Annie DiRusso: The Best of What’s Next

The NYC-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter has announced her debut album, Super Pedestrian. Watch the music video for “Back in Town” and read our exclusive profile on DiRusso below.

Annie DiRusso: The Best of What’s Next

Annie DiRusso has millions of views on TikTok, hundreds of thousands of Spotify listeners and headline shows already under her belt. Yet, when I spoke to her this past Monday afternoon—T-minus five days until the announcement of her debut album, Super Pedestrian, its accompanying tour and the release of the record’s fourth single, “Back in Town”—DiRusso simply looked like any other 25-year-old. But that’s kind of the point.

On Super Pedestrian, DiRusso is back in town at long last, and not just as Annie DiRusso, TikTok sensation or Annie DiRusso, Touring Rockstar, but as Annie DiRusso, 23-turned-24-turned-25-year-old trying to figure out how to exist in the world—which is, really, what we’re all trying to figure out, at any and every point in each of our lives. But DiRusso had to jump a higher hurdle than most of us. She went from being a normal 20-something stuck in COVID-19 isolation to spending almost three years constantly on tour, all without a second to breathe and make sense of herself in this brave new world—post-COVID, post-TikTok-virality—she found herself in. Finally, after all that time on the road, DiRusso knew it was time to get off the tour bus and walk on her own two feet again. Time, in other words, to go full-on super pedestrian.

Part of the meaning behind the record’s title, DiRusso tells me, is a bit of an in-joke about the fact she’s never had a driver’s license. I try to defend her, saying she’s a native New Yorker, so, really, not knowing how to drive is kind of fair game, but she waves it off: “Yeah, but I live in Nashville now, and Nashville is a driving city. I just kind of made it a walkable city for myself.” This was the initial genesis for the album name, but as time went on, it started to feel more and more apt for the record: “It gives me a sense of autonomy,” DiRusso says. “That’s what the album is all about. It’s me trying to reckon with my autonomy, basically—trying to figure out what it means, and how it manifests in all different areas of my life: socially, sexually and, yeah, even in actual transportation. That’s what, actually, a lot of [ages] 23 and 24 were about for me.”

That’s when most of the songs on the record were written: a year, two years ago, fresh off of tour and getting her feet back under her. But DiRusso is 25 now, and she’s spent the last few dozen months reacquainting herself with the super pedestrian lifestyle—it’s time for Annie DiRusso to get back on the road.

After Super Pedestrian releases on March 7th, DiRusso will only have a few weeks to breathe before hitting the road again for her sprawling, 32-show, two-month, cross-country roadtrip: The Back In Town Tour, titled after the impossibly catchy single released today. But, again, this is far from their first rodeo. The name of the tour couldn’t be more fitting: Annie DiRusso is going to be back in town, back on tour, even though this is, technically, her debut record.

But that’s all the way in March. For now, DiRusso is subletting in Chinatown, her temporary home base filled with absolutely immaculate decor—so much so that I notice it immediately, even from my admittedly shitty vantage point on the other side of a Zoom screen (“The person I’m subletting from is an artist,” she says, gesturing at the wall-spanning work of abstract art behind her, “so I kind of lucked out”). The musician herself is in a henley tee and a pair of huge headphones, currently leaning back on her elbows (and quite possibly sitting on the floor, which endeared me to her instantly) and evidently thinking very, very hard. I wait, anticipating. Eventually, DiRusso’s facial journey reaches its destination and she sits upright once more as she says with utter certainty: “Okay. I’ve got it.”

A beat. Then, with total confidence and a small pause after each word, as if to let them sink in fully, DiRusso declares: “Full Bush, Party July, Big Nap.” She grins after, a small thing but a sly one, proud of the phrase—and deservedly so. “Full Bush Party July Big Nap,” I parrot back, unable to keep the sheer awe from my voice. “Oh my god, that’s beautiful.”

