Passion Pit’s next chapter: “I didn’t think I’d ever feel excited about this”

When the Passion Pit bandleader fired off a series of tweets in 2017 that decried the music industry and its malicious treatment of the artists who fuel it, many publications interpreted that as an official announcement of a hiatus. “I simply cannot continue making music,” read one. He provided some clarification the following day, specifying that he no longer wished to be “a commercialized artist,” one who abides by the typical album-release schedule, which augurs a lengthy tour, innumerable interviews, and constant promotion. 

At first, both Angelakos and the press cited mental health as his primary reason for wanting to step away from music, given that he has been transparent about his experiences with bipolar I disorder in both his music and interviews. But that had little to do with why he needed time away. With 2017’s quietly released Tremendous Sea of Love, an album that bypassed traditional release models by emailing it directly to fans, Angelakos had fulfilled his contract with Sony’s Columbia Records. “The only reason I kept going is because I had a lot of backing and lots of people banking on me and needing me to come through,” he tells me on his tour bus before a late-June Passion Pit show in Kansas City. “I was kind of listless.”

He didn’t like where Passion Pit had gone, and the excitement that had propelled the project in its early days had withered. At the time, he was freshly thirty, and he took a couple of years to plot his next move, but the financial well had begun to run dry. In 2019, he consulted Roddy Potter, his high school English teacher, whom he also calls his mentor, for advice on how to think beyond himself. As a touring musician for the entirety of his twenties, he’d unintentionally prolonged that stage of his life, and he wanted to shift his perspective, especially lyrically, with his entrance into a new decade. After the pair discussed what would be best for Angelakos, he moved to Buffalo, where his parents live. “I ended up getting stuck there during COVID,” he remembers, “but then I fucking figured out how to describe a rock.”

According to the man himself, Angelakos is an annoying megalomaniac with a sizable ego, so learning how to direct his gaze outward felt important for this new phase of his life. He wanted to move away from the “very self-centered, overly self-aware lyrical perspective” that defined breakthrough records such as 2009’s Manners and 2012’s Gossamer. He doesn’t begrudge that introspective style, something he deems a formative part of any young person figuring themselves out. “But I was over that, and it was always going back to this character,” he says. “I don’t embody that character.” Potter, who was a mentee of the legendary Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, helped Angelakos escape his creative rut. The songwriting process itself, though, began in summer 2024, a period marked by taking care of his mother, who has dementia and Alzheimer’s. The seeds Potter planted in his mind had begun to germinate, and they were now blossoming into a fruitful creative period in which Angelakos wrote about his family, his wife, and his surroundings.

“I’m so excited, and I didn’t think I’d ever feel excited about this,” he says, leaning forward in his seat, his shaggy brown hair and beard framing his face. “I never thought I would be excited, and the band and everybody was like, ‘Let’s play the new stuff.’” Before they’d incorporated the new material into the setlist, it was “like a touring production of Cats at one point,” he says with a laugh. “It was just so boring.”

When I saw Passion Pit on the Gossamer tour in December 2012, it was part of a Christmas-themed radio show officially titled “The Night the Buzz Stole XXXmas: Night 3” that included alt-J, Blondfire, and Churchill among its openers. That’s a show Angelakos now looks back on and compares to the aforementioned touring production of Cats, which was rife with technical issues. He wishes I could’ve seen a “real show,” not one where it’s “random-ass fans all thrown together.” The radio era of the early 2010s is one he doesn’t want to return to, but there are positive aspects of these new shows that give Angelakos some hope and remind him of that time. 

Namely, there are all the younger fans. I notice them in the crowd later that night, too, amid the usual sea of millennials. With this new Passion Pit music, he wants to reach a younger demographic. “I don’t want it to be, say, the millennial nostalgia thing,” he says. Nostalgia can be a dangerous trap, I tell him. He reaches beneath him and pulls open a drawer stuffed to the brim with Pedialyte. “I thought everyone would want to hear all the old stuff,” he says in between sips of the purple liquid, “but at the end of the day, people are still interested in the new stuff.”

Passion Pit’s next release, the seven-song EP Pretty Penny, is what Angelakos emerged with after nearly a decade of deep contemplation. There’s no release date yet, but they’ve been playing nearly every song live on this tour. “He wants to be very intentional given the importance of this release, so is in the process of looking for the right partner as the landscape continues to change the more he’s out touring,” Madeline Dubus, Angelakos’ wife and artist manager, tells me in an email. “The goal is ASAP, but done right.” Near the midpoint of my conversation with Angelakos, he pulls a laptop out of a bag, connects it to the tour bus’s sound system, and cranks up the volume. While the music plays, he paces around the van, fiddles with the volume knob some more, and peels open one of several bananas lying on the countertop. 

