3QUENCY Shares What We Didn’t See on Netflix’s ‘Building the Band’ (Exclusive) originally appeared on Parade.
Collaborating with “some pretty cool people” as we speak, Building the Band winner 3QUENCY certainly has a bright future ahead.
For those who have yet to tune in, Building the Band is a “first-of-its-kind music competition,” where “50 participants took part in blind auditions, listening to one another sing from their individual sound booths” (according to Netflix).
“From there, the performers who formed deep connections sight unseen officially locked in six bands: 3QUENCY, SZN4, Iconyx (formerly Soulidified), Midnight Til Morning, Sweet Seduction and Siren Society,” all competing against one another for a 500k grand prize.
Spoiler alert: 3QUENCY — consisting of Brianna Mazzola, Wennely Quezada and Nori Royale — ultimately emerged victorious come finale night due to their stellar singing AND dancing skills, ultimately bringing home the bacon and becoming the inaugural Building the Band champion. How exciting is that?
Aside from “getting in the studio” and working on some new tunes, with Building the Band finally hitting Netflix after almost a year of anticipation, 3QUENCY has been busy reflecting on their time on the reality television series. Needless to say, it was a journey to remember for the trio!
Yesterday (August 5), Brianna, Wennely and Nori sat down with Parade to discuss all things Building the Band, sharing some oh-so secret moments that didn’t make it onto our television screens. Keep scrolling to see for yourself…
“With each member bringing her own distinct style, voice and attitude,” Brianna, Wennely and Nori are seemingly a match made in heaven, but their meeting was rather unconventional (to say the least).
Bandmates Brianna and Wennely had actually met each other at an audition nearly a decade prior, which was briefly mentioned during Building the Band. In our exclusive interview, though, the pair finally elaborated on the story, sharing all of the nitty gritty details of their initial encounter.
“So we had done a previous show like 10 years ago,” Wennely prefaced. “I met her, and I thought she was so cool, and we hung out and went to Urban Outfitters together. We would go shopping, and we were in school at the time, so we were literally hanging out on set at school.”
Although she and Brianna had lost touch since, “the minute that I heard her voice — mind you, I don’t really know anybody by the name Brianna, other than a cousin of mine – I heard her voice and I heard her name and I’m like, ‘That can’t be,'” Wennely continued. “She started singing, and I was like, ‘It is,’ and so it was just crazy how like even after not speaking for 10 years, you know, we come full circle back into each other’s lives and we end up doing this.”
If that isn’t fate bringing 3QUENCY together, we don’t know what is!
After Brianna and Wennely had formed a solid foundation with one another, the pair then looped in Nori, who was seemingly the missing piece that 3QUENCY needed.
Unlike her bandmates, Nori had surprisingly never performed onstage with a full band before, but the Georgia native admitted that both Brianna and Wennely made her feel so much more comfortable throughout her Building the Band journey and beyond.
“These girls have literally been my saving grace,” she prefaced. “I was definitely singing before, but I wasn’t used to singing onstage in front of all of these people. It was more so like I was just singing at intimate settings — graduation, Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings, funerals, things of that nature.”
The self-proclaimed “Bratz doll” continued, “I did want to make sure that I learned everything that I could, so I was just like, ‘Listen, I just need to be a sponge and soak up as much information as I can,’ because I felt like I had to play catch up.”
“The only thing I showed up and knew how to do was how to sing and dance and how to look cute,” she concluded with a chuckle, but with “tips and advice” from her bandmates, Nori now looks AND feels like a natural onstage.
Nevertheless, once Brianna, Wennely and Nori found one another, deciding on a name became their next challenge, with the girls admitting that “that was actually probably the hardest part about the entire experience.”
“Every name we wanted, they were like, ‘It’s already trademarked. It’s already owned by somebody else. Another group is using it.’ Like, there was always roadblocks, but it got to a point where we were like, ‘Okay, well maybe there’s like a visual element that we can incorporate with this,'” Brianna spilled.
For those who are unfamiliar, Brianna is known for her makeup, always rocking an oh-so artsy audio wave across her eyes. Playing around with different colors, glitter and more, it has become her signature style, and believe it or not, it actually inspired the name 3QUENCY.
“When I had met the girls, they didn’t show it on the show, but the first thing they were freaking out about was the makeup,” the Pennsylvania native reminisced. “Then, we started talking about maybe ways of incorporating that into the brand to make it make sense… It wasn’t something that they were bringing into their identity — they knew it was like my thing — but they didn’t want it to feel like it didn’t have a place in the group.”
After that, the trio began “throwing words around like sound wave and frequency” as an ode to Brianna’s makeup, admitting that the latter was on the right track, but felt “kind of plain.” With three members in the group, Brianna, Wennely and Nori eventually changed “frequency” to 3QUENCY, and the rest is history!
Aside from making musical magic on Building the Band — under the name 3QUENCY, of course — the trio also spilled some things that happened when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“Our house was the kickback house,” Nori exclaimed, with Brianna delving into the details of the slumber parties that occurred in their apartment “every night.”
“They didn’t show this, but in one of the clips, you could see we were all on one bed in the kitchen. We moved all three of our mattresses onto the floor in the kitchen and slept out there together every night,” she recalled. “Once the other bands saw that we were doing that, they started coming over and sleeping over with us. We would literally set up our little iPads — because they would give us an iPad and we could watch Netflix on it, because we didn’t have phones or anything — and we would sit there with a movie and we would be all on on top of each other somehow.”
“We always ended up in the crack of the mattress. I don’t know how,” Brianna concluded with a shrug, admitting that once everyone eventually left, that was when 3QUENCY would start to rehearse.
To follow this oh-so silly story, Wennely shared another incident that occurred in their apartment, this time involving cookies.
“We were baking cookies, and a big ol’ strand of my hair got into the butter, and we still served the cookies,” she explained with an ear-to-ear grin.
“We didn’t have time to like re-bake the cookies. We were making vegan cookies at that, so you know, we only had one vegan butter stick. That was all we had, so we were like, ‘Listen, we want these cookies. It’s okay. It’ll be alright.’ The cookies, they were pretty good,” Nori concluded.
Aside from both of these memories, the girls confirmed that there were also a great deal of intimate conversations that they had off-camera, admitting that it would have been nice for those discussions to make it into Building the Band for viewers to watch their friendship blossom firsthand.
Thankfully, social media has served as a great asset for 3QUENCY — as well as the other bands — to show the world their chemistry, with Brianna adding, “If we could have had 20 episodes, it could have been perfect. Obviously there’s only 10 episodes, and we gotta get everything in there, so I think it’s cool now seeing like everybody’s content post-show and seeing how everybody’s like evolving with their groups and how their dynamics are playing out. It’s cute.”
Speaking of social media, to see all of 3QUENCY’s content, you may connect with the band via TikTok at @3quencyofficial and Instagram @3quencyofficial.
Stay tuned — the girls have teased some exciting things to come…
3QUENCY Shares What We Didn’t See on Netflix’s ‘Building the Band’ (Exclusive) first appeared on Parade on Aug 6, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Aug 6, 2025, where it first appeared.