We had been talking about those terrible, nonsensical Spotify Wrapped “genres,” and I asked DiRusso what she thinks her music’s ridiculous Wrapped genre title would be—and while I had a hunch she would think up something good (seeing as she is, after all, Annie DiRusso), in my ignorance I failed to consider that the result would be straight-up glorious. Full Bush Party July Big Nap. Screw that old urban legend about Hemingway’s famous six-word story. DiRusso just blew those baby shoes out of the water.

Look, there’s a lot I could say about Annie DiRusso’s music by way of describing it. I could say that she’s often categorized as indie rock, which, while not incorrect, feels a little incomplete, considering the rollicking alt-pop feel she infuses into her tracks that makes them feel tailor-made for drunkenly dancing alone in your bedroom at 2 AM. I could say that she blends the euphoric bite of GUTS-era Olivia Rodrigo with the gauzy, introspective contemplation of boygenius and the universal-feeling relatability of Taylor Swift’s lyricism. I could say that, when speaking of musical influences, she often cites indie-rockers like Wednesday and Alex G, past tour-mates like Samia, Declan McKenna and Hannah Cole, her roommate Caroline Culver (the two are a serious power duo) and even country singers like Ruston Kelly or timeless icons like Kate Bush. But, honestly, I don’t even need to. The single best description of DiRusso’s music that I could give you is the one she coined herself: Full Bush Party July Big Nap.

Full Bush Party July Big Nap energy is undoubtedly the intangible, addictive source of Super Pedestrian’s power, and DiRusso milks it for all it’s worth in the best way possible. Pulses of it can be heard throughout DiRusso’s discography, as well, but it really isn’t until now that this potential has been fully realized—and much of that, likely, has to do with DiRusso’s own growing confidence in not only her work, but herself as an artist and as a person (and, perhaps most of all, the relationship between the two). But finding this happy place took some time.

A Guitar, A Dream, and A Tour

Annie DiRusso has always wanted to play music. She taught herself guitar and started writing songs when she was 11 years old—specifically, after watching a Taylor Swift documentary in which Swift insisted that anyone who loves music should learn how to play it, advice DiRusso followed vehemently. Growing up in New York, she made her parents drive her up to the Hudson Valley so she could play at open mic events. The Valley’s open mic scene, she’s joked before, was more or less a bunch of 60-year-old men plus one teenager with a guitar: her. Eventually, she left New York to head to college in Nashville, where she studied songwriting. In other words, while DiRusso’s rise to relative prominence via TikTok may have been sudden, her journey with music has absolutely been a lifelong one.

“I always wanted to tour so bad,” DiRusso says, laughing. “When I was like 14, I was like ‘And when I’m 16, I’ll be going on tour.’” She says that last part in a silly, almost-nasal voice, as if to poke fun at the ridiculousness of her naivety—and in most cases, I’d be inclined to agree. But, in this specific instance, I feel like that childish guess wasn’t too far off. She went on tour with Samia just a few years later. “All I wanted to do in high school was open for artists, and I always assumed that was how I would grow my fanbase, because I love playing live,” DiRusso continues. “But then, of course, during COVID, that became a non-starter.”

She had a few listeners prior to the pandemic, just through releasing a song here and there (she released her first two singles, “Don’t Swerve” and “Jonathan,” as early as 2018) and getting them on the Spotify algorithm once in a while. Then, on one fateful day in early 2021, DiRusso’s friend talked her into posting one of her songs on TikTok. She did so, using a short clip of her single “Nine Months”—and that, as they say, was that. Except it wasn’t. Hardly a few months later, DiRusso had another song (”Coming Soon”) go viral on the app, its confessional-style and honest lyrics about growing up immediately resonating with countless terminally online twenty-somethings. Lightning isn’t known to strike twice, or so the old adage goes, but if you’re Annie DiRusso, I suppose anything is possible.

Either way, the fact remains: DiRusso went into COVID-19 quarantine with a guitar and a dream, and came out of it on tour. “It was just kind of funny,” she says of the experience. “You never really know what is gonna flip the tide, and then that happened to do it. And then, because of that, when shows came back [after COVID lockdown ended], I was able to open for Samia. Then, as soon as I got to that first show, there were people already singing my songs. That first show in Burlington, people were yelling the line on ‘Coming Soon’ that I always pictured people yelling. I was freaking out. The whole tour was so magical—it was, like, out of nowhere, that was my first full band tour. And then, out of nowhere, I was able to do my first headline tour after that.”

