Sir Chloe, courtesy.

Sir Chloe started out as Dana Foote’s senior thesis. Now she’s opening for Beck and Phoenix on their Summer Odyssey tour across North America.

Foote had put the band together to play a show for her final project during her senior year at Bennington College, a private school in Vermont. Then she and her bandmates, Teddy O’Mara, Palmer Foote (her brother), Emma Welch and Austin Holmes, spent one day recording songs at the school’s on-campus studio. She put them online, which got a small local following.

Within two years, “Michelle” went viral on TikTok and sparked a bidding war that ended with Sir Chloe signing with Atlantic. The band released a debut album, I Am the Dog, in May, including singles “Hooves” and “Salivate.”

“I didn’t really know anything about establishing an act,” Foote said. “So two years felt like a century to me.”

Foote said she always knew she was going to go into music as a career. She just wasn’t sure what that might look like. If the band didn’t work out, she planned to go into production or public relations.

Sir Chloe started out playing nearly empty bars to their college friends. But when she found herself about to go onstage at Lollapalooza, she knew it was working out.

“I remember getting off stage and calling my friend and being like, ‘I’m scared. This is scary,’” she said. “It felt like it had gotten out of my hands a little bit.”

Sir Chloe played the main stage at the Chicago festival, which she called “a very flattering gig.” Afterward, the band’s trajectory did not get as crazy as she’d feared. Instead, it turned into a much healthier slow build-up; that initial viral attention had made her uncomfortable.

“Seeing articles about myself and speculation on personal aspects of my life; it felt invasive and weird,” she said.

The scrutiny has thankfully lessened, she said, but now she’s more prepared for it than she was before. Sharing the stage and the studio with her brother is likely also a calming force. Palmer Foote, Sir Chloe’s drummer, is also a producer and session drummer for hip-hop artists. She said the partnership works because they’re both clear communicators and don’t take things personally.

“There’s not a whole lot of ego there,” she said. “It was just like, ‘this is so cool that you’re doing this, and how cool that we get to do it together.’”

Together, they’ve been able to travel the world, opening for Modest Mouse, Alt-J and Portugal. The Man. Foote said performing in Spain was a gift, enabling Sir Chloe to be tourists in Barcelona and Madrid.

“I think there’s so much more pleasure in the experience of seeing something new, knowing that on top of that, we get to do something that we all really love doing,” she said. “The camaraderie of traveling together, too, is really fun.”

Foote said she’s not intimidated by the idea of playing to audiences who may not be there for Sir Chloe, such as on the current Beck and Phoenix tour. She’s looking forward to the experience both as an artist hoping to encounter open-minded music lovers, and as a fan of her tour mates, which at some shows will include Weyes Blood, Jenny Lewis and Japanese Breakfast.

“They’re all musicians that we have admired for quite some time,” she said. “He’s [Beck] covered so much ground with the type of music that he’s made. I think it fosters a lot of trust in the musician, because he’s made a lot of different kinds of music and it’s all so good.”

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.