Rocket: The Best of What’s Next

If you can imagine Sonic Youth writing songs for the pop charts, then you can imagine why I’m absolutely buzzing about the band Rocket. Their debut EP, Versions of You, was a gas in 2023, an especially tall feat, considering the bite-sized bangers we got that year from Angel Olsen, NewJeans, Yaya Bey, and Geese. Rocket’s debut record, R is for Rocket (a nod to the nineties band Radio Flyer), is an expansive upscaling of Versions of You’s pop bombast and guitar language. Recorded at 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606—a far-cry from the limited-resource, backhouse production of the EP—in SoCal, the noise and the hooks are still big-time, but there’s a nice wash of piano, Farfisa organ, mellotron, and drum machine threaded throughout, flashing the band’s obsession with Siamese Dream’s overdrive while flaunting the softer accents of a Beach Boys and Brian Jonestown Massacre’s influence.

Alithea Tuttle, Baron Rinzler, Cooper Ladomade, and Desi Scaglione formed Rocket in Los Angeles two years earlier, in an “excuse to hang out and do something fun together.” For everyone but Scaglione, it’s their first band ever. Their earliest practices together took place in a “shitty little practice space,” as Rinzler puts it, in Hollywood off Selma and Highland. At the beginning, Tuttle, whose dreams of becoming a dancer were quelled by a spinal injury in 2016, was learning how to play bass, which she calls the “best and scariest” atmosphere to be in. “It’s like when you say a word wrong in front of your friends, you know that one of them is going to say it back to you,” she elaborates. “But I don’t think I would have been able to learn as quickly without it being my friends. I would have been too scared.” The energy in the room then, she says, was always inviting and comfortable.

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And, considering Tuttle’s bandmates’ extensive histories with their instruments (Rinzler has been playing guitar since he was ten, Scaglione’s dad is a musician, and Ladomade started playing drums in hers and Tuttle’s middle school’s jazz band), she felt especially encouraged to not be Rocket’s weak link. “It’s easier, when you’re playing with people that are already good, because the odds that you are all going to sound good together are higher than if you’re all learning.” Despite the foursome’s collective friendship dating back to childhood, Tuttle and her bandmates took everything slowly and on the chin. “It was challenging, because it was like, ‘In order to know if we can do this or not, we need to know if we can play,’” Tuttle remembers. “Like, ‘If we don’t sound good together, then this is over.’ It was definitely nerve-wracking.” Scaglione, Tuttle’s partner since high school, echoes her recollection. “We didn’t want to jump the gun,” he says. “Getting together every day, we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this until it’s good and, then, once it’s good, we can start telling people about it.’”

Tuttle didn’t sing during Rocket’s first six months of existence, despite the band rehearsing every day. “I could not do it for the life of me. Then, we got our first show and everyone said, ‘Look, we know it’s scary, but you have to do this, or else we’re screwed.’” I ask if she was writing songs at that point. “We had a bunch of songs that we were going to play for our first show. [My bandmates] heard the demos where I was singing. I could sing, but I couldn’t do it in person.” But Tuttle did sing, eventually, at Rocket’s first show, which occurred at El Cid on Sunset, opening for MILLY and a band called Crisman (now known as Teethe). “We got asked to play four months before the show,” Scaglione says. “Our friend, who was one of the only friends we had shared this info with, that we had music, was like, ‘You need to play your first show with our band!’”

“We were like, ‘Thank God you want us to play with you,’” Tuttle hollers. “It’s that thing of, like, how do you get your first job if no one will hire you because you haven’t had a job?”

“And [MILLY] very much are still a part of the LA music scene,” Scaglione adds. “I think, because we played our first show with them, other people booking bands were like, ‘Oh, this band played with them, you guys should come play with us,’ which made it very easy to get shows in the beginning.”

But there was one issue leading up to the MILLY gig: Rocket didn’t have a name. “At a certain point,” Scaglione reveals, “[MILLY] would say, ‘Yo, do you have a name? We need to announce the show. We need to make the flyer.’ And we’d be like, ‘No.’” Time was running out and, a month before the show, Tuttle, Rinzler, Ladomade, and Scaglione decided on “Rocket.”

“It’s an easy name to remember,” I say. “What got you there?”

“I was apparently doodling and I drew a rocket,” Tuttle says. “We were up late at our rehearsal space, being like, ‘What are we going to name this band?’ We had so many bad names in this hat, and we were so embarrassed to say them out loud. Then I was doodling, and Baron was like, ‘What about “Rocket”?’ And we were all like, ‘That’s not half bad, because we can actually say it out loud.’”