Thus, after that long stretch of COVID-induced isolation and a sudden viral clip at the tail end of 2021, DiRusso found herself spending the next two-and-a-half years in constant company, first opening for Samia in 2022, then Declan McKenna, then finally headlining her own nation-wide tour in 2023—all of this with just a handful of singles and a five-song EP to her name (although both are, of course, quite good). As jaw-droppingly impressive as that is, and as life-changing and incredible her experience on the road was, the whole situation was also, DiRusso admits, just “really funny.” “I only had six songs out, I think!” she laughs, recalling. “I had, like, no music! I honestly had no music out. I don’t even know what the hell I played.”

But as magical as it was, it was also a lot. “Touring is one of my favorite things in the world,” DiRusso says, “But you do really lose yourself in it. You’re just in this micro-environment with the same people—and they’re beautiful people, and you make beautiful friendships. But you really lose touch with being alone.”

This sentiment would ring true to many artists, I’m sure, but few artists likely followed DiRusso’s specific, incredible (and, I’d imagine, incredibly draining) pipeline. Every wannabe musician dreams of striking TikTok gold like DiRusso did at the end of 2021, and they especially dream of it happening as early in their careers as DiRusso’s moment was in hers. And even though DiRusso is the first to acknowledge how lucky she was to undergo such an overnight transformation, and how grateful she is that it happened, that life did have its drawbacks: “I was playing the songs I wrote when I was 19, and wearing the costume I wore when I was 20—and I love the songs and I love the outfit, and it was all amazing,” DiRusso assures me once more. “But I also feel like it was so hard for me to figure out who I was at 23 when I was basically playing this 20-year-old version of myself every night.”

During this time, while touring with artists like Samia and McKenna, DiRusso wrote God, I Hate This Place, the five-song EP that, up until today’s announcement of Super Pedestrian, was the only actual multi-track project in her discography. “That was a really, really tough project for me to write,” she reveals. “It’s so hard to write on tour because you’re never alone. And I feel like I was pulling from things that happened to me when I was 16 because I was just working, just touring, that whole time. There’s only so many songs you can write about driving through Texas, you know?”

She tried to write about the rare moments she had between tours, but those attempts rarely worked out in her favor, either. “I’d get home from tour and be like ‘I need to write,’ because I hadn’t written anything. I needed songs to put out. So I would just hole myself up in my bedroom to try and come up with something, all alone after not being alone for months on end, and I would immediately get so depressed. I would have nothing to write about, and that just made it all worse. It would become this crazy cycle.” Hence the need for a break—some time to be just…well, super pedestrian. As the end of her God I Love This Tour approached, DiRusso made a vow to herself to do things differently this time around in order to avoid falling back into that same doomed cycle. “I was like, ‘This time, I’m adamantly not doing that. So I did Party July.”

The Party July Mindset

What is Party July, you might ask? More or less, it’s precisely what it sounds like, although you can take the “Party” aspect of it more or less literally (it’s more about the vibe than a month-long bender, although don’t get DiRusso wrong, you do absolutely party) and the “July” portion as more an example than a mandate (you can Party July in any month; it’s a headspace, not a calendar holiday). In DiRusso’s specific case, Party July was talked about long before the month approached, viewed as something of a light at the end of a tunnel. “I don’t drink or party on tour, because I can’t sing then, so I’m always going to sleep first and waking up last—and I’m on tour with all of my friends who are all hanging out and partying all the time. It’s always so annoying!” DiRusso says with a small smile, no bite to it at all. “So that last month or two of tour, that May and June, I kept saying to my band and crew, like, ‘Alright, y’all, July is Party July. When we get back to Nashville, it’s Party July.’ And everyone just…followed through.”

