small-town whimsies of Turks Inn between a cornerstore bodega and a vandalized brownstone. The pavement is still wet. The air, still damp and faint fog clings beneath the streetlight from the afternoon rain. There is an undeniable sense that tonight, the venue tonight feels like a launchpad soaked in possibility.

Inside, the room is filled with red and blue lights that shift slowly. There’s a bar on the left, a raised stage at the back, and a low ceiling with exposed beams. The crowd is tightly packed. marQ has 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, one million likes on TikTok, and 9,000 followers on Instagram. Tonight, the numbers are bodies. A mix of people who came alone, people dragged by friends. The room is full. No one’s dancing yet, but everyone’s waiting in anticipation.

A week later, I sat down with Adam Bross, marQ’s co-producer and collaborator, who also played at their live set to ask about the making of this band. Bross first contacted marQ after finding him on TikTok in January of last year. Turns out Bross also discovered him through social media – marQ was still new to music at the time, using YouTube beats for his early tracks.

“I hit him up and said, ‘Love your sound,'” Bross recalls. “He replied that he was looking for a producer, so I sent him some material. We put out ‘My Room’ that February – his third song ever. It’s close to two million streams now.” Since then, they’ve worked on every track marQ has released – roughly 50 songs over 13 months. Last summer, marQ traveled to Chicago multiple times to collaborate in person.

But who is marQ exactly?

“Hayden is marQ—he’s the artist,” Adam says. “We make all the music together, but he’s the center, the face. The band that performs with us. They’re our homies. Incredible musicians, incredible people. But the people who are making the music are Hayden and I.”

Hayden and Adam write and produce everything, while a rotating crew of close friends forms the live band. They’re not hired guns—they’re part of the ecosystem. The music takes shape in bedrooms, over Dropbox, between campus breaks and midnight sessions.

Back Inside the venue, red and blue lights sweep across the ceiling in slow loops. The bar to the left is backed up four deep. Someone spills a drink and kicks ice cubes out of the way. In the crowd, there are two people with dyed red hair, which already feels like one too many. There are leather jackets, digital camera kids taking flash photos of their group, baseball caps and drawstring hoodies. In the sea of concert-goers, a Nintendo DS stands out, held up high and flipped open, ready to film. Tank-top college girls stand closer to the back, leaning in ready to swoon over the band, two of them share a vape. A girl with chipped black nails is scrolling through TikTok with her sound off. A guy in a denim jacket, three piercings in one ear, beer in hand, nods on beat like he already knows what’s coming.

For me, it was almost too perfect. A week ago, while doom scrolling, the godly TikTok algorithm led me to this white-college-girl vlogging about how she’s “done gatekeeping marQ”. I checked him out—his sound, his aesthetic. A few clicks later, I saw he had a show in Brooklyn the same week. There’s something fascinating about seeing an artist in real life so soon after discovering them online, a digital serendipity of modern music discovery…I wondered, Who else would be here? Would they be like me—fans in the making, caught up in the organic pull of digital discovery?

The moment he stepped onto the stage and launched into his original song “Oh Yeah”, there was no hesitation. No awkward “first gig” energy. His presence was immediate—confident, magnetic. There’s an overall sense of intimacy in the room like everyone’s in on the same niche secret — a shared discovery of someone who hasn’t broken into the mainstream yet. Everyone was rooting for him. I was. There’s something special about being at the start of a musician’s journey, knowing they’re onto something, and knowing you saw it early.

There was a rawness that melted into their second song, “My Lady”, an overwhelming sense of playful innocence to it, like something pulled from a coming-of-age film. It’s rough around the edges, but honest. Hayden introduces the band: Adam, the producer/guitarist/publicist; Carson, his roommate on drums; and Max, the friend behind the camera. It’s all deeply DIY. No label, no entourage. Just friends making something. And somehow, it all holds together. It’s simple, but it clicks.

Hayden’s vocals weren’t perfect—but they didn’t need to be. He’s got range, emotion, and something in his delivery that cuts through. The sound isn’t flashy. It just fits. His voice, layered over lo-fi bass and steady drums, felt personal. I later found out he’d only been playing guitar for less than a year. And yet, there he was, shredding on stage. I was impressed.

And the crowd? They’re not just locals. Some flew in from Miami, Orlando, even Texas. One guy drove in from Hoboken just to catch the set. The room was locked in, heads were bobbing, swaying, moving in sync with the set’s mixtape-like flow. The whole night felt more like a shared experience, band included.

