On a recent Friday in St. Petersburg, Kyle Wyss and Sheridan Willard were sipping health drinks at Central Cafe and Organics when in through the door walked Orhan Chettri and Ben Goodman.

Greetings were issued. Introductions were made. Small talk was exchanged.

And with that, the group Blind Man’s Colour became, for the first time ever, a full band.

This might come as a surprise to some, considering a growing number of prominent music blogs and bloggers — including Kanye West and Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste — have heaped praise upon Blind Man’s Colour this spring. Pitchfork included a song on a recent podcast. The band’s forthcoming album, Season Dreaming, due in August on Brooklyn’s Kanine Records (Chairlift, Northern State, Oxford Collapse), is drawing comparisons to Animal Collective.

Promient blogs like Stereogum, Gorilla vs. Bear and I Guess I'm Floating have already called Blind Man's Colour a band to watch. "They’ve got a good chance of becoming my favorite find of 2009," wrote I Guess I'm Floating.

But while the online hype mounts, this group of 19-year-old college kids -- three of whom attended Shorecrest Preparatory School in St. Petersburg -- is working to flesh out their dreamy, noise-pop sound.

Their summer project? To figure out how to be a band.

“It was kind of uncertain what would happen with this album,” said Chettri, who along with Wyss is one of the group's driving forces. (That's Chettri on the left and Wyss on the right in the photo above.) “We weren’t sure if we would have to play them live, even. We were just like, 'Whatever, let’s record them, and we’ll figure it out when we get to that point.'”

“A lot of songs on the album were basically written and recorded in a few days,” Wyss adds. “So we never even learned the songs.”

“We have to listen to them and relearn them,” Chettri laughs. “We have to relearn our album now. We’ve got to get the tabs for our album.”

You can pre-order Season Dreaming and get all the mp3s now. Recorded at home, the album does sound a lot like Animal Collective ‚Äî bird noises, hypnotic guitars, repetitive riffs, underwater-sounding vocals. It is earthy, natural, ambient and wholly organic.

To read more about Blind Man's Colour, including their reaction when they found out they made Kanye's blog, click here. And listen to an mp3 of their track Jimmy Dove by clicking here.

-- Jay Cridlin, tbt*. Photo by Evan Wyss.