This Heat Is Slowly Killing Aunt Katrina

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Ryan Walchonski is in his Baltimore basement, which he’s converted into a home studio. It’s the sacred space where all of his songs begin. Behind him, throw blankets cover the walls to serve as makeshift acoustic panels. “I had moving blankets up there and my girlfriend was like, ‘You can’t do that,’” he says with a smirk, referring to a gingham-patterned blanket dotted with homesteads, and a fuzzy blue number with two farmers leaning over a fence to talk. It’s the perfect image. “To me, music is at its best, at its most important, when you’re focusing on the community that’s around you. You’re going to shows, you’re supporting other bands within your local space, and they’re supporting you,” Walchonski adds. “That was the reason I started Aunt Katrina.”

Once a solo project and now a full band, Walchonski founded Aunt Katrina after an amicable split from his old group, feeble little horse—a band he co-founded in 2021. After moving to Washington, D.C., Walchonski felt compelled to invest in his local music scene and turned to his own network for help. At first, it was mainly just an excuse to meet people. “Eric [Zidar], one of our guitar players, plays in a band called Tosser and works at a venue. I went to his work one day and was like, ‘Hey, someone told me that I should meet you,’” Walchonski remembers. “When you’re in a new place, you can either play kickball or you can go to local concerts. That’s just the mid-twenties experience.” Walchonski preferred the latter activity, and in time, the people he met at shows became his bandmates.

After meeting the rest of the crew, including Ray Brown, Laney Ackley, Emma Banks, Nick Miller, and Connor Peters, Walchonski refocused his fuzzed-out guitars on what would eventually become Aunt Katrina. Together, the members scrapped together some demos and released their debut EP, Hot, in 2023. The title is an ode to the band’s original name: “When we first started, our name was Hot Slut. I don’t think people wanted to work with us with that. Aunt Katrina is Emma’s aunt’s name, and it just sounded good to us.” The change worked for the band, who also use the real Aunt Katrina’s handwriting for their album art. She even makes appearances at their shows. “We’ve met the real Aunt Katrina a couple of times now,” Walchonski says. “It’s like meeting a celebrity.”

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Two years after the band’s debut, Aunt Katrina is now releasing their debut full-length, This Heat is Slowly Killing Me, an album Walchonski calls an ode to the “collaborative energy of the D.C punk scene.” “It was not lost on me that the EP was Hot and our first album is called This Heat is Slowly Killing Me,” he admits. While the EP pointed to the band’s past, these new songs were inspired by Walchonski’s present life. After fleshing out the demos for the album with the band, he perfected them with Alex Bass, a producer who lived on the opposite side of D.C. Walchonski drove across the city multiple times a week in a van with no A/C during the dog days of summer last year. “The drives were a solid 30 minutes of D.C. traffic. I don’t know if we were in a heatwave, but it was 95-plus and super humid. When you hit a part of the summer, it is just oppressive outside,” he elaborates. With only a cassette tape for sound (the car was too old to have a CD player,) the chaotic rock of This Heat served as the soundtrack for the journey. “The drive was suffocating, but that’s also how This Heat’s music makes me feel. I really like the song ‘Paper Hats’ that they do,” Walchonski admits with a grin.

The frenzied sounds of This Heat might not exactly match up with Aunt Katrina’s sentimental tones, but a throughline ties all the songs together: “I make chaotic music, but in a pretty way. They make chaotic music, but in a haunted way,” Walchonski gestures. The chaos he’s talking about is his band’s tendency to sashay between different genres. “I don’t think any of the songs really sound the same,” he says. From electronica to math rock, the album has a softer, more introspective lean than Walchonski’s previous band—but that same haze of distortion is there. “Another thing I like about Aunt Katrina is the songs are short and they’re sweet. If you don’t like a song that we’re playing live or on the record, it’ll probably be over in like a minute and a half.”

While the title of Aunt Katrina’s new album is a tribute to This Heat, the band took sonic inspiration from the mid-aughts noise-pop group The Radio Dept. “I have always admired their sound and their songwriting,” Walchonski tells me. “They scored the movie Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola. It’s an 1800s-style movie with this dream-pop soundtrack, so it’s a really beautiful melding of imagery.” This Heat is Slowly Killing Me’s yearning lyrics shroud in blurry guitars—it’s textured but neat, and that fusion of guitar-driven rock and electronic embellishments create a sound Walchonski creatively dubs “laptop gaze.” “This album is my attempt at a singer-songwriter album, and The Radio Dept. just has really great songs and cool textures in their music that I was really trying to emulate,” he says. “Also, their music is often sad or longing for something, which I’ve really connected to over the past few years, too.”

While the album has these impressions, it’s still Walchonski at every song’s core. Made during transition—including a move, evolving friendships, and the death of his grandparents—This Heat is Slowly Killing Me’s theme centers around the topics of impermanence and confusion (“I don’t understand the way things are again, how you took me and you left me here to die”). “I’m always making music, sometimes almost obsessively, and the lyrics always come from a place of whatever I’m going through at that time. I’m not always good at expressing negative emotions that I’m feeling, but music allows you to adopt a mask. You can hide behind a song, but still be very vulnerable with yourself as you’re writing it.”

The stories might be personal to Walchonski, but they’re all imbued with universal ideas that every human has experienced. “Losing people, feeling like you’ve changed, trying to understand who you are, trying to understand the people around you and how they feel about you,” he says. Lyrically, the album is relatively sad but, as he puts it, “in a way that you can let it go, hopefully.” With instrumentals bringing life to the despondent lyrics (“Got caught in the rainstorm, I’m falling apart / Got cut into pieces, I’m falling apart”), the songs on Aunt Katrina’s debut achieve a delicate balance—or, “a spoonful of sugar.” “For me, it’s easier to digest a sad song if it’s wrapped around in cool things going on with instrumentation or texture.” Walchonski hopes he can use Aunt Katrina’s formal introduction to help fans have an easier time digesting more difficult emotions. “Everyone goes through hard experiences in life,” he reckons, “and a lot of us look to music to help explore those feelings. I think that this album can be similar if someone wants it to be.”

This Heat Is Slowly Killing Aunt Katrina

Ryan Walchonski dives into the oddities of the mid-twenties experience, how he creates the band’s whirly “laptop gaze” sound, and the ethos behind their debut album, This Heat is Slowly Killing Me.