Pretty Bitter Build a Musical Dream House

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The miniature house on the cover of Pretty Bitter’s Pleaser looks bigger in person. Standing a couple feet tall by a couple feet wide, it occupies most of the kitchen table in bassist Miri Tyler and singer Mel Bleker’s Silver Spring, Maryland apartment. Ahead of the album release, the bandmates (and fiancés) give me a tour, pointing out the tiny dollhouse-within-a-dollhouse in the attic and the Crush Fund poster hidden behind a wardrobe in the bedroom. You can’t see most of it in the cover photo, but, “for no reason at all, there’s real stuff in the fridge,” says Tyler. “Every detail was really plotted out.”

The duo spent over a year building, painting, and furnishing the house with help from their friend Jo Morgan. The finished model combines bought, borrowed, and homemade pieces, some of which are recreations of furniture from their real apartment. In the deep blue living room, I spy a perfect replica of the purple coffee table where Tyler served me a mug just a few minutes earlier. “It was kind of like building our dream house the best that we could,” says Bleker from the corner of the couple’s (normal-sized) couch. “Home ownership is a pipe dream, but if we ever did get to have our own home, we would want it to be really bright and colorful, so we created the most maximal version of what we could do.”

Likewise, Pretty Bitter—Bleker, Tyler, multi-instrumentalist Zach Be, and drummer Jason Hayes—made Pleaser a dream house of sounds. It’s the synthy D.C. indie-pop band’s first LP with professional studio polish, featuring vocals tracked at Type One Studio in Chicago and drums from The Hangar in Columbia, Maryland. It’s their first album to feature the banjo, as introduced by Be (albeit by way of twinkly, American Football-type riffing), and it marks the first time Bleker wrote their own vocal melodies instead of fitting lyrics to their bandmates’ demos. As a whole, Pleaser preserves the anthemic hooks and homey dream pop atmosphere of its predecessor, 2022’s Hinges, but with the new wrinkles of an older and wiser band. By coincidence, our conversation falls on the day before Bleker’s 30th birthday.

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“[Pleaser] is about aging and death and friends and love,” they explain. “The way that time changes the experience of these really, really big emotions, positive and negative and neutral.” Bleker points to “Outer Heaven Dude Ranch,” an all-out belter of a single, as the summation of the album’s themes. “The line, ‘I’m ten years older waving the same white flag’ is like, Jesus Christ, if I still have the same issues and the same heavy sadness that I did when I was 20, or 16, then why does it look so different now?”

Tyler and Bleker have spent most of the last decade working through those issues in tandem. After meeting on Tinder, the two had their first date in 2017 and formed an immediate personal and artistic connection; in Bleker’s poetry, Tyler heard the exact voice she’d been trying to channel in her own songs. “Our first date lasted for three weeks, and the rest is Pretty Bitter,” Bleker elaborates, though the band name came later. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the duo underwent a creative rebirth, working together on a host of side projects—extraterra, A Physalis, wartown—while Bleker became a miniaturist to keep their hands busy and their mind clear under quarantine. (You can see their first full build on the single cover for “Outer Heaven Dude Ranch.”) Around the same time, the two started collaborating remotely with Be on the songs that became Hinges; they’d all made music together before, but this was the birth of Pretty Bitter as we know it. “We came out of lockdown with a much more serious outlook on what we were doing,” Bleker adds. “Much more, ‘Okay, actually, we’re never gonna take this for granted again. We’re going to put the thought and time and effort into this that it deserves, if we’re going to call ourselves a band.’”

With the release of Hinges, Pretty Bitter’s determination got them noticed in D.C. and beyond. They won two Washington Area Music Association Wammie Awards (Best Pop Album, plus Best Pop Song for “The Damn Thing Is Cursed”). They also drew the attention of Pleaser co-producer Evan Weiss (founder of Into It. Over It. and Pet Symmetry). In 2023, Weiss put out a call for D.C. bands on Twitter, and a mutual friend tagged Pretty Bitter. That recommendation landed them on a bill with Weiss’ project Their / They’re / There at Comet Ping Pong.

