Guerilla Toss Remains the Exception to the Rule

While that kind of fun feels in keeping with Famously Alive-era Guerilla Toss as well, the making of You’re Weird Now differed significantly in intention, content, and form. “[Famously Alive] is kind of a record about pop music,” Negroponte says. “Or at least that’s maybe my pretentious way of summing that one up.” You’re Weird Now originated from a decidedly opposite conceit: “We were all kind of very consciously thinking, like, ‘Let’s do some wacky fucking shit again.’ There’s a lot of sharp turns and weird decisions and funky harmonies on this one, because we wanted to bring the band back to the idea that not everything needs to work perfectly.”

But more than anything, it was the process that shifted—intentionally, yes, but also as a result of circumstance. Famously Alive was inherently a pandemic record, both in that it was the product of Negroponte, Carson, and Shafiee hunched around a laptop during quarantine, and in that there was much less thought given to how songs would work live, largely because any conversation about touring inevitably resulted in questions like, to quote Carlson, “Are we ever going to be able to perform live again? Ahhhhh!” Nearly half of You’re Weird Now, on the other hand, was written “in a room as a band in the good old-fashioned way.” Negroponte estimates that around five of the album’s ten tracks were written in a single illness-ridden week: “It was the dead of winter, and we were all so sick. We were so fucked up during that one.” (He then makes some rather convincing zombie noises to illustrate the fucked-up-ness.)

They often mixed workflows: while typically Negroponte’s “insane, intricate demos” came first and Carlson wrote to them, occasionally Carlson wrote lyrics first and Negroponte built a song around the language (“CEO,” “Life’s A Zoo” started that way), shuffling sections until the snap felt right. “It’s all like Legos,” Carlson says—parts moving between songs until a structure locks. That’s how “Crocodile Cloud” finally coalesced: a years-long “unsolvable puzzle” that clicked when a chorus, borrowed from another piece, slotted into place.

The same seems to hold true for her lyrics: Carlson treats confessionals like collages, and vice versa. She’ll lift phrases from books and magazines, building lines for how they hit the ear as much as for what they say: “Every sentence that you make has a musical rhythm.” Her delivery is engineered to enunciate that rhythm best, her syntax often syncopated to fall in line with the internal music of a lyric more than anything (see: the near iambic pentameter of the chorus of “Panglossian Mannequin”). She prioritizes strong initial consonants that cut through the mix; avoiding overly “soft” phonemes that smear on stage—hence the tongue-twister architecture of “crocodile cloud” (for real; try saying it five times fast) or the sharp clack of “red flag to angry bull.” Negroponte hears a little Malkmus in the word-juggling this time, which tracks with Carlson’s pivot toward phrases that read cleanly but fracture into rhythmic play when sung.

At The Barn, the tape-rolling felt less like studio hermeticism than a communal hang: no glass partition, lots of bleed, friends drifting through and, occasionally, into the takes. “There’s some shit talking buried in there, but not about anyone that doesn’t deserve it,” Negroponte grins. And while Malkmus produced with his famously relaxed touch, the credit list underscores how group-built the record is: Shafiee’s guitar and Lewellyn’s bass anchoring the hairpin grooves, Lichter’s synths carpeting the hooks, and Malkmus adding backing vocals and literal power drill, with engineers Bryce Goggin and Ben Collette capturing the mess in situ.

THE RESULTS ARE HARD TO ARGUE WITH. Negroponte’s joking description of the record as “Guerilla Toss’ Greatest Hits that didn’t exist until now” is entirely apt. That’s why the history of the band couldn’t be simply brushed past here—if it’s a little bit like a decade-long compilation of different eras, it helps to have a sense of what records these new hits might’ve been pulled from. Pre-album single “Psychosis Is Just A Number” feels like the modern band’s interpretation of their no-wave beginnings, all skronk and shout. Famously Alive can be felt in opener “Krystal Ball”’s bright, infectious pop and in the bouncy hyper-punk sensibility of “Life’s A Zoo.” The latter’s manic synths make it feel like a bridge between the 2022 record and GT Ultra (the influence of which is also heard on the insane synth-work on “Crocodile Cloud,” although something about the syncopated vocals there feels a little bit Twisted Crystal). You see what I mean?

