Petey Finds His Place

You certainly have seen Peter Martin somewhere. If you’re one of the billion users who doomscroll through TikTok daily, you’ve likely caught a glimpse of him on your For You page—or, maybe you already follow him and don’t exactly remember when you started doing that. As is the case with any social media platform that has far too much content for its own good, the faces and names can sometimes blur; you remember what a video was about, but there’s no shot you’re gonna be able to pinpoint who filmed it. Martin—who makes music under the name Petey—is one of the few voices who has been able to cut through the noise and make his work memorable.

Since COVID, Petey has become one of TikTok’s uniquest creators. At the time I’m writing this, he has 1.5 million followers and has amassed over 33.4 million likes on his videos. Those aren’t rookie numbers, and they’ve arrived in response to his absurd, meta comedy that takes shape in videos where Petey—or three or four iterations of himself, which can be separated by changes in vintage T-shirts and hats—is taking a gag a minute too far and going absolutely bananas with it. One of his more recent gems, an examination of the highly coveted “Gatorade boil,” is a swift representation of just how surreal Petey’s oeuvre can go:

Petey #1: Hey, what are you guys doing?
Petey #2: We’re having a Gatorade boil.
Petey #1: Why?
Petey #3: Imagine a big tub full of yellow Gatorade.
Petey #1: Okay, I like that.
Petey #3: Now imagine it boiling.
Petey #1. Okay, fuck. I actually fucking love the idea.
Petey #4: You got any Gatorade on your person?
Petey #1: I’ve got three of them, yeah.
Petey #2: Are they yellow?
Petey #1: I think so, yeah.

I think Petey was one of the first accounts I followed on TikTok when I joined the app back in 2021. My partner and I do that very common thing where we will sit together and each scroll through our FYPs on our phones. She’s much more into the sub-30-second videos that get straight to the point, whereas I’m pretty sold on any skit that takes up two or three minutes of my life. Latching onto Petey’s brand of humor was a simple task. But what’s come easier for me is latching onto his music. Two years ago, after DM’ing Terrible Records and scoring an album deal, he made Lean Into Life, an ambitious alt-rock project. Flash-forward a couple calendar cycles, and he’s signed to Capitol Records and has put out his big, bold project, USA.

USA is a level-up for Petey, be it his via foray into the orbit of ‘90s-revival sounds that are decked out in a modern color or the natural musical progression that usually comes with making a sophomore record. You can tell that he’s got a lot of love for the CD-era, and USA sounds like it was meant to live in a jewel case. Tap into the record and you’ll be greeted with some tip-top production and a bevy of palettes. It’s a deviation from Lean Into Life, as Petey puts his interests in synth-pop and distortion on full display. USA is not a mixed bag; it’s a visceral honing of talent—and Petey possesses a real mess of that. The record is diaristic, almost to a concerning fault, and that’s a big part of what makes it such a rewarding listen—there’s some heavy shit (“Can we finally let the daylight in? ‘Cause I’m so sick of saying I’m sorry”) that then morphs into black comedy-style wit (“Hell, what do I need? Need the freedom to smell bad, ‘cause this ain’t relaxing—thinkin’ ‘bout way too much in a warm bath”).

“When I was writing the album, I was like, ‘Damn, a lot of this is so sad.’ I was worried that people were gonna be too bummed out by it, until I started showing it to people and they’re like, ‘Oh, this part is super funny,’ and I was like, ‘I never thought about it like that, but that’s nice.’ I’d rather have people think it’s funny than sad, so they don’t worry about me,” Petey explains.

Petey was born in Detroit and raised in Chicago—a true Midwesterner down to the bone. From ages 16 to 22, he played drums in his buddy John Rossiter’s band Young Jesus—and, on Petey’s last tour, Rossister opened up the gigs, bringing their history together as musicians full-circle. Though he moved to Los Angeles for college when he was 18, he would return east and play gigs around Chicago with Rossiter whenever he could. And his relationship to Midwest music culture remains pretty consistent with what it was 15 years ago when he was coming of age here. “I feel like all of my influences are still pretty much the same,” Petey says. “I really like Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, American Football—but I was also way more into classic pop punk shit, like Fall Out Boy and Take This to Your Grave. It’s still, definitely, just as with me as it always was, maybe even more so.”

As is the case with many of us who lived and died by the Hot Topic graphic T-shirt wall, Blink-182 also played a formative experience in shaping Petey’s interest in making records—Travis Barker’s drumming finesse being a big, foundational catalyst pushing him towards picking up a set of sticks himself. “I learned how to play drums by memorizing Enema of the State,” he says. “That has guided how the music sounds, especially on this record, where I would just start with the drums—and want to write and record a song just because I want to play and record drums to it.” Being that Petey’s audience was first introduced to him via his skits, you might think there’s a deeper influence between Blink-182’s lyrical humor and Petey’s interest in songwriting—but the two approaches never fully converged. “I’d say [any similarities are] more of an accident than anything,” he adds. “Songwriting, in terms of lyrical inspiration, I just don’t feel like I have much. I feel like I’m writing in the only way that I know how, so it’s probably just a mixture of a bunch of different things that I haven’t really processed yet.”

