Good Flying Birds: The Best of What’s Next

“I don’t know what town we’re in, but we are parking at a Chinese restaurant called Little Bamboo,” Kellen Baker tells me over the phone, his bandmates chirping indecipherably around him. They’re on a 14-hour drive home to Indianapolis from New York, where they recently played Bazooka! Fest alongside the Moles and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. A voice hollers from the background, “We’re in Bell Vernon, Pennsylvania.” “Never heard of it,” Baker scoffs. His band, Good Flying Birds (named after a Guided by Voices song), has become something of an out-of-time, DIY anomaly in its first years of existence, selling 300 copies of their debut collection, Talulah’s Tape, without any DSPs or much promotion beyond an Instagram account. In the age we live in, artists selling hundreds of cassette tapes by hand isn’t front-page material, but it can be a pathway to a few headaches: “I would get a DM that’s like, ‘Hey, dude, I ordered a tape three months ago and I haven’t gotten it yet. What’s up?’” Baker chuckles.

Luckily, most of the leg-work was handled by Martin Meyers of the St. Lous label Rotten Apples. “Martin was the first person who really, adamantly, wanted to back me and do something for this project,” Baker gushes. Now, Good Flying Birds have ceremoniously signed with Carpark Records and Smoking Room, who will be pressing Talulah’s Tape onto vinyl this fall. “A band like us receiving a platform like this, it’s not common enough,” Baker says. “A lot of our favorite bands never really get an opportunity like this. Maybe that’s a choice, maybe that’s a result of circumstances or whatever, but it’s nice. We are scrappy, the recordings are pretty lo-fi—it’s not something that would be pushed out to radio stations.” One of those bands, Chronophage, is “up there with the Beatles” for Baker, as are Workers Comp, Answering Machines, LIVING DREAM, and a recent Best of What’s next pick, Columbus’s Golomb.

Most Popular

Golomb are a part of the ongoing, youthful guitar renaissance in the Midwest that ought to be followed closely, an era Good Flying Birds are equally grateful to be a part of, even if it hasn’t totally caught on in Indianapolis. Chicago is certainly the mecca, while Detroit, St. Louis, and Columbus are slowly building their own empires, but in Indiana, Baker says, only a small number of people engage with “the scene.” “We all wish that we could have what Chicago has, with so many people making zines and taking photos,” he explains. “It’s more sparse here, but I think that drives a lot of creativity—when there’s not as many distractions or options.” But bands are still playing in basements every week, slowly and aspirationally trying to fill the shoes of Dow Jones and the Industrials, the Gizmos, Amoebas in Chaos, and Dancing Cigarettes.

When it was just him, Susie Slaughter, and Ari Bales in the band, Baker wasn’t yet ready to debut under the banner they’d been working with, so they called themselves Talulah God, an homage to Talulah Gosh, Amelia Fletcher and Elizabeth Price’s guitar-pop band from 40 years ago. “I went out to New York to see the Heavenly shows [in 2024],” Baker remembers. “I’m a big fan of everything Amelia does, and I wanted to write some fast indie-pop songs. And they are the queens.” Talulah God was also Good Flying Birds’ YouTube channel name, a home to four-track recordings that Baker made in his bedroom and envisioned serving as his “mysterious internet persona.” “I would never have my name on anything,” he admits, “but I’ve kind of been lax about that.”

Good Flying Birds has kept an anonymous profile since forming, so consider this their official coming party: Joining Baker, Slaughter, and Bales are Richard Edge (bass) and Luke Cornette (guitar), the two final links needed to finally present the band to the world. Still, there’s virtually no information about the five-piece online. There is, however, this very bitchin’ neocities website (which Baker made himself) that features talk of “epic swag, twinkly tunes, fortnite balls, bruh moments, cool pix, rarest prime energy drink, skibidi toilet, roblox,” tour logs, birds, and a GIF of Cheeseface, the dog being held at gunpoint on the cover of National Lampoon magazine’s January 1973 cover. In May, the page updated: “heyyy wowowow so overdue for an update but gfb was compromised by the library of congress for advancing musical innovations too quickly and locked into cryostasis chambers this is their clones writing.” I ask them if they’ve been released from their chambers yet. “I would say our cryostasis chamber is the van and we did just step foot out of it,” Baker says. “So, yes, temporarily.” Slaughter adds, “We’ve cracked the eggshell.” A burst of laughter swells.

The band’s origins are murky, beginning with Baker and Cornette playing a show together in Cincinnati on either New Year’s Day 2022 or New Year’s Day 2023. “I told him he looked like the singer of Josef K and he liked that, so I won him over,” Baker remembers. Bales, who is not a Paul Haig lookalike, came into Baker’s view at a DIY space in Indianapolis because he was wearing a “crazy beret and handing out business cards of himself.” (“He wasn’t advertising anything but his name and some facts about him,” Baker clarifies.) Slaughter played in a band called Tony, which Baker used to book for gigs in Fort Wayne, and she met Edge on the night they opened for hippyfuckers. “Richard’s a guitar master of the South and Midwest who gives some people you like lessons,” Baker says. “When we needed a bass player, I knew there were no better fingers available.” Edge laughs, “That’s neat.”