But, again, Party July is not merely about waking up with throbbing hangovers. “I partied, sure, but I also just said yes to things,” DiRusso says. “Just hung out with friends all the time, not worrying about things.” She describes it as a huge turning point in her life, a time that absolutely defined that entire year for her. For Annie DiRusso, age 23 was all about Party July. And Party July was all about, well, just being 23—not a young adult in COVID isolation, not an up-and-coming rockstar on tour, just being a super pedestrian 23-year-old and doing super pedestrian 23-year-old things.

Well, shit, I thought. I’m 23. What am I doing with my life? Where is my Party July spirit? “I think I need to Party July,” I muse out loud, mid-interview. “You do need to Party July!” DiRusso gushes. “It’s a huge part of 23. You absolutely should. You kind of have to.”

Age is also, of course, a huge part of Super Pedestrian, an album written primarily when DiRusso was herself 23, with a surprisingly massive chunk of it written during the fabled Party July itself. “I wrote three songs that made the album in July within, like, three days of each other,” she recalls, then lists off the tracks in question: the summery anthem “Legs,” which was released as the record’s first single and has Party July written all over it; the softer, introspective “Wearing Pants Again,” which DiRusso wrote alongside Ruston Kelly and released as the third single; and the fuzzed up, distortion-heavy “I Am The Deer,” which DiRusso thought up while reading Richard Siken’s book of poems, Crush. (There was also, apparently, a fourth Party July track that almost made the album, but was cut last minute; at one point, DiRusso says the first draft of the record had around 20 songs before they whittled it back down to 11—so it sounds like she won’t need to worry about not having enough songs to fill up a setlist again for quite some time).

The Genesis of Super Pedestrian

Super Pedestrian might be a debut album, but it doesn’t feel like it; the record carries itself with a confidence and self-assuredness that feels at total odds with the actual facts. It’s the least debut-sounding debut that I’ve heard in years, and I mean that as a compliment. Even DiRusso herself finds it hard to think of Super Pedestrian as a “debut” in the traditional sense, feeling that it’s “more reflective of a sophomore record” than a debut—a description that I had already planned to use in the article myself until DiRusso beat me to the revelation.

“A lot of people’s debut records end up being a collection of their favorite songs from over the years. Mine is, like… Not that,” DiRusso laughs. “Mine is just a collection of songs I wrote literally within six, eight, months. I think that makes the album mean a lot to me, honestly, because it doesn’t feel like this puzzle-piece-connection of a bunch of different things. It feels very cohesive, and it does feel like a point in time, but I still feel like I’m in that point in time in some ways.”

In previous years, DiRusso has talked at length about how hard the songwriting process often was for her—but the difficulties she faced when writing in the past just…never surfaced this time around, possibly due to that Party July mindset. It felt like an anomaly, but as song after song kept flowing out of her, it started to become the norm rather than an exception to it. “I’m so happy to report that [songwriting] wasn’t this taxing, draining thing this time,” she tells me. “Songwriting was so easy for me this time around, and I was really, really, really scared of it, because I had always thought, like, ‘Oh, my debut album, how the hell am I going to write that many songs that I really like enough to release in such a short amount of time?’”

But the creation of Super Pedestrian was like no other songwriting process DiRusso had experienced before. It was fun, everything seemed to flow. She read constantly—from Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow to Siken’s Crush to the life’s work of Louise Glück and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. She began to find inspiration everywhere, in everything. She wrote with artists she’d spent years looking up to (like Kelly on “Wearing Pants Again,” the lyrics of which were thought up by the pair sitting together “with our diaries out in front of us, reading parts to each other”), as well as best friends and loved ones (like her roommate Caroline Culver and her tourmate/friend Hannah Cole, the three of whom cooked up “Legs” in a single night alongside a bottle of wine, all while still making their dinner reservation in time). It was good. Easy. Fun. Suspiciously so.

