The Music Never Stops: Aiden Bonilla 

Many kids who grew up in the 2010s have tried their hand at starting a YouTube channel at some point in the decade. Kids would make these channels, use them and post on them for a bit. Then, they would eventually forget about them and move on to the next big thing. 

But for Aiden Bonilla, a YouTube channel he started as a joke in 2019 would become an outlet for him to release original music. It would serve as a launching pad for his current band.  

Bonilla is a singer-songwriter from East Haddam, Connecticut, who sings lead vocals and plays guitar for Overlöded, an indie punk band that has quickly risen the ranks and become one of the most energetic bands in Storrs. As the group’s frontman, Bonilla brings a ton of energy whenever he takes the stage, capturing the audience’s attention and providing an electric show.  

Bonilla started learning guitar when he was 12, in his middle school music class. He quickly took to the instrument, noting that it was something that he was more interested in than anything else he was learning in school.  

“It was something that I was genuinely interested in that was being taught in school, which is cool because a lot of times, it’s hard in middle school to find a subject that really grasps you,” he said.  

The next big step in his musical journey was when he started his first band, Flipside, with his friend Arlo Matthews in 2019. The two recruited a rhythm section to round up the group and started playing shows, which was the first time that Bonilla performed live. Though they were only playing small venues, he was happy to be out playing.  

“I really liked it because it gave us a way to play out, which is something we hadn’t really done before,” he said. “We played community events in our town, anywhere we could set up and play.” 

It was at this time that Bonilla started a YouTube channel called Löded Diper, a reference to the fictional band from the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book series. The channel was a meme account where he posted instrumentals combined with audio from the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movie series.  

But the channel would become more than a simple meme account in 2020, as Bonilla started writing and releasing music on the channel as Löded Diper. He released his first album under the name, “Cranium Shaker,” in October 2021, which he wrote, recorded and produced all by himself.  

Bonilla said that his songwriting process has no specific pattern, describing it as a “very song-to-song process” that varies each time.  

“I have some songs that I’ve started a year and a half before I actually finished it,” he explained. And then there’s a couple songs that I thought of in one night, wrote the whole thing that night and recorded it the next morning.” 

Bonilla said that while it’s hard to pick a favorite song that he’s written, one of the songs that means the most to him is “The Boardwalk,” a track from “Cranium Shaker.” He said that the song was the one that he “had done all on [his] own and that [he] was proud enough to release it” and that it represents what he was feeling as he was halfway through high school and beginning to write more.

“It encapsulates a time in my life that was so important to me when writing music,” he said. “The song is about spending time with your friends before you go off in different directions. Even though it’s a very simple song, I’m proud of it to this day.” 

After the release of “Cranium Shaker” and the single “Watch The World Burn,” Bonilla brought in his friend Drew MacNeil to play drums in early 2022, turning it from a solo project to the duo that has made up the core of the band since then. Bonilla said that he wanted real drums on his recordings instead of programming them like he had been doing.  

“I started really getting into punk music and I realized that punk drums, at least with my skills, I can’t program them very well and I understood the limitations of doing it all myself,” he said. “And also, it’s so much less fun when you’re on your own.”  

The pair recorded the band’s next album, “Love and Youth,” which came out in October 2022. At the same time, Bonilla entered the group into a competition run by “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” author Jeff Kinney, where the winning band would get to accompany him on his upcoming book tour. The group didn’t win, but they got on Kinney’s radar. 

The group changed their name to Overlöded in the spring of 2023 after Kinney’s camp informed the band that they had trademarked the name Löded Diper. But this led to Bonilla, accompanied by MacNeil and friends, to be invited to a tour of Kinney’s studio in Plainville, Massachusetts during May 2023, something that he never thought would have happened when he started his YouTube channel.  

“The fact that this little joke that I started in 2019 escalated all the way to getting personally invited by [Kinney] to his studio was just insane, it didn’t feel real,” he said.  

2023 would be a big year for the band, as Bonilla performed live with them for the first time and revealed himself and MacNeil as the two behind the project after being anonymous for three years. With the veil of anonymity lifted, the group started performing in the Storrs area and across Connecticut frequently.  

One of the shows that stood out most to Bonilla was when they competed in WHUS Radio’s Battle of The Bands in February 2024. It was the biggest show he had played up to that point, calling the night “so validating” for everything he had been working towards.  

Another one of Bonilla’s favorite shows he’s played happened later that month when the group performed at Moon Club, where members of the crowd were yelling to play certain songs.  

“Right before we started playing ‘The Boardwalk,’ a bunch of people were yelling for us it play it,” he said. “And then someone in the front row was singing all the words to ‘Fools to the End.’ That show was just surreal, I still can’t believe it happened.” 

Bonilla continues to share his energy and passion for music with the Storrs-Willimantic scene one show at a time. And it’s all thanks to a YouTube channel.