I push back, hoping to get some inkling as to what names are too wretched to repeat.

“I could never utter those words ever again,” Tuttle insists. “To this day, I don’t think any of us could.”

“They were really bad,” Scaglione confirms.

I concede, “I’ll take your word for it.”

Rocket are great because they serve as a reminder of an age-old adage in rock and roll: It’s very cool to start a band with your friends. And all of it has, in Rinzler’s eyes, exceeded their expectations. “We get to travel around the country and meet some of our favorite bands, hang out with each other, play shows, learn from other people, meet cool people in the industry,” he says. Tuttle concurs, saying that it was everyone’s dream all along, that “we hoped we would continue to do it and be allowed to be able to do it.” On their first-ever tour, Rocket criss-crossed the country in a minivan, sharing gear with MILLY and lugging around merch boxes, suitcases, and guitars to cities that Tuttle never thought she’d visit. “I never knew when I would get to Detroit,” she says, before grinning. “Our friend fell down the stairs at the venue, and that was one of the funniest moments of my life.”

The band takes a minute to reminisce on those shows, retelling stories like they happened only yesterday, including a performance in a haunted hotel, hot rooms with less than five people in them, and the “fever dream” of doing a hard-style viking handshake with a venue worker outside the Foundry in Philadelphia moments before he dropped all of their amps and amp heads into a wet street. Then there was a stranger, ensconced in a wall of her own luggage, painting her toenails in Rocket’s green room. “She was waiting for a photoshoot, and it turned out that the venue we were playing and the place she was going had almost the exact same name and were down the street from each other,” Scaglione says before immediately busting up. “They gave her our buyout!”

You can say a lot about R is for Rocket. There’s the pummeling intro on “Wide Awake,” or the bleary film of head-pounding compression on “Act Like Your Title,” or the soup of melody oozing from “Crossing Fingers.” Nearly every minute is covered in reverb; Tuttle’s singing is a dynamic and captivating form of worship at the altar of Rocket’s jagged, trouncing riffage. The songs are loud, grieving, and curious. Touring constantly helped the band, in Rinzler’s own words, “play everything faster [in the studio] afterwards.” But the album’s standout ingredient is Tuttle’s writing—subconscious bends of resentment, generational trauma, and isolation. Through her intuition, the album’s themes glare: relationships, platonic and romantic fundamentals that Rocket especially thrive on. “I’ve learned a lot about what I want to do more of and be better at,” Tuttle says. “I’ve only been writing songs for a couple of years, and there’s so much to learn about it. Something I’ve really cherished is that I don’t know much about songwriting, and I’m able to come at it with [the mindset], ‘This is what sounds good to me.’ I don’t know what note this is, or why it makes sense in this [song], but I like it that way, because I’m able to just do what I actually like.”

Two years ago, “Portrait Show” was a perfect song on a bite-sized introduction. And it came together quickly in Ladomade’s parents’ garage. R is for Rocket is that times ten, and “Another Second Chance” has a comedown that is, for my money, one of the best final acts in a rock and roll song this year: an arras of gauzy, collapsing guitars spilling out of Tuttle’s drowned-out vocal. “The song was pretty much done, and then we were like, ‘Oh, it needs to go somewhere. Where should it go?’” Rinzler recalls. “And then we collectively jammed on it and came up with this ending. Even in the recording of it, we all needed to be in sync. Desi and I had to record it in the same room, staring at each other, because the click went away. It was just us locking in. We were all locked into each other.” Tuttle and Ladomade had to get to a similar kinesis on “R is for Rocket.” “It’s just a jam, and we play it differently every time,” Tuttle says. “Cooper gives me certain signals to play certain things at certain times. We’re not playing a song, we’re playing to each other. If we weren’t, it wouldn’t make any sense.” As far as debut albums go, R is for Rocket is a charming, crushing success. Ten songs just isn’t enough. I need a thousand more.