The first song he shows me is the EP’s closer, “To Mend Two Broken Vessels with a Single Cherry Tree,” an homage to Andre Dubus II, the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer whose youngest daughter is Madeleine, whom Angelakos lovingly calls “the shit.” To be more specific, he says the song is informed by the titular essay of Dubus’ 1991 collection, Broken Vessels, a personal piece of writing that explores his 1986 car accident and resulting leg amputation. It’s an acoustic guitar ballad, a stark departure from the sparkling indie-pop people may expect from the man who wrote bright, John Hughes-hued tunes like “Take a Walk,” “Sleepyhead,” and “Carried Away.” “When I’m 39 in May / Then finally I may be / Somewhere in between the man I am and could never be,” he sings, his voice clear against the sparse backdrop of guitar, piano, and mandolin.

He also shows me “Chanson Pour Vous,” which he says isn’t on the tour’s setlist but is one he’s particularly proud of. Its shuffling dance beat and iridescent synths subsume the bus, and Angelakos, still standing, nods along and smiles. He also plays portions of two others titled “Remembering You” and “Everything’s Stephanie,” the latter of which is a high-energy number that opens the EP, its maximalist production bringing to mind the proto-hyper-pop of “I’ll Be Alright.” There’s another track, “The Worrier and Warrior,” that was meant to be on the original Pretty Penny, and he came across it on Box.com while sifting through old files, seeing what he could dredge up. From there, he developed it into its current form: rollicking toms and light guitar introduce the track, and some pentatonic synth arpeggios descend when his vocals enter the mix. 

Weeks later, Angelakos sends me some more songs in a folder simply labeled “Others to come,” which contains demos of songs he’ll perform later that night: “Brothers to the End” and “Remembering You,” plus some others that’ll remain off the setlist for now: the plucky marimba breaks of “Head in Your Heads,” the anthemic “The Way We Will Win,” and the call-and-response vocal sketch “Bobby Pinned a Butterfly.” It all underscores a feverish creative period for Angelakos, who seemingly can’t stop making music, re-energized and ready for a new chapter of Passion Pit. 

This also feels like a full-circle moment. Initially, Chunk of Change was intended as the first part of a triptych that would include Pretty Penny and another release named Dozens of Dollars. When I listen to these new songs, most of them sound like a more polished, mature take on Chunk of Change, and Angelakos is visibly elated when I tell him this. “That’s what Passion Pit should have always been,” he says. “I’ve got so many new songs.” To find the new direction for Passion Pit, Angelakos went back to the beginning.

Halfway through “The Reeling,” Angelakos’ voice gives out. It’s the opening song of Passion Pit’s set at the Truman. The room is full of eager fans, and the band’s setup looks as if Neil Peart were really into luxe synthesizers instead of drums. The expensive-looking configuration means everything is analog, a fact that Angelakos takes pointed pride in. As everyone on stage fiddles with knobs and arpeggios swirl around them like bats circling a cave entrance, Angelakos wades through the sea of synths. He takes a seat at his own Roland JUNO-60 and places a pair of large red headphones over his ears. The instrumental finesse is tight, and the lack of backing tracks is apparent; not a single computer is in sight.

After the first verse, Angelakos opens up his voice to make way for his signature falsetto, a defining feature of Passion Pit’s music. When he’s ready to let loose, he opens his mouth, but little comes out. The crowd fills in the earworm “oh nooooo”s, but the frontman is physically incapable of producing anything else. Immediately after the song, he takes a beat to apologize for his vocal malfunctions. “Guys, I am so sorry,” he tells the room defeatedly. A stagehand brings him some tea, and the band continues the show with “Make Light,” a notorious falsetto-ripper, which Angelakos mostly sings an octave down this June evening. Intermittently, he goes for the higher notes, but it’s to no avail. On Kindred highlight “Where the Sky Hangs,” however, he starts to find his footing in its lower register.

At one point, another stagehand refills Angelakos’ tea and supplies him with a fresh bottle of purple Pedialyte, the same beverage he was nursing earlier on the tour bus. The crowd cheers him on while he chugs it. “Shout out to Pedialyte,” he says. “Name brand only.” Repeatedly, he apologizes for his less-than-ideal vocal performance, an aspect of the show he often prides himself on, especially as the son of an opera singer and music educator. My friends and I feel bad for him; he seems to be his own worst critic, beating himself up more than anyone else in attendance, who all seem to be having a good time anyway.

For the most part, though, the energy sustains itself. Audience members dance and sing to classics like “Moth’s Wings” and “Little Secrets” and new ones such as “Everything’s Stephanie” and “Remembering You,” enthusiastic for the band’s first show here since 2015. I recognize the ones he showed me earlier that day, but there are others, too: “Once Upon Your Balcony,” “Brothers to the End,” and something on the written setlist called “Alone (On Ice!)” that they don’t play because of Angelakos’ vocal strain. 

Instead, he closes with the acoustic-guitar ballad “To Mend Two Broken Vessels with a Single Cherry Tree,” the first song he showed me, the one that pays tribute to his late father-in-law. At one point, he asks the crowd when they last performed here. “Geez, that’s a long time,” he responds when someone answers him. “I’m so sorry, guys.” He reassures everyone that they’ll be back very, very soon. Given how excited he was on the bus, how pleased he is with Passion Pit’s new music, and how he’s finally learned to love making music again, I believe him. He’s rekindled the spark. He’s found the passion again.   

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

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