2023 finds Be Your Own Pet not only back with a new album, but stronger than ever before. Due August 25, Mommy bolsters the group’s patented garage punk ferocity with matured songwriting, inspired musicianship, and a fervor to claim their space and define their future. “I’m not your victim, I’m my own person/ I’m not some casualty, I set myself free,” Pearl roars on lead single “Hand Grenade”, propelled forward by a burst of guitar shrapnel from Stein and a time-bomb rhythm section courtesy of Vasquez and Eatherly. Born during the group’s first day of writing, the track is both a vicious rebuke of the sexism and abuse that pervades the music world and a steely refusal to be defined by it. “That song’s one of my little babies,” Pearl says. “By telling our stories and sharing our truth, we can gain power back from a situation where we felt powerless.”
On Mommy highlight “Goodtime!”, that exaggeration comes through in the form of trying to balance two kids, a mortgage, and some FOMO. “Used to be the life of the party/ Crashing out nothing to lose/ Now I’m not so juvenile/ I got nothing left to prove,” Pearl shouts over a roiling garage thump, before quickly transitioning to wondering aloud whether everyone else is still hanging out and just not calling her. “The older you get, the more responsibility and compromise, the more people that depend on you—but there’s always a little bit of missing the freedom from when you’re younger,” she explains. Stein agrees: “You can be nurturing an adult life with your family but still looking over your shoulder like, ‘God, I wanna be partying.’”
The group have grown a lot since their first run, both personally and musically, but have managed to reshape their razor-edged swagger through the turmoil. “It got kind of dark towards the end. My own challenges with mental health probably affected everybody in the band. I was undiagnosed bipolar 1 at the time. It felt like we were just on this runaway train,” Pearl says. “Years later, we wanted to come back together in this new, more evolved place, to connect the threads between our old records and Mommy, while not worrying about what other people’s expectations might be.”
In the studio, the quartet reveled in leveraging their new freedom and strengths through their old formula. While Pearl had previously fitted lyrics into the others’ songs, she brought her own song ideas into the writing room for Mommy. Stein, meanwhile, relished the opportunity to riff out some new lead guitar parts after relinquishing that role while fronting Turbo Fruits. Vasquez evolved from a rough-around-the-edges rocker in the band’s early days to the band’s limber, inventive engine. Eatherly’s newly diversified skill set led to even more robust songs. “He’d be shouting out melody and production ideas while drumming,” Stein says. “He’s that super-talented motherfucker that pisses you off because he plays everything better than you.”
The thunderous capacity of the rhythm section powers songs like “Big Trouble”, a siren-laden jam where Pearl insists on her own emotions and reality. Elsewhere, “Worship the Whip” plays out like an explicit, leather-clad dom evolution of “Whip It”, the riotous “Pleasure Seeker” stomps and snarls through a glorious layer of fuzz, and reverb-laden retro ballad “Teenage Heaven” brings a relationship back to a place that’s no bickering and all making out.
With a fresh slate of tour dates already booked, Be Your Own Pet are looking forward to sharing this new version of themselves with fans who are thrilled to reconnect and new fans who may not have been old enough to remember their first run. But the band are also longing to reconnect with each other and a part of themselves. “Mommy is the bitch in charge, the one in control,” Pearl says. “It’s a reclamation of myself.” With that, the quartet are ready to step back out into the wild, vicious Be Your Own Pet world and rough things up again – but this time, on their own terms.
As lockdown approached in 2020, Chicago-based singer Lili Trifilio was wrapping up a tour in support of Beach Bunny’s debut album, Honeymoon. Suddenly, she found herself back at her parents’ house, coping with her new reality. To deal, she retreated into sci-fi stories and her always-active imagination. She envisioned new places to travel in her mind, thus dreaming up big, bombastic pop sounds to construct Beach Bunny’s highly anticipated sophomore album, Emotional Creature.
Simultaneously about personal growth, Emotional Creature is a collection of highly relatable songs that capture the highs and lows of new relationships, the joys and vulnerabilities of letting someone in, the gut-wrenching realities of experiencing anxiety, leaving toxic relationships, and seeing yourself through the eyes of the one you love. These complex feelings are expertly contrasted with ultra-poppy melodies, anthemic choruses, and a slight punk edge. “The songs have grown with me over time,” Trifilio explains. “Some of them were written in various stages of life, and I think as we go through different experiences and hardships, you come out stronger. I’ve grown as a person, so the songwriting reflects that.”