But it never feels like a mere rehashing of previous work—it’s less that the band is recreating their old sounds one after the other than that they manage to amalgamate a decade of vastly different styles into one culminating, cohesive whole. “Psychosis,” for instance, might be drenched in feverish post-punk insanity, but the inclusion of earworm-worthy hooks and riptide melodies means that the Guerilla Toss of old wouldn’t be caught dead performing it. And the album stretches beyond new takes on old sounds, too: “When Dogs Bark” locks into a slower pocket than the band is typically associated with; while album centerpiece “Red Flag to Angry Bull” is a campfire-groove dad-rock singalong (with cameos by Malkmus and Phish’s Trey Anastasio, to boot) that is utterly unlike anything the band has done before. Hell, every song that has a chorus is one old GT would have balked at.

That says more about their 2013 selves, though, than it does the band they’ve become today. As Negroponte puts it, “When we started the band, we were just a bunch of 20-something idiots with narrow taste.” So narrow, in fact, that if said idiots had somehow gotten wind of You’re Weird Now all those years ago, they would probably “laugh at the fact that we’re singing together, and doing any melodic elements at all,” Carlson jokes. “A lot of taboos are being broken right now. It might be hard to accept.” (Negroponte: “But, you know, we’re making a record with fucking Steve Malkmus, which is fucking nuts. So I’m sure I’d have been stoked too.”)

“Everyone always asks us, like, ‘Why’d you guys change the sound?’” Negroponte says, a light frustration evident in his voice. “And I’m just like: ‘Because we fucking grew up.’” His point, to be clear, is not that noise-rock is immature—noise rock is great!—but that staying the same all of your life is. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the trajectory of the band, and how, in the beginning, there was absolutely no way we’d write this chorus that was very dome-like and resolved in this really nice way,” Carlson continues. “And similarly, I felt like every time I’d write lyrics, I was like, “Well, I mean this, but I really need to obscure it and make it sound insane.” But now it’s like we’re coming full circle, where making it more understandable to people, more relatable, has become this radical idea for the band.”

Yet like all cult favorite acts, Guerilla Toss has its fair share of diehard fans who have yet to mentally leave 2013, and thus remain baffled by the band’s choice to weave in melodies, hooks, harmonies. “Honestly, it sucks a little bit—or maybe hurts a little bit—when someone’s like ‘Oh, I like the old shit more,” Negroponte admits. “But the plus side is when people come along for the journey too and understand the evolution of it, because that means a fucking lot. There’s a bunch of other bands that are making crazy, straight up noise rock. But the challenging part—and the fun part—at this stage in our career is challenging ourselves to adapt while still liking what we do, and making music that’s both challenging and accessible.”

The hesitance by some listeners to embrace the newer records reflects the somewhat common misconception that maturing always means buttoning up and conforming to polite society, the same way a band becoming “more accessible” is always nice way of saying they became fucking boring. That can be the case, but it isn’t always—so treating it like some universal maxim results in a strict dichotomization between “normie” and “good” that fails to really reckon with either. If any perceived growth is a sign of selling out, acquiescence to the man, whatever—what’s the point of, well, doing anything? Take it from Carlson herself: “Staying the same is the most normie shit ever.”

AFTER ALL, IT’S NOT LIKE Guerilla Toss have gotten any less strange or DIY-oriented—sure, they write hooks now, but that doesn’t mean they fall in line with mainstream expectations of rhythm or melody. The pair joke about how a friend once told them they should probably “land on some money hooks,” but even now, they’ve only gotten halfway there: “There’s still no money, but there are hooks!” Carlson laughs. (“Broke ass hooks,” Negroponte interjects).

So while they’re still weird, the motivation behind the showcasing of their weirdness feels different. It’s a little bit like a classic glass-half-full-or-half-empty situation: the foundation remains intact, but now the charge characterizing it is less a spitting hatred for the “normal” than it is a genuine love for the “weird.” Still the same glass and same water, the only difference being how you look at it. There’s no pivot to wide-eyed idealism, but rather, an attempt to choose optimism and connection even in the face of calamity—even when the very idea feels futile. Take the Voltaire-referencing track “Panglossian Mannequin,” which shrewdly articulates the impossible tightrope walk of trying to remain positive in such a “collectively dangerous world.” But despite the self-effacing connection drawn between the speaker (“I’m optimistic, I confess”) and the satiric Candide character representing the foolishness of excessive optimism in the face of hardship, Carlson is no Dr. “This is the best of all possible worlds” Pangloss.

