An Interview with Puppy Angst
This past year, Philadelphia band Puppy Angst cemented themselves in the city’s buzzing indie rock scene, with a signature shoegaze-inspired dream pop sound and honest lyricism recounting heartbreak and self-discovery. In anticipation of the band’s recently announced vinyl reissue of their 2022 debut, Scorpio Season, I was able to interview the band—featuring frontperson Alyssa Millman, drummer Eric Naroden, guitarist/backing vocalist Dan Leinweber, bassist John Heywood, and synth player/backing vocalist Pauli Mia— to look back on the record’s creation and the journey since its release, as well as what’s coming next for Puppy Angst.
Photo by jay leiby
What a year it’s been for Puppy Angst since the release of Scorpio Season! How was the experience of bringing this record on the road this year?
Alyssa: It was incredible to do some longer tours with this band! We’d done a few weekenders here and there, but this year was the first time we really got to tour and get further out than ever before. It was really special being as far away from home as Texas and seeing people singing along or having them tell me our songs mean a lot to them. It was also really cool talking to people from all over at the SXSW showcases; some even said we were one of the bands on their radar that week who they’d traveled to see. It felt like a movie and a dream and it was so beautiful to experience that connection with people who I would have never met otherwise!
Eric: It was a blast! It’s always great to see our friends all over the country, make new ones, spend time together, and share our music with new people.
Dan: I really enjoyed getting to see new places and bands I would have never discovered otherwise. Just getting out of the bubble of our day to day to focus on performing and showing our songs to brand new groups of people.
John: It’s been great seeing people in cities outside of our hometown of Philadelphia resonate with our music.
Pauli: I joined Puppy Angst right before going on tour to SXSW and it’s been so fun! It’s so cool to see people respond so positively to these songs whether they knew us already or not.
The members of Puppy Angst come to this project as veterans of Philly’s music scene. How did the band come together, and have you taken any influences from your bandmates’ other works?
A: I started playing solo shows in 2016, after I had already joined/helped found Past Life and Blushed earlier that year. It was originally just my creative outlet and I treated it as a backburner project; if one of my other more established bands couldn’t play a show I wanted to play, I’d offer myself up for a solo set.
I really wanted to make it a full band for a long time, but didn’t manage to until the summer of 2018. It came together with the original lineup of Eric Naroden on drums, myself and Dylan Kittrell on guitar, and Kyle Lim on bass. Kyle stepped back because of a move and other projects getting busier in early 2019, so John Heywood joined in on bass. My partner Dan Leinweber joined during the recording process for Scorpio Season, and we had Mol White learn the album and play synth and sing with us for our album release show in December 2022, as well as a couple gigs in January 2023. They weren’t able to go on tour though, so Pauli Mia ended up joining in February 2023 on synth/backing vocals.
As far as any direct influences from my bandmates’ other works, I’m sure they’re there in how everyone writes their parts and plays, but I think it’s more a subconscious thing that I can’t come up with specific examples for at the moment!
How did your experiences in former bands and touring with bands like Kississippi shape the process of working on Scorpio Season?
A: So we did a bulk of the tracking for this album with John, Eric, and myself in July 2021, right before I left for the Kississippi Mood Ring headlining tour in August 2021. Originally, I was going to write and track all of the guitar on the album after we parted ways with our original guitarist Dylan (sidenote: their project Velvet Graves is absolutely incredible, go check out their album Damage Control). However, with how busy Kississippi stuff was, I began to worry I wouldn’t have time for all the vocals, synth, AND coming up with more guitar, so we enlisted the help of my partner Dan. Besides “Yellow Paint”, Dan’s guitar parts are on every other song of the album; he’s certainly got a different approach to guitar writing than I (or Dylan) do, so the outcome was a lot different than if I had written all the guitar parts myself. We doubled a lot of his lead parts on synth as well, so I can’t even imagine how different it might’ve been without Dan!
It was definitely good having some prior recording and touring experience, but this was the first time I’ve been part of a full-length album and especially one where it was so personal to me, so it was something new entirely. I greatly appreciate all of the experiences and opportunities I’ve had with my other projects that have given me the confidence to be all in on Puppy Angst!
PHOTO BY paige walter
I had read that the writing process for the album began back in 2019, were there any songs from those initial sessions that made it onto the record?
A: Truthfully, the collection of songs on here spans a long time because I didn’t originally plan writing sessions intending to make this album. It worked out that they all feel very cohesive, at least for me, because they encapsulated a season of my life. There might be some songs I had from my time as a solo artist that I retired or never brought to the group, but I can’t really think of any songs we’d spent time on together as a band that didn’t end up on this album. It’s more like a “here’s what we’ve got up till now” and I’m glad it worked with the theme the album took on.
“Your Bones” was the earliest song from this collection, as it’s a total rewrite of a very old song I wrote when I was still a freshman in college (spring 2014 I think?) that we reimagined in early 2019 before Kyle left the band. “Yellow Paint” and “Aftermath” were also rewrites of older songs I had (“Aftermath” actually used to be a Blushed song!), but I didn’t rewrite those until summer/fall of 2020. I remember “Timetaker” was one I had started to play when I was still solo and put on the backburner so we didn’t really work on it together until way later. “Bedhead” was the first song we did with John as our bassist back in 2019. It all kinda blurs together, but there’s a mix of songs we had been starting to work on pre-lockdown, songs I had in the vault that I was planning to bring to the group and hadn’t had a chance to yet, and songs that I wrote or rewrote during lockdown. The true album writing process became me sending demos to everyone and them trying to come up with stuff at home on their own until we were able to start meeting up for in person practices again.
