I am carrying a half-gallon jug of red wine from a freight elevator to the center of a converted warehouse loft. Scattered on the floor are drum heads, endless tangles of instrument cables, and a shopping bag full of water guns. Here, in an industrial corner of Charlestown, the band Intac prepares for their next concert.
The word “concert” is mine; Intac refers to this evening as a “Q2 Review.” I ask Bill Restivo, lead singer and creative engine of the band, why this event in mid-October is billed as a review of Q2. “In here it’s always Q2,” he tells me. Not too many indie rock bands would dare to measure time this way, or even know what fiscal quarter we’re in, but that’s exactly the grindset mindset that the cast of characters in Intac delights in sending up.
The last fourthmeal
The Somerville-based small business (read: band) has been turning heads with a string of innovative products (read: polished garage-pop releases) and a compelling live act that’s part TED talk, part rock show, part anticapitalist performance art piece. Their signature corporate cosplay is enough to reel in curious onlookers online and at their seminars (read: shows) before going in with the hard sell (read: some of the most fun rock n’ roll tunes this side of Ric Ocasek).
If you wandered into an Intac show, the first thing you’d see was a bizarro PowerPoint presentation projected onto a pop-up screen piloted by a man in a green Lycra bodysuit with the shell of an iMac G3 on his head. That’s Lucas Restivo, Bill’s cousin and creative foil. The two grew up part of a tight-knit Italian-American family. Bill’s parents split up when he was a baby and his dad moved from Woburn to Burlington to be closer to his brother’s family, their houses literally across the street from one another. “We’ve kinda always spent a lot of time at each other’s houses our whole lives,” Bill said. Before long Lucas and Bill became like brothers, creating art and their own antic sense of humor together.
To be a member of Intac is to be in on the joke. Josh Rosenberg, a childhood friend of the Restivos, has been playing music with Bill and Lucas for over 20 years. Early projects Never Say Die and Donna Bummer were mostly short-lived larks, “before business was the priority,” Rosenberg said. Now, he’s completely invested in Intac and wants to take the band as far as it’ll go. “We’re going to be the first business to hold a seminar on the moon,” he said.
In a corner of the loft, Neil Morrissey, member of the band The Only Humans, unfolds a green casino mat onto a table. Though he has his violin with him, his role in Intac is to run the blackjack table. “Bill likes to create this image of a seedy kind of business, or a business that’s in league with some shady people,” he said. This totalizing vision of the extra-musical world, an eye for what happens both on stage and off, is usually reserved for the biggest pop stars, not small-time indie bands. Everything is considered, from the water cooler that holds Bill’s mic stand to the oversized suits the band wears onstage. “In terms of the local live shows that I’ve seen, there’s nothing quite like it,” Morrissey said.
Intac has a way of turning spectators into fans. The combined might of their theatrical presentation and impressive musical chops sends audiences scrambling for their phones to capture some of the magic. Still, their live antics can sometimes overshadow their intentions as a band. “We’ve probably been too funny a few times and we know sometimes when you cross that line you feel like too much of a clown,” Lucas said. While humor and stagecraft are part of the Intac experience, they worry that people will see them only as a schtick. “We don’t want people to leave being like, ‘Oh that was fun and funny, but it’s a gimmick and I have no interest in listening to this music,’” Bill said.
Drummer Nick Morrone came to Intac first as a fan of the music before being recruited as a member. Morrone, who also plays in Me In Capris, thinks the synthesis of flash and substance is what makes the band special. “So many bands take themselves way too seriously and don’t write good songs. Which there are, unfortunately, a lot of those bands.” he said.
While an Intac live show might be something of a sensory overload, their recorded output is–perhaps unexpectedly given the artifice surrounding it–tastefully pared down and tender. There are no skits, no self-indulgent prog suites, no meme-bait. Bill demonstrates a remarkable (and marketable) pop sensibility in his songwriting which carries the torch handed to him by greats like Warren Zevon, Loudon Wainwright III, Josh Tillman, and other songwriters that paint with humor a mostly bleak portrait of the world.
Since 2021, Intac has been releasing catchy, clever garage rock and bedroom pop records at a steady clip. Their latest album and fourth original release of 2025, God Is Time, Time is Money, and the Money’s Long Gone, pushes their sound further into folk territory. There are road-weary ballads, hard-times lamented over acoustic guitar strumming, and paeans to the workweek. They haven’t quite gone country, but there’s a strong gesture towards twang and the lovelorn feelings that come with it.
The songs are more valuable to Bill than anything else Intac does, and I mean that literally. Part of his mission with the band is to challenge the streaming-era notion that recorded music is essentially worthless, a commodity cheaper than sugar or natural gas. “If there was an understanding that you get what you pay for and that [a] recording is worth money, then when you make good stuff maybe it has a higher chance that you could make money from it,” Bill said. It inspired the band to launch their Patreon channel and remove their music from streaming services.
Following a raucous performance of the Counting Crows’ “Mr Jones,” the lights in the loft suddenly come on. The apartment’s primary resident gets on the mic to announce that the cops are here. Sure enough, four Boston police officers are standing in the hallway. Apparently there’d been a noise complaint–even bohemians need their sleep it seems. The officers are quiet at first but soon start shining flashlights in people’s faces and phone cameras (including my own) and telling everyone to clear out. The party is over. It’s time to go home. In a statement posted to Instagram the next morning, the band offered the cops a deal: “show Intac proof of resignation from your post, and we’ll give you a FREE ticket to our holiday party at Margaritaville on Dec 6.” We hope to see some of them there.