Puppy Angst: One Year of Scorpio Season
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Dreamy, gazey Philadelphia rockers Puppy Angst celebrated one year of their debut LP Scorpio Season, hitting the road on an East Coast tour and releasing a vinyl edition to commemorate the occasion. Swim Into The Sound spoke with lead vocalist Alyssa Milman as they looked back on the genesis, recording, and touring of this creative and impressive contribution to indie rock.
Milman was a founding member of bands Blushed and Past Life and has played as a touring member of Kississippi. They noted that touring with Kississippi and other bands has been a deeply generative experience, which helped shape and focus their sights on their own musical projects.
“As of April 2022, Puppy Angst is my only band. It’s why I left Kississippi. Having those experiences on the stage as we played… definitely shaped me as a musician, in the sense that it taught me what tour was really like,” said Milman. “It was a whirlwind and definitely changed things for me. I had never played on a stage that big. It just [gave] me a bit of a hunger to have this band get to do that stuff, too.”
Puppy Angst is a rollicking rock outfit suffused with youthful energy and tenderness, nurturing both brashness and vulnerability. Milman described the sound as “like if Mannequin Pussy or Bully was a shoegaze band.” To my ear, it also recalls glam rock and pop-punk while being something entirely original.
The band’s grounding in the Philadelphia rock ecosystem is one of Puppy Angst’s great strengths. Every member in the band besides Milman is in other projects; drummer Eric Naroden is the frontman of In Lieu of Roses, synth player Pauli Mia is the frontwoman of Twin Princess, and bassist John Heywood tours with indie superstar Alex G. Guitarist Dan Leinweber played alongside Milman in Blushed, and makes ambient music under the name greenspace. “It is cool to have this intricate web,” said Milman. “A band family. Bands-in-law, as [synth player] Pauli would say.”
For Scorpio Season, Puppy Angst’s debut album, the creative process was a mix of gradual cultivation and rapid finalization