With its openhearted, vulnerable themes and progressive, hook-filled take on pop rock and pop punk, Emotional Creature only further cements Beach Bunny and Trifilio’s well-earned reputation as a leading voice of their generation.
Car Seat Headrest began as a solo project of Will Toledo in 2010. Recording in cars, bedrooms, and other solitary spaces, Toledo self-released 10 Car Seat Headrest records during his college years. In 2015, after signing with Matador Records, Car Seat Headrest expanded to include Andrew Katz on drums, Ethan Ives on guitar, and Seth Dalby on bass.
Now 10 years in, the four-piece is starting fresh with their 2020 release, Making A Door Less Open. The album, which features their first new music in 4 years, also marks a shift in sound towards the electronic and the eccentric, and introduces a mysterious character called “Trait”, Toledo’s new alternate persona.
Jayla Kai is both a product of her environment and totally her own. She grew up near Woodstock, placing her in a community of musicians who she cites as key mentors. Kai studied classical violin from a young age before picking up guitar, beginning to write songs and building a repertoire of her own music. While studying composition and songwriting at Bard college, she released her debut EP Epitome in July of 2021. Now she is gearing up for a new and different release, the Short Song Project.
The Short Song Project is about play, navigating and reveling in the freedom afforded by curiosity, innocence, empowerment and excitement. It explores Kai’s inner world with unconstrained openness, inviting everybody in.
“The project largely deals with navigating how I see myself, cycling through playful, realistic, somber, theatrical, and joyful self-images. It gives a space and a voice to each of these characters.”
Kai’s influences are throughout the project: Wet Leg’s well-placed humor, Still Woozy’s lush layers, Noname’s sharp poetry, Dora Jar’s whimsical longing, Sylvan Esso’s fiercely accessible pursuit of adventure. Primarily self-produced and developed with a couple of close collaborators, the project is preserved as it was conceived: jagged, unique and personal.
Interspersed are recordings of the violin which Kai grew up playing, samples of her college’s orchestra setting up, and percussive sounds made by miking her jeans, to name a few. She sings in crisp vocal stacks, with bitcrushed jaggedness and through gritty guitar amps. She is between intense self-awareness and outrageous confidence. She is vibrating with ideas.
The Short Song Project is a bold, dynamic and whimsical album that is everything except predictable.
The latest from Meernaa’s digital EP, “I Believe In You,” is out now on Keeled Scales, alongside previously-released singles “Another Dimension” and “On My Line.”
Meernaa pairs songwriter Carly Bond’s dusky, dexterous vocals with sensual, technically refined compositions that reference neo-soul, classic R&B, and the passionate side of indie-pop, with influences as diverse as Sade, Cate Le Bon, Minnie Riperton, and Talk Talk.
Throughout Meernaa’s work, Carly Bond has viewed heavy themes like addiction and loss through the lens of love. On “I Believe In You”:
“Growing up both my parents were drug addicts. They eventually became sober, but even through their sobriety their mental health was neglected. This song is about how I actively rebelled against that lifestyle and let myself believe that I had a right to have good things in my life.”
“On My Line” was inspired by Joni Mitchell’s “Car On A Hill” and channels a sad, cool acceptance of rejection, and in that, a sense of release.
“Another Dimension” is about a vivid dream Bond had where she traveled back in time to meet her partner 10 years before they’d ever actually met. After she woke she couldn’t shake the visceral, lingering feeling.
Bond grew up in the Bay Area, with poetry and music her main ways to escape and process her feelings. She self-soothed with a cassette of Whitney Houston’s self-titled album and eventually began learning guitar and writing songs of her own in high school.
Wanting to learn more about music, and unsure of whether she should go to college for music production, she began interning at Tiny Telephone Recording. Eager to record her own music, Bond saved up her tips from her job at a pizza place to afford a day in the studio. She met her future bandmate and husband Rob Shelton that day, his first time engineering a session in that studio.