The same night, Weiss asked the band to record with him in Chicago. Tyler says the group saw it as a major opportunity, but hesitated before stepping out of their home studios. “Having come out of DIY, making Hinges fully in our closets, proving to ourselves that we could get to that level of production on our own, it was a question of, ‘Do we need it if we can’t afford it, being working class people?’ It came down to how nice Evan was to us, and how much he genuinely seemed to connect with the music we were making and the messages we were talking about on stage.” (More on the messages later.)

In 2024, For their first trip to Weiss’ Type One Studios, Pretty Bitter partnered with fellow D.C. band Flowerbomb to record Take Me Out, a snappy, five-song split. Bleker says the sessions with Weiss and his studio partner Simon Small (Strawberry Boy) doubled as master classes in songwriting; their in-studio advice on harmonies and dynamics shaped the band’s approach to writing Pleaser (note the way the Bleker grows the momentum of “Bodies Under the Rose Garden” by shifting into a higher register for verse two). That alone vindicated the band’s decision to work with outside producers, but by a stroke of cosmic luck, the studio also shared a building with a miniatures shop. “It seemed like, ‘Oh, the universe is telling me that this is the right spot to be in my life,’” says Bleker. On the return trip for the Pleaser sessions later that year, the cosmos delivered an even more direct message. “One day during the lunch break, I was like, ‘I’m gonna go down to the shop. I’m just gonna pick up a couple tiny things for myself.’ And, fucking kismet, she’s having a raffle where she’s like, ‘Just put your name in, and you could win this pack of miniatures that totals, like, $200.’ I was recording vocals [during the drawing], so I sent Miri down, and we won it.”

Among the spoils: the mugs, pillows, and plants that imbue the Pleaser diorama with so much life. Bleker may call the finished product a dream house, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sterile fantasy; the details add up to an idealized future as much as an emotionally fraught past and present. Just look at the foot of the bed in the green room. Bleker meticulously designed the messy heap there—pill bottles, wine bottles, discarded packages, and other signs of struggle—as a tribute to Tracey Emin’s 1998 sculpture My Bed, which put all the detritus of a depressive episode on display. Bleker first saw pictures of the exhibit when they were in college and in a spiral of their own, grappling with death. They found it so moving, they wrote letters to Emin in their journal. Hence, the Pleaser track “Letter to Tracey In Her Bed.”

“It was the most affecting piece of art at that point in my life that I’d ever seen,” Bleker recalls. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, these are the things I’m ashamed of, and how beautiful to make that art.’ When I’m holed up in my room and my space looks similar to that, I’d do anything to hide it…I’m never gonna meet this person, but [the song] is a thank you for letting me hold that art with me for the past 10 years. So at the foot of the bed is my pile… just kind of a mess, but it’s my mess. It’s my version of the mess that helped me get out of my mess.”

In keeping with the theme of growing older, many of Pleaser’s songs deal with mortality, though with multi-colored complexity, and often against a backdrop of bubbly, arpeggiated synths. “Bodies Under the Rose Garden” takes place in the aftermath of a righteous murder, and it finds Bleker contemplating their own burial (imagine a pensive sequel to The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” with a sticky midwest emo riff that passes from guitar to bass). There’s also the gut-punch bridge to “Thrill Eater,” where Bleker mourns: “The lifesavers I have known / Have taken their own / Please tell me when you get home.” Bleker says several of the dream house’s most personal easter eggs are memorials to friends of the band who didn’t make it to the album’s release date.

“We lost friends while we were writing it. We lost friends right after recording it. Obviously it’s horrible, but also, I’m lucky enough to still be alive at this age, and I’m lucky to love a lot of complex people. The risk you have to take is that complex people deal with complex emotions and thoughts, and you have to know entering into a loving relationship or a loving friendship that sometimes you lose them to those complications. I try to think of it like, I am so lucky, right? To love so many people who have such context for their lives that adds so much context to my life.”