Between songs, I asked people how they had heard of marQ. The answers were eerily similar: Spotify algorithms, weekly discover playlist. TikTok algorithms. A friend of a friend. Music discovery in 2025 doesn’t work the way it used to. The old-school idea of “breaking out” has been replaced by digital serendipity—a single moment of visibility that places an artist in front of thousands, sometimes millions. marQ is part of this shift, but he’s also actively trying to prove he’s more than a name the algorithm decided to surface. But what happens after the algorithm does its job? Does virality translate to longevity?

“As independent artists without label support, TikTok has been one of our main tools for reaching new listeners,” Adam said. “We’ve been using it for a while—it’s helped us grow a lot. Honestly, we’d love nothing more than to stop posting on TikTok and just focus on the music. But right now, it’s still one of the most effective platforms for outreach.”

Later in the set, a fan in the front row called out a request for “My Room”—the very first song Hayden and Adam ever released together. “Hayden was like, ‘I don’t remember the words,’” Adam laughed. “And I said, ‘I think I remember the chord progression,’ so I just started messing around until I found it.” The wild part? They’d never played the song together live—not even once. “Back then, I just sent him the beat and he recorded it,” Adam said. “We never rehearsed it at all. We just figured it out on stage.” The audience watched as they pieced it together in real-time, a moment of raw spontaneity that only deepened the night’s intimacy—less a polished concert, more a living room jam session with a hundred people along for the ride.

At the back of the room, I struck up a conversation with a guy in a puffer jacket layered under a wool coat. His center-parted hair fell just past his temples—he looked to be in his mid-30s, probably one of the older people in the crowd. He told me he worked in publicity for a record label. I asked if the band was signed, and how he’d heard of them. A friend had sent him a link, he said. “They’re not signed,” he added, then paused. “But he’s getting signed soon.” He said it casually, almost matter-of-factly, like it was already in motion. We both agreed.

The setlist felt like a well-placed breadcrumb trail of influences. Their own songs fit so seamlessly alongside a Dominic Fike cover, that at times, it was hard to tell where influence ended and originality began. That’s the tightrope walk of an emerging artist—balancing homage with identity, carving out a voice distinct enough to stand out but familiar enough to resonate.

Right now, marQ’s music feels like a piece of something bigger: the Gen Z indie-TikTok-renaissance, a new wave of genre-blurring, bedroom-to-stage artists redefining what an indie artist can sound like. But over time, the question will become: what makes marQ distinctly marQ? After the set, the band stood at the front of the venue, singing merch. A line had formed. People were waiting. Not just to get a shirt or a poster, but to capture a piece of the moment, to say “I was here first.”.

“We had the opportunity to meet so many people after the show,” Adam said. “We were kind of stuck at the venue for two hours, just doing autographs, pictures, talking with people. Everyone we met was just so genuine. They were all so excited to be a part of our music.”

It seems like marQ is building a fanbase the old-fashioned way—locally, one show at a time. It’s easy to rack up streams or go viral for a week; it’s harder to get people to show up on a rainy night in Brooklyn, to know the words, to stick around afterward just to say hi. This wasn’t just a TikTok crowd chasing a trend. It felt like the start of a real community, anchored by the music—and by the messy, human moments that don’t go viral but stick with you anyway.

So what’s next? Adam studied engineering; Hayden studies biology. Graduation looms. Moves are coming. A debut album is on the way. A label deal might not be far behind. But for now, they’re not chasing labels, streams, or even perfection. They’re chasing something harder: a sound that feels human, and a fanbase that stays. “We’re being really intentional,” Adam said. “Everything—the music videos, the photos—are shot on the same vintage digicam. The quality is terrible, the audio’s bad, but it just fits. It’s the feeling we want. It’s who we are.”

No filters. No formulas. Just a couple of friends, a busted camera, and a room full of believers.

marQ isn’t there yet, but that’s the magic. They’re still on the verge—and in those exciting early moments of in-between space, that’s where the most honest music is made full of possibility, and authenticity, and maybe, that’s where the best music is made.

This piece was written back in March 2025, but life (and edits) got in the way—so it’s seeing the light a little later than planned. marQ have since released their debut album, Matchbox, on May 16 and are now heading out on tour

Photos courtesy of @Hudson_Smiley and Glenn Paul