For instance, DiRusso and Kelly wrote the entirety of “Wearing Pants Again” in “like, two hours, while sitting on my couch” and then it was just done. It went too smoothly. DiRusso didn’t trust it. “Because it was so quick and easy, I was kind of like ‘I don’t know…’ and sat on the song for a few weeks,” she says of the track, which she now calls one of her personal favorites. “I was just, like, ‘Why was it so easy?’ And that’s how a lot of the record felt. Everything felt so natural.” She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but one never came. The song she wrote with Culver and Cole in between glasses of wine and dinner dates was actually good. The line one of them proposed as a joke—”I don’t give a shit / If we fuck or we date”—ended up becoming the track’s centerpiece, and in the final mix, you can already hear how it will sound when chanted by audiences til their throats go hoarse.

Super Pedestrian marks the first time DiRusso’s enjoyed the songwriting process, but it’s also another first: the first time she’s gotten heavily involved on the production side of a project. This is partially because, up until she found Caleb Wright (who eventually produced the album) (and whom she refers to as “one of the most magical beings in the world”), DiRusso struggled to find producers who seemed to share her vision for the record. “A lot of times, I don’t want things to sound like a perfectly trained guitar player is playing. That’s not really reflective of…well, me, to be honest. And, really, I think that any kind of guitar-playing, of music, honestly, could be incredible if it’s just real.”

DiRusso cites an old clip of Angel Olson performing her song “Unfuck the World” as a constant source of inspiration: “The way she’s playing guitar is, like, ultimately insane, but it’s so perfect.” Forcing too much polish on a track intended to be raw, vulnerable, cathartic can ruin it entirely, and that’s what DiRusso found herself fearing for her own tracks: “I always felt like the songs were getting away from me, like it was no longer mine—and not in a beautiful way, but in an ‘I’m losing it’ way—and that is actually one of my least favorite feelings in the world.”

In the end, DiRusso decided to teach herself how to produce the demos, to take control of the situation and grant herself that much-needed autonomy—which, really, could not be more perfect for Super Pedestrian, considering its thematic core. Her friend and bandmate Eden took her to a Guitar Center and helped her figure out what she needed for a home studio setup, albeit a very basic one. “I didn’t have a synth in my setup, so I was just using my vocal and then manipulating it to make it sound like a synth,” she says. “And that’s actually what ended up being in the beginning of ‘Legs.’ It’s not a synth. It’s still my voice, pitched and manipulated.”

She showed what she had of “Legs” to Eden and asked him to cut a bass part on it, but before either of them knew it, they had moved to Eden’s home studio and had spent the past three days working on it nonstop, stuck in an indescribably euphoric creative fugue. “We got into this crazy flow, this excitement, of, like, ‘This is the coolest, best thing we’ve ever done. I just want to stay up all night and work on this,” DiRusso says. “And it was kind of the thing that I’d always been looking for? It was the same excitement as I had when I wrote a song for the first time when I was 12, or when I played with a band for the first time. I hadn’t felt that in such a long time. It was just this eye-opening childlike wonder, this lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and I feel so lucky that we were able to capture it somehow.” She even says that those few days-turned-to-weeks working with Eden on demos (first “Legs,” then five or six more) were “probably the most fulfilling times I’ve ever had making music.”

Even the recording process went down disconcertingly easy, although much of this was thanks to Wright, who ended up being the “father figure” Eden and DiRusso needed to take the project across the finish line, as she jokingly calls him. According to DiRusso, Wright was the first producer to actually stop and ask her what the record was about. “Caleb was so amazing at pacing, at creating a sense of wonder,” she gushes. “He was concerned about the things that I was concerned about: getting the emotion across, serving the lyrics, experimenting.” Between Eden and the rest of the band, Wright on production, and Drop of Sun’s Alex Farrar (who engineered the record), DiRusso felt like she had found her “dream team.” “It was kind of the most beautiful experience of my life,” she says, wistfully. “It was just such an easy and enlightening time, like the songwriting.”

One night that seems to stand out is the evening they recorded the final vocals for “Legs,” the song she wrote with Culver and Cole. “I needed to get in the head space of ‘Legs,’ which was Party July,” DiRusso reminisces. “We just got the tequila out, and we all took shots, and I just re-recorded the vocals drunk. It was this really cool experience of, like, trying to get into the character of basically me from a little less than a year before, when I wrote it, and it was just so much fun.”