If anything, the band’s optimism is a constant effort and movement, not a sign of stagnancy—and for all the gleeful arrangements populating the record, the lyrics of You’re Weird Now are dark more often than not. For every line about “staying positive and all that shit,” as Carlson puts it, there’s at least one more about “disillusionment and loneliness and sadness.” Standout track “Psychosis Is Just A Number” opens with existentialism and a quick Baudrillardian critique of simulacra, followed by Carlson’s voice spitting “Easier to pretend that I am merely just an actor / Cut my happiness, it’s fleeting, and it’s truly not the only factor.” “Life’s A Zoo” renders internet overstimulation in 8-bit, a peek into a vision of an alternate universe Donkey Kong where the villain wasn’t King K. Rool but technofascism: “Stimulation buries you / Simulate a break-through.” And “When Dogs Bark” is pure vulnerability, Carlson singing about how she, like barking dogs, has “begged for a meal,” “chased [her] own tail.”

Neither optimism nor pessimism go unchallenged in You’re Weird Now, with the focus being on finding a livable balance between them rather than veering too far in either direction—perhaps a step back from the more in-your-face positivity of Famously Alive. They wrote that album, they say, because they needed that burst of poppy hope at the time, and so did we; it was, again, written in the midst of Covid-19. This album’s message, though, is less about sheer positivity than it is brute acceptance: “It’s about learning to trust yourself and accept what things have become and get better at rolling with it,” Carlson says. Or, as Negroponte adds, “And accepting that you might just be weird your whole fucking life.” Which, Carlson interjects, is “actually a plus! A lot of people don’t have that.”

Now, this is far from the first musical endeavor to encourage listeners to embrace one’s weirdness (personally, my first was when I was ten and played a pig in Shrek the Musical Jr., which closes with a track called “Freak Flag”). But there’s a realism and a self-consciousness to You’re Weird Now that makes it stand apart from many other entries in the “be yourself!” canon. You might think that during the press tour for an album about eschewing normalcy and loving your weirdness, its creators would likely parrot age-old precepts of the “Be who you want to be, and screw anyone who doesn’t like it!” variety. Yet Negroponte freely admits something I’ve found few artists will publicly cop to: reading—and caring about—reactions to your work online.

“I know people always say, ‘It doesn’t matter what other people think.’ But I’m like, ‘What the fuck? Honestly, kind of all that matters is what other people think.’ It’s for them,” Negroponte says. “Obviously, you need to love it too. But it goes an extra mile when other people enjoy it as well. It’s the best part. I want the other freaks to enjoy it, you know? The goal is to connect, always.” Carlson hops in: “The cure for loneliness is interconnectedness and realizing that there are other people like you.” Embracing your weirdness doesn’t have to mean isolating yourself from the rest of the world as a means of celebrating your independence, your individuality—the aim, as Carlson says, is “to connect, not to cater to.” You can love yourself without hating everything else—and, frankly, you kind of have to.

This theme can be easily located in album closer “Favorite Sun,” which orbits the realization that our brains are just extensions of all the people we have met before, that none of us are so unique when it comes down to it. If we are all just “bodies floating in nothing,” Carlson sings, vocals doubled atop a wailing guitar solo, “Why not take part in this / Madness of sunlight?”

It might’ve been a long journey to get here, but Guerilla Toss now stand decidedly in view of that mad sun, and they’re not alone. You can hear it in each beat of the record: the kids shouting “Life’s! A Zoo!,” the friends chowing down on “punk lunch” in the background, even Malkmus (“a lifer” of weird, as Negroponte dubs him) drilling literal holes in the texture. Its form mimics its argument: weirdness as a commons. Connecting without catering. Guerilla Toss used to wage war on coherence, but You’re Weird Now makes a different, harder bet: that all the old dichotomies that structured their music—abrasiveness versus accessibility, realism versus optimism, individuality versus connection—can cohabitate without canceling each other out. Given that these binary oppositions still permeate our culture, most people wouldn’t exactly feel confident about those odds. But, as always, Guerilla Toss remains the exception to the rule.

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].