When he goes on tour, Petey is firmly positioned behind the microphone with a guitar in his hand. I ask him if he’s ever felt tempted to get behind the kit and do some drumming during one of his own sets, but he humbly refutes it—at least for the moment—due to a combination of finances and him not being able to mimic the work of Levon Helm or, even, Underoath’s Aaron Gillespie. “It’d be really cool to jam on an instrumental section, but I can’t play drums and sing at the same time. It’s not something I’ve ever been able to do,” he says. “I just don’t have the lung capacity for it, but it would be really cool to, hopefully, be making enough money with the tours to be able to bring an extra drum set on-stage—or just have someone wheel something out and then I do a little jam. I think that’d be really fun, but we’re not there yet. Touring is so expensive, so every extra piece of gear is just such a drag.”

The first sketches of USA first came together in late-2021, around the time Petey was wrapping up his tour for Lean Into Life. He’d hit the studio around January of 2022 and then, after signing with Capitol, he really started cruising on the songs. Aidan Spiro and John DeBold—the guys Petey has been making tunes with over the past few years—returned to help bring USA to life, and the chemistry between the trio couldn’t be more larger-than-life. Rather than hit the studio and tinker with rough drafts, Petey is a completionist at heart—and it’s a steadfast process that he continues to mine through. “I have to finish writing a song before I even start recording,” he says. “I’m not just laying down ideas ever, I’ll do groups of songs. I’ll have four songs done, and then I’ll go into the studio and record them. Then I’ll do another four. And then I’ll do another four.” After assembling 12 tracks across three chunks of writing and recording, he, Spiro and DeBold spent five months combing through the stems and doing overdubs or re-records when and wherever they were needed. It was a relatively seamless process—save for the writing, which Petey admits takes himself a while to complete, because he can never start and finish an idea in the studio—that translates into a big, massive and reflective sound.

Petey generates a lot of his ideas while on the road. He’s not writing about being a touring musician, but the architecture of what became USA was first rooted in the imagination he was working from while jumping from city to city. A few of the songs on the record were built from instrumental parts he drummed up during pre-show soundchecks, partly because he grew bored of playing the same guitar lines every night. He’s also got an affinity for the simple pleasures of driving across the country. “The last time I was on tour, I spent a bunch of time in the car, which I really enjoyed,” he says. “I like staring out the window and thinking a lot, so I come up with a lot of ideas that way. Whenever I have enough time to sit and do nothing, I’m usually thinking about writing songs. I don’t necessarily need to interact with anything to draw inspiration from, the best thing for me is going on hikes and staring at mountains.”

Because he started releasing his own music while COVID was still limiting the reach of musicians and derailing tours, Petey had to find his place on the internet by winning everyone over. It was a time when being glued to our phones and laptops were the only available avenues for connecting with people, and Petey was able to curb those uncertainties by cultivating an online community on TikTok. But, you never know how in-tune anyone is with your art when it’s separated by screens. It wasn’t until Petey embarked on his first ever headlining tour last year that he finally got a taste of how many people had truly devoted a piece of their lives to his music. The energy around the songs was palpable, and the reception of every crowd was life-changing.

“All of the shows were sold out. It was crazy to come out of COVID and play all of these shows and these rooms are filled with people who are singing all the lyrics,” he says. “It became real and it was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s you guys.’ And I just got a general vibe of who these people were every single night. I learned a lot about them. On the first record, you’re writing for yourself. And then, on the second record, it’s like, ‘I’m gonna write for me and these people who come to the shows,’ and that creates a really, really, really fun experience. When I went into [USA], I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna do what was working live and make an entire record out of stuff like that.’ That’s what I really want. If this is gonna be my job—if I release songs and then tour them, I want the tours to be really fun. And that’s completely within my control, to have that happen.”

The singularity for USA was pretty immediate for Petey, and much of that has to do with a simple truth: It’s an upgrade from what he was doing two years ago. And part of that derives from resources and worry. “Lean Into Life was written with such urgency to it, because I didn’t have any money,” Petey explains. “I was using the money from my indie deal to record the record, but I also got to keep the stuff that I didn’t use—and I really, really, really was trying to avoid having to get a job. Whenever I get a job, I always seem so focused on just doing a good job at that job, whatever it may be, and not getting fired that I am never able to do music at the same time. The idea of recording an album while also having a part-time job would have been really bad, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. My brain doesn’t work that way. There are people who can do it, I just can’t.”