In an attempt to move from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis, Baker lived in Slaughter’s basement “with the cat boxes” for a few months, as he searched for a job and tried to land on his feet. There, he began working on the first Good Flying Birds songs, including the metallic, needling “wallace,” which was named after the street that he and Slaughter lived on. “A lot of those songs,” Slaughter recalls, “I could hear him writing them through the vents in our house.” Having shuffled through rock and roll bands since he was 12 years old, Good Flying Birds finds Baker’s orientation narrowing itself “into what I want to be making that feels true to me.”

What’s true to him is a jangly sound reminiscent of Beat Happening, the Pastels, and Olivia Tremor Control. His writing is sophisticated, but he covers it in a ramshackle hue. Improbably, the lo-fi noise never muddies the well-arranged charm spilling out of his orange Danelectro. And the Mad Planets-influenced “Eric’s Eyes,” one of the more “polished” tracks on the album, might just be the best guitar-pop effort released this summer. Talulah’s Tape is the can’t-miss mix of 2025. The band’s antics, which are as historical as they are hot and frenetic, reveal the clutter of Baker’s low-battery bombast: the silvery instrumental “GFB” blazes into the itchy “I Care For You,” and harsh interludes gash through the echoing vibrance of “Golfball” before beachy riffs in “Glass” collapse into woozy vocal patches and firecracker snare thwacks. Wishy’s Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter (whom Baker is roommates with) lend their own idiosyncrasies to “Fall Away,” while “Pulling Hair” sounds like two songs fighting for position. And then there is the 5-minute “Last Straw,” a type of delightful obscurity you’d find on a tape released by Scat in the ‘90s. What I’m trying to say is: Good Flying Birds sound like the local opener on a three-band bill that you end up loving more than the headliner. They are impossibly great without the bells and whistles of clever PR.

And those four-track recordings capture how writing music stopped being an “exercise in style” for Baker. Instead of hocking techniques and melodies from the Beatles like every wannabe rock musician just starting out, he put a great emphasis on letting his own peculiarities come out. “I cried while writing a lot of these songs,” he admits. “It was very therapeutic and cathartic. Developing some ideas on the guitar that feel pretty unique to me, and finding myself as a musician, I didn’t really know it was possible. I stopped trying to do something and just let out what was rattling around inside.” When he put songs on YouTube, they weren’t his anymore and he didn’t have to sit with those feelings. “It was something I was releasing as a song and releasing emotionally.”

Since then, the Good Flying Birds live sets have started to live and breathe in the world. Baker suggests that he enters the mindset of a performer almost exclusively now, despite still feeling deeply connected to the music. Part of that is likely because, as Slaughter says, the songs are “faster, noisier” than Baker’s initial recordings. “We all heard the songs in a new light after playing them live,” she elaborates. But Bales going “beast mode” on the drums and supporters calling Good Flying Birds’ jangle-pop foundations “punk rock” doesn’t mean that Baker has become detached from his original concepts completely. “There are times when I’m driving in the van and we’re all together, and I’m thinking about the meaning of it all, and I get a little wet behind the eyes. It’s a very personal piece of me to be sharing.” Cornette reminds everyone that the band’s first show together, a set at the “rock and roll freak joint” that is State Street Pub on August 5, 2024, will have its first anniversary the day after our call.

Baker says that, the more audiences they play in front of, the more their initial sonic concepts—twee, pop, and punk—get compared to emo and math-rock. “I think that’s purely based on the complexity of the guitars. It’s not like we have odd time signatures and shouty vocals.” Digging into Talulah’s Tape, you’ll find experimental vantages—curious drum ‘n’ bass passages and heaps of vocal-stim samples (from video clips you’d doom-scroll through) woven into tracklist transitions. “I really wanted to conceptualize a window into my life and my mind the best I could,” Baker notes. “That isn’t just writing songs. Part of my daily diet is seeing a bunch of random memes on Instagram and laughing with my friends about them. It’s a legitimate piece of my life, as silly as it is.”

What’s not silly is that Good Flying Birds have landed on bills with bands like Ducks Ltd., Wishy, Horsegirl, and Sharp Pins—a real who’s-who of Paste favorites—and are making a splash outside of Indianapolis, steadily gigging on weekends in the Midwest. The most informative part of their touring grind? “You make better routes,” Cornette jokes. “Yeah,” Baker agrees. “A little less driving, way more merch. I can’t open up with ‘Eric’s Eyes,’ because I keep fucking up that twiddly guitar part.” But Slaughter, laughing with her bandmates, chimes in with a good thought to end on: “The more and more I’ve toured, outside of this project and in it, the world just gets smaller. It’s a really beautiful, worldwide community of artists that are inspiring to be around.”

Watch the music video for “Fall Away” below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Good Flying Birds: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: Guided by Voices, Beat Happening, Ducks Ltd., and Mad Planets.