Tyler and Bleker also count themselves lucky to have a band that is, first and foremost, a friend group—one that changes shape as time brings new members into the fold and leads old ones to move on. After making Pleaser, Be, a long-time songwriting force in Pretty Bitter, left to focus on his other career. In turn, Pretty Bitter brought in Liam Hughes—guitarist for Tyler’s other band, acclaimed D.C. punk trio Ekko Astral—who now plays Be’s banjo parts on keyboard. Live guitarist Chris Smith also parted ways with the group, replaced by Kira Campbell (who also lends bass to Tyler’s solo project).

The city where Pretty Bitter built their home happens to be a good one for making musical friends. Though they recently signed to North Carolina label Tiny Engines, the band remains committed to the D.C. scene, which is in the midst of a cohesive moment driven more by community and DIY principles than punk aesthetics—not harDCore so much as inDie C. Since the release of Ekko Astral’s critically-acclaimed pink balloons last year, the District’s creativity and consciousness has continued to snowball through bands that, like Pretty Bitter, sound nothing like Fugazi, Black Eyes, or Priests.

In January, Pretty Bitter performed at Mosh Madness, a charity basketball tournament for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, alongside the likes of power-pop-punk band Massie and proggy post-emo band Spring Silver (to say nothing of the dozen or so local bands who competed for the tournament trophy). Soon after, they contributed to Plenty Happening, a 27-song compilation supporting gender-affirming care for D.C. youth at Whitman-Walker Health. The tracklist includes folk, rock, and electronic music from local acts new and old—everything from post-punk stalwarts BRNDA to pop-rock up-and-comers Berra (Pretty Bitter’s track, “The Catalog,” is a re-recorded extraterra song).

In May, Ekko Astral frontwoman Jael Holzmann spearheaded Liberation Weekend, a D.C. music festival that raised over $30,000 for the Gender Liberation Movement. In addition to Pretty Bitter’s set on the main stage (and Ekko’s at the afterparty), Tyler played a solo project set at the fest’s local showcase and drummed for digital shoegazers Pinky Lemon. I could go on like this indefinitely, just listing exciting local crossovers from the past year, but I’ll limit myself to a few more. In the video for “Outer Heaven Dude Ranch,” Pretty Bitter features friends Sam Elmore (formerly of Ekko Astral, currently of americana project Sam Elmore and the Ghosts) and Massie. Later this summer, they’re bringing local emo band Cuni with them on tour.

“This current iteration of D.C. music, bands don’t abandon the city once they start getting attention, and I think that’s different from how it was pre-pandemic,” Bleker says. Tyler adds, “As somebody who was born and raised in the area, that’s a matter of, like, I refuse to let whoever is in the White House or the Capitol—I refuse to let those fuckers be the voice and face of my city. This city is actually full of queer people, of trans people, of people of color, and we’re all making amazing stuff, and it’s all pretty different.”

Accordingly, Pretty Bitter’s isn’t a white house, but a dream house as colorful as their city—a Washington monument worthy of the scene it represents. To open it to the world on Pleaser is an act of vulnerability, but it’s also an extension of the emotional space they build on stage. As a band fronted by trans and nonbinary people, Pretty Bitter go out of their way to declare every show a safe place for the marginalized. When they play “The Damn Thing Is Cursed,” they demonstrate exactly what that safety can look like. The routine goes like this: during the ecstatic mid-song breakdown, Campbell strums in a furious tremolo and Hayes goes even crazier than usual on the drum kit. Bleker and Tyler turn away from the audience, bull-rush each other, and dance face to face, forehead to forehead, sometimes falling in a heap on the ground, reveling for that minute in absolute freedom and trust. It’s become a tradition, but Bleker tells me it started with a suggestion from Tyler to help manage their intense stage fright before the Hinges release show three years ago. “She always knows what to say when I’m scared. She was like, ‘What do we do in our house when we’re dancing? Just look at me, and we’re gonna have fun.’”

Taylor Ruckle is an Arlington, Virginia-based music writer for publications like Post-Trash, FLOOD Magazine, and Washington City Paper. Find him at @TaylorRuckle on Twitter, or on the balcony at the 9:30 Club.

Pretty Bitter Build a Musical Dream House

The D.C. indie-pop quintet’s new album Pleaser is a different kind of Washington monument.