Petey had set a small amount of his advance aside and was living off of that—and it was really meager stuff that he was rationing, just so he could do the record as cheap as possible without sacrificing the equipment and freedom he needed to make the whole thing come together. Every recording session was a race against the clock, and there wasn’t much room for re-takes. “That was the vibe for a lot of Lean Into Life, which is cool—because it sounds very frantic and urgent and sloppy,” Petey adds. “[USA] was cool, because I had two producers, a nice record budget and time to make mistakes. There were days when we went into the studio and recorded an instrumental track and then realized it was in the wrong key and had to throw out the day. And that was fine! I really got the chance to think about the best way to do things, rather than just have it be the first way to do things—which is cool, I’ve never been able to do that before. There’s more care put into [USA], more time put into it. And I think that really shows, sonically—and even with the lyric-writing, to make sure that every line was the line that I needed to say, as opposed to just throwing something in there last minute.”

There are no leftovers from USA, which means we won’t see Petey tap into the ever enduring trend of deluxe-editions being released six months after the initial album cycle. That’s not a bad deal, though, as the thought of getting to live with songs like “I’ll Wait” and “The Freedom to Fuck Off” and “Did I Mention I’m Sorry” is a pretty sweet set-up. Writing and finishing a song is hard work for anyone, and Petey isn’t afraid to admit that he falls into that pool of creators. “If I’m going to work that hard on something, then it’s going to come out,” he says. “I’ll never finish a song and then be like, ‘This one’s not the one’—because, like, I put so much work into it. If something is not clicking, I’ll go ahead and rearrange it so it works. I’m not a songwriter who has 30 ideas and 10 make the album. I spend way too much time thinking about the lyrics to just throw [a song] out like that, so I’ll make it work. There’s nothing left, gotta do another album.” A deluxe-edition isn’t totally out of the equation, though—but only if Petey can nab some features and they re-record some of the songs together.

Petey describes USA as “an origin story of a typical American male in their 30s,” but the work across the dozen songs can easily be affixed to anybody trudging through adulthood in 2023. The tagline stems from, as he puts it, his personal experiences being mixed with every other dude he’s met. It’s a thematic cocktail that balances dashes of personal history with universal lifetimes—and the result is one of the more accessible rock projects of the year, a title that still holds a treasured significance. “When I write, I always try to toe the line between stuff that sounds really specific, but it could be specific to a lot of people,” he adds. “What I try and accomplish is making sure that my references are specific enough where it sounds like it’s special to each individual person listening to it—but people don’t even know how broad of a net it’s casting.”

Though Petey played in Young Jesus for six years, played drums on other peoples’ records and has remained tuned into the Chicago music scene even now that he’s in California, there’s still a dynamic shift when it comes to him making his own stuff. When he went solo with the intent of building a discography for himself, he was only 28—which might not seem like a very old age to be but in this industry, where the trends and expectations that are always shifting, it’s a late start. “I went into the studio and I was like, ‘I’ve got the songs, I’m gonna play all the instruments and we’re gonna get it done in a day.’ I wasn’t jamming with a band or practicing with a band, I just wasn’t doing that. When I recorded Lean Into Life, I was like, ‘Oh, it worked out and it’s cheaper and I have a lot of fun doing it that way.”

When it came time to make USA, Petey was fully prepared to employ that mantra again. Instead of getting a studio band or having his friends fill out the instrumentation, he was perfectly ready to do it alone. “This is my job now, so I’m just gonna do it in the way that I’ve always done it. And I love doing it,” he insists. “It’s so fun going into the studio and building a song from the ground up. Watching something come to life that previously was just nowhere, it’s really cool. It’s like, ‘Well, we started the day and no song existed and, now, a song exists and I didn’t have to spend any energy or time or money teaching someone how to play the parts. It’s mainly just efficiency and a fun thing, and the only way I know how.”

On USA, Petey has cemented himself as a powerful presence in contemporary rock ‘n’ roll. He’s self-sustained and damn full of ideas—many of which resonate with his still-growing fanbase. It’s a lot of fun seeing a passionate dude (and a Midwestern one, at that) figure out a way to put his own imprint on genres that have been touched and re-shaped over and over for decades. It’s the mark of brilliance, to wedge your way into a conversation that’s been going on forever and never leaving. Petey has got the destiny of stardom in spades. Just like when actors try releasing music—or when musicians try acting—it can be strange and overwhelming to try and crossover into a medium that’s separated from the art you’re known for. Petey doesn’t parade around ignoring how difficult getting folks to buy into his music is, though—especially after he’s pulled so many interactions online through his TikTok skits. It’s an end goal for any creator, to never stop bringing new people into your hive—and that’s what Petey has made an integral fixture of his life.

“You only have peoples’ attention spans on the internet for a minute, however long they’re going to interact with you until they scroll on to the next thing—and then it’s gone,” he says. “I’ll post on my Instagram or my TikTok, being like, ‘This is my new song and it’s out on Friday,’ and then the comments will be like, ‘Who’s this song by? What is that?’ You have to really keep driving it home in order for people to start getting the idea. But, whatever the ratio is—of people who like my comedy videos to people who like my music—the ones who crossover, or the ones who started with the music, that is a real passionate and engaged group of people. It’s a really great, fun circle. I’m just gonna keep on doing what I’ve been doing and, hopefully, the whole thing gets bigger.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.