And 40-percent of the record has been in Rocket’s live repertoire for two years now, with “Wide Awake” especially going through numerous versions, including a different chorus in the version the band played at Paste’s South by Southwest party in 2024 (the genesis of my bi-monthly “When’s the new Rocket album coming out?” manifestation). When they entered the studio to concoct the record altogether, they tried tapping into the same decisions they would make onstage while still remaining open to newness. So they demoed songs like “Number One Fan” out piece by piece, with Tuttle and Ladomade playing to an acoustic guitar recording from four years ago. In “The Choice,” a drum machine drops into Ladomade’s real percussion, and Tuttle’s synth bass part turns into a real bass midway through the song. “Even though it’s just our first record, that [individuality] continues with the second record and the third record,” Tuttle says. “It was nice to open up the door to new and different types of songs for ourselves.” That held true even as the band scrambled to learn how to play “Number One Fan” live after months of playing everything but the chorus separately.

Rocket’s time at 64 Sound and Studio 606 gave them access to instruments that, on previous demos and recordings, would have just been employed through plug-ins. And, once the band realized that the techniques they use live don’t always translate well on a microphone, they took a Black Sabbath approach on R is for Rocket by replacing pedals with amps. Instead of using a distortion device to scoop out their guitars’ mid-ranges, they found that amps could articulate the tones better. It was more practical. And it helped, of course, that 64 Sound and Studio 606 both had more amps than Rocket could need or imagine. “We had thought, ‘Oh, there must be a Big Muff all over Siamese Dream,’” Tuttle says. “And it turned out that it was amp tones. Same with Sunny Day Real Estate when we toured with them: We realized that they don’t use a whole lot of pedals.”

Since forming in 2021, Rocket has wedged itself onto some very good bills, sharing stages with Silversun Pickups, Ride, the Regrettes, the aforementioned Sunny Day Real Estate, and Sunflower Bean. But perhaps no touring partner has made more sense than the Smashing Pumpkins, who welcomed Rocket on a 4-day run in England, on nightly stages in front of some five thousand people. I’d imagine that very few musicians ever get truly used to playing in front of capacity crowds. If any up-and-coming group is destined to do so, I’d put my money on the promise of Rocket, who’ve put long hours into playing the highs and lows of LA’s DIY venue circuit. Ladomade says it’ll always be difficult, playing to that many people at a place like Castle Park in Colchester, but that nerves can be a good antidote to perfectionism. “It feels like I’m playing the songs for the first time, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” she elaborates. “You can know these songs so well but it’s always so intimidating, to have to perform them perfectly.” Rock and roll ain’t about getting comfortable.

It’s fitting, too, that Rocket opened for the Smashing Pumpkins, because Billy Corgan’s band is a good measuring stick for something that Tuttle, Rinzler, Ladomade, and Scaglione all do well, which is rock hard without always rocking the same way. The Pumpkins touched all corners of alt-rock and even ventured into pop territory. The question always is: What bands have influenced your sound? But there’s something to be said about what bands’ attitudes toward genres, labels, and the industry can rub off on a group as green as Rocket. Fugazi is a totem of DIY excellence for them, in that regard. “The label they were on is the label that they started. They recorded in the house where they lived together,” Scaglione says. “I think that we take a lot of guidance from that, even though we live in Los Angeles and we’re assigned to a label and have a manager now. That is still very much something we believe in and appreciate and have tried to do as much as we could up until this point. We make our own merch, we record ourselves, we write everything ourselves. We’ve tried to do everything as long as we could without help.”

Recorded in halves between January and August 2024, R is for Rocket was self-produced, largely by Scaglione—who, in Tuttle’s words, “thankfully knows about recording, mic placement, and the little details.” I ask Scaglione about the trial and error of producing a record on your own, of being so close to the material always. “That was a very comfortable thing for us, doing it on our own versus with a producer,” he admits. “I’ve been in other bands and worked with producers and had good experiences. But I’ve had horrible experiences, too. That really did stick with me; I would not want anyone to have someone infringing on their art or cutting corners, whether it’s time or money, which, when we recorded, we didn’t have.”

It was beneficial for Rocket to have full autonomy, as they tunneled forward without giving in to anyone but themselves, reminding each other often about their cardinal motivation: “We need to make this good.” They were also able to, just two days before R is for Rocket was due for final mastering, add more guitar parts into the mix where they saw fit. Scaglione adds, “All of us have a very clear idea of what we want the end result to be, and I think we are very lucky to have been able to execute that on our own.” Tuttle chimes in, agreeing that “the freedom to do it by ourselves is why [R is for Rocket] sounds exactly like it does.”

“We believe in being a band,” Scaglione stresses, “and we try to hold onto as much of that as we can.”

R is for Rocket is out October 3 via Transgressive Records/Canvasback.

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

Rocket: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Lush, The Brian Jonestown Massacre