They began playing in bands together and in 2020 moved to Los Angeles together to open their own studio Altamira Sound.
Part of a blooming Los Angeles music scene, Carly Bond is a session and touring guitarist who’s worked with artists such as Luke Temple, Jerry Paper, Suzanne Vallie, and Miya Folick.
Meernaa has shared bills with Helado Negro, Miya Folick, Nilüfer Yanya, Brijean, and Sam Evian. Bond leads a complete band, which fully realize Meernaa’s smoldering performances.
Arrangements, the upcoming fourth record from Preoccupations, begins with the pounding metallic slash of guitar strings of “Fix Bayonets!” It’s harsh and desolate at first, but builds into a thrilling synth sprint. The track —from its call-to-arms title and tense first guitar phrases to its whirlwind evolution— sets the stage for what is to come: a Preoccupations record that weaves their guitar-heavy origins with their newer synth-based work. The result is Arrangements, a record that is at once the band’s most intense, engaging, and playful work yet.
Work on Arrangements began in the fall of 2019, when vocalist and bassist Matt Flegel and guitarist Danny Christiansen met up with Munro at his Studio St. Zo in Montreal. The three wrote the record’s material and recorded all of the bed tracks, then drummer Mike Wallace joined and laid down his parts. All told, drums, guitars, and bass were completed during the sessions at Studio St. Zo. The band planned to reconvene in a couple of months and decide what else the songs needed.
When COVID hit, those plans were halted. Munro was in Calgary on tour with his partner when shutdowns began, so he ended up staying in the city with his parents for the next 16 months. He whipped up a make-shift studio in their house, and the record was finished remotely via Munro and Flegel sending tracks back and forth. All of Munro’s vocals and keyboard parts were completed in this new set up, while Flegel’s vocals were done in New York. Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) mixed the record, and Mikey Young (Total Control) mastered it.
The isolation in part encouraged the band to reconnect with elements of their earlier releases. Munro, holed up in Calgary with endless weed gummies, “obsessively” doubled keyboards on guitars and vice versa, sampled the recordings using an old Ensoniq keyboard sampler, and made new parts out of the samples. While Munro was committed to making keyboards the centerpiece of the band’s 2016 and 2018 releases, this time, guitar returned to the spotlight — an instrument he describes as more fun and visceral to play. Christiansen’s guitar is in a unique tuning for almost the entire record, blurring and smearing the tracks while Munro’s standard-tuning riffs provide melody and clarity.
The album’s title —like that of their 2018 LP New Material— is literal and cheeky, a sharp contrast to the band’s sonic aesthetic. Having finished it entirely on their own, the band has decided to self-release the record outside of Canada. Long-time co-conspirators Flemish Eye will handle the record’s Canadian release.
Thematically speaking, Arrangements is dark and direct: “The lyrics are pretty conspicuous and self explanatory on this one, but it’s basically about the world blowing up and no one giving a shit,” says Flegel.
Lead single “Ricochet” follows “Fix Bayonets!” with a gothic dark pop churn and Flegel’s mournful cries: “Everything tastes like the bitter end,” he calls, and Wallace carries the track out on lashing snare rolls. “Death Of Melody” recalls the martial, machine-like rhythms of the band’s 2015 full-length, switching into Bowie-meets-shoegaze territory before long.
“Slowly” leans further into these atmospherics, ditching its macabre prog-pop beginnings for a swirling, galactic outro, while “Advisor,” at nearly eight minutes, reverses this form, taking time to grow a universe of sounds before bursting into a blasted-out synth closing act.
Closer “Tearing Up The Grass” is a galvanizing six-minute swan song, a shimmering, mostly major-key shroom trip of a post-rock song. It’s bursting with energy and clarity, even through dozens of layers of voices, guitars, synths, bass, and drums: they align in that way that only Preoccupations can make them, creating something that feels prehistoric and unsettling and marvelous and true.
With Arrangements, Preoccupations finally and confidently inhabit the dystopia that they have been carefully creating from their musical genesis. In a room with taped up windows, with only a tiny pinprick of light beaming from the otherworld onto the far wall — upside down and blurred, yet recognizable enough to fill you with warm familiarity and nostalgia of unknown origins.
“Arrangements” is out September 9.