When the Party Stops

You might have noticed that the word “fun” keeps cropping up, and that’s honestly just because it’s one of the best words for Super Pedestrian itself. It’s simply fun. DiRusso marvels at the night-and-day difference between the “dark, dark, dark songs like ‘Body’ and ‘Frisco Forever’” on her EP and “songs like ‘Wet’ on this record, and ‘Back in Town’ and ‘Legs’” (and, I personally would add, “Derek Jeter,” which is 100 seconds of straight chants and claps—and it’s great). But that doesn’t mean the record is happy-go-lucky 24/7; far from it. A lot of it is written in a more observational, introspective tenor, which makes sense, considering that DiRusso quips that “for those eight months of my life where I was writing this record, my whole job was to think.”

Super Pedestrian is chockfull of self-awareness, including the kind of self-aware observations you wish you could ignore. There’s “I Am The Deer,” which is, in DiRusso’s own words, really “a self-sabotage song”—it’s about being, at once, the deer in the headlights and the car veering towards it (“Which is ironic, because I don’t drive,” DiRusso laughs, “But! I do crash into myself.”) There’s the opener “Ovid,” which revolves around one of my favorite couplets off the album, primarily because it feels like something my own therapist would absolutely accuse me of: “Always looking for something to change my life,” DiRusso sings. “Never want to hear nothing to change my mind.”

But perhaps the biggest shift from the “Party” feel of Party July would be “Hungry,” which encapsulates the mid-twenties experience of looking back at the things and people that had hurt you in the past and finally allowing yourself to be angry about them, now that you’re old enough, distant enough, for the sadness to dissipate and the well-deserved fury to seep through. The searing final verse has lived in my head ever since I first heard it: “Today I called my mom / And told her what you did / After all of these years / I’m finally sure of it,” DiRusso sings, a fit of rage bleeding through voice and instrumentation alike. “You told me your mom’s a bitch / Although she raised a monster, / I don’t think she is / It makes me not want kids / Just knowing what you did / It makes me not want kids.”

“I’m not a very angry person, but I wrote [‘Hungry’] in this very angry week of my life,” DiRusso recalls. “There kept being all these reminders of things I went through a few years before, when I was 20 and 21, and looking back at it as a 24-year-old… I was like, ‘What the fuck?!’ Instead of being sad, I was just so angry. I was just thinking a lot, going on these really angry walks where my fists were, like, balled up, and I couldn’t stop thinking about [this line from ‘Nine Months,’ a single from 2021]: ‘The words it’s not my fault epeat until I fall asleep each night.’” DiRusso has a complicated relationship with that couplet: while she initially thought it was her most important lyric, she once sang it at a concert unusually packed with men (she was opening for an artist with a more male-predominant base) and felt suddenly unsure about its worth. “I found myself being, like, ‘Is that just a stupid lyric?” she remembers. “Are all the men in the audience just thinking ‘All right, we get it?’”

That feeling, unfortunately, seems to come with the territory of being a woman musician these days—especially a young one, and especially a young one in a pop-adjacent genre, and especially a young one in a pop-adjacent genre who sings about sex—and Annie DiRusso certainly checks all four of those boxes (as well as a secret fifth: got her initial boost off of TikTok). She recalls a time when a man from the music industry attended one of her concerts and said (not of ‘Nine Months,’ but a different song’): “Only a 20-year-old girl could say that.” It’s not the worst thing someone could say by any means, of course, but it’s that specific tenor of condescension that all female artists—not just musicians, but artists in general—have surely become frustratingly familiar with. “It just gave me this feeling of, like, ‘Oh, maybe these ideas aren’t legitimate to the world,” DiRusso says.