Your songwriting is so unapologetically honest, with vivid lyrics in songs like “Yellow Paint” that have remained etched into my brain to this day. What does your songwriting process look like, and did finding the power to be vulnerable through your lyricism come easily to you?
A: Thank you so much for the kind words! For lyrics, I mostly keep a lot of notes in my phone over time that I return to when I start coming up with guitar riffs, chord progressions, melodies, etc. to see if there’s anything there that’ll come together. I had a really bad writer’s block after I finished writing and demoing the album in late 2020 that spanned until I sat down to write our latest song “TKO”; it was written on the last or second to last day of 2022 under pressure to get a song ready for Fire Talk’s Open Tab Online. Recently, I’ve been able to get the floodgates open again. Sometimes I feel like lightning strikes and then suddenly I have a bunch of songs that all spill out at once. I wish I could describe the process better, but it’s kind of just a lot of noodling and pondering that eventually just comes together.
It’s still really scary to be this vulnerable and raw in my lyrics. There’s definitely a big jump in how personal and vulnerable I got between our 2018 EP Tiny Thoughts and Scorpio Season and I had to reckon with that. I almost backed out on including “Eternal (Stream of Consciousness)” on the album because it felt too honest and I was scared at how people would receive it. It’s hard to reckon with the fact that people might not react positively to something that feels so intensely personal. But this is kind of the only way I know how to write lyrics and in a lot of ways, it does come easily and naturally to me – until it’s time to share it with people and I get scared. I’m learning that if my vulnerable moments help even one person feel less alone, then I’ve done my job and I shouldn’t second guess that. It’s very real and it’s very me and hopefully that resonates with people the way my favorite music resonates with me.
The album is a Scorpio, of course, but if you also had to assign Moon and Rising astrological signs to the record what would they be?
A: I think it’d be really sick if it was a triple Scorpio or if it had my birth chart. But in the interest of accuracy, I plugged in the release date, time, and location; the result is Scorpio sun, Libra moon, Leo rising which feels kind of accurate. There’s certainly a lot of push and pull between moments of intensity and more playful, fun, poppy elements. I personally have a Scorpio sun, Leo moon, Capricorn rising combo so the fact that Scorpio and Leo are both represented there is fun for me!
Are there any moments on the record that you’re especially proud of?
A: I’m really proud of the whole thing! I’m especially proud of what I was able to do with my voice; I feel like I broke new ground for myself vocally and discovered a lot about myself as a singer. When I tracked “Yellow Paint” (the first song we finished tracking for), I did kinda go, “Whoa did I really just do that?” Same with the second chorus of “Your Bones” and the yell-y part towards the end of “Timetaker”. There’s some backing vocals moments that made me feel similarly, like some notes I was shocked were in my range after being out of college choirs/voice lessons for so long or harmonies I came up with that I actually used my music theory degree to arrange. I used to feel pretty insecure about my voice after receiving some not very constructive comments about it from a teacher and from college auditions, but I feel like this album taught me that I am a good singer and there’s people out there who will like my voice, even if it’s not what everyone considers as the “ideal” or “standard”.
I’m super proud of the guitar tones I was able to achieve with my guitar parts, especially on the back half of “Eternal (Stream of Consciousness)”. Also my jangly guitar parts and solo moment on “Yellow Paint” are a high point for me! I had my hand in a lot of pots, so I must also mention my arranging work with the backing vocals/harmonies and the synth parts; we didn’t have a synth player until after the record came out, so getting to work on those parts and coming up with tones on the Juno we used was very very cool. The “In Sensitivity” synth solos are definitely a high point for me there, too! I put a lot of myself into this album so it’s hard to pick just a few things! I’m glad I’m still so proud of it so long after finishing it.
E: I mean, the whole thing was such a fun undertaking and we were really lucky to work with such talented and insightful people on it. My personal favorite part of the record is the second half of “Bedhead”.
D: A lot of the lead lines that we ended up doubling on synth really stand out to me as parts that came out sounding way better than I could have planned.
J: I’m proud of the bassline I came up with for “In Sensitivity”. My goal was to add melodic interest to a song that mostly hovers around two chords, and I feel like I accomplished that.
If you could introduce Puppy Angst to our readers with just one track, which would it be and why?
A: So hard to choose just one! Maybe “Yellow Paint” because it gave me that feeling of “there’s no way I just wrote that, did I rip it off?” that I think happens when lightning strikes and you write a song that feels super catchy. I’m cheating and throwing in “The Pattern” too for a deep cut because I love an album closer and it has vocal/guitar/synth callbacks to the rest of the album, a chaotic and fun little synth arp, and a couple of friends contributed backing vocals which was very special and sweet.
E: I’d probably go with “Your Bones.” I just think that song encapsulates all of our individual influences the best.
D: “Bedhead” because it’s super fun to play and goes a lot of different places and sort of runs through the spectrum of what I think of as “Puppy Angst sounds”.
J: “Timetaker.” It’s an overlooked track, but it was always one of my favorites.
P: My favorite is “Bedhead” – I especially love the bass parts throughout. It’s perfectly dreamy with a bombastic and cathartic ending.
PHOTO BY JAY LEIBY