But then time passed. DiRusso’s tour ended. Party July began and ended, too, soon fading into Angry October (which is not actually a thing, but does sum up the headspace she was in at the time she wrote “Hungry”). It’s that moment—writing “Hungry,” thinking back on that old lyric from 2021—that DiRusso identifies as a crucial turning point for her “in terms of the way I considered men and my music.” Now, at 25, and in 2025, she recognizes once more that “No matter how cheesy or how reflective [that lyric from ‘Nine Months’] is of being a twenty-whatever-something-girl,” DiRusso says. “I think that is probably the most important lyric in my discography, or at least it was then.”

When she first started writing Super Pedestrian (specifically, she says, with the track “Back in Town”), she found herself worried about its reception, particularly among that brand of listener, of men. “There were a few times where I was like, ‘Damn, maybe I talked about sex too much on this record.’ But then I just had to stop myself and say, ‘Well, why don’t I just write it and see?’” These days, since “Hungry” and Angry October, DiRusso has found some peace in kind indifference: “Since then, I’ve just been, honestly, a little apathetic towards what men like that might think about my music.” All things as they should be.

Besides, the number of people who resonate with DiRusso’s music surely outweighs the few naysayers. There’s a reason she went viral on TikTok, after all: DiRusso’s not afraid to get hyper-vulnerable or hyper-specific on her tracks, and that’s precisely why so many twenty-somethings insist on her music being the soundtrack to their own lives. “I remember being worried at one point that I was writing too specific, and then I would release the song, and people on TikTok would be like, ‘Uh, okay, I literally ghostwrote this in my diary,’” DiRusso laughs. “And that’s always so funny to me, because I’m like, ‘Really?! I thought I was saying this really specific thing.’ But that’s honestly my favorite compliment—one of my favorite things about writing, really; how the specificity of a line ends up making it feel so universal.”

While all those 2021 TikTok fans coming to Super Pedestrian looking for more confessional songs to scream-sing out of a rolled-down window certainly will not leave disappointed, in addition to all the bangers (and there are many), DiRusso hints at something even deeper through the course of the record—something as genuinely moving as it is relatable. “I feel like, this time around, I’m coming from such a place of, just… Being in my body and stepping into myself,” she says. “It’s just so meaningful for me to listen to ‘Body,’ which is a very painful song, and then to see the way I’m able to talk about being in my body on this record—not as this hugely taxing thing, but this beautiful and freeing and autonomous place to be.”

DiRusso continues, “I hope that, with this record, people can feel the sense of freedom I felt while making it—that ease, that groundedness and clarity. The songs I had written before, I was still carrying a lot from the past, and they were so heavy with the weight of it. But here…” She pauses, thinking. “I don’t know. I feel like I was able to step into myself in a way that you do in your early twenties, and I’m just happy that I was able to get that on record.” It’s 2025 now, and it’s a bit late to still be celebrating Brat Summer. So, for the twenty-somethings among us, myself included: Maybe this is the year we go for something a little more specific. Maybe this year we go all in—we go Full Bush Party July Big Nap.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

Check out Annie DiRusso’s upcoming tour dates:

3/24 – Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
3/26 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater
3/28 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
3/29 – Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Fest
3/31 – Vancouver, BC @ Fox Cabaret
4/01 – Seattle, WA @ Neumos
4/02 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
4/04 – San Francisco, CA @The Independent
4/05 – Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom
4/06 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah
4/09 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar
4/11 – Oklahoma City, OK @ Beer City Music Hall
4/12 – Austin, TX @ Antone’s Nightclub
4/13 – Dallas, TX @ Dada
4/15 – Orlando, FL @ The Social
4/16 – Tampa, FL @ Crowbar
4/18 – Birmingham, AL @ Saturn
4/19 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West
5/23 – Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall
5/24 – Washington DC @ 9:30 Club
5/25 – Asbury Park, NJ @ The Wonder Bar
5/28 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall Grand Ballroom
5/29 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club Music Hall
5/30 – South Burlington, VA @ Higher Ground
5/31 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB
6/02 – Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground
6/03 – Lakewood, OH @ Mahall’s
6/05 – Detroit, MI @ El Club
6/06 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
6/07 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line
6/08 – Milwaukee, WI @ Vivarium
6/10 – Saint Louis, MO @ Off Broadway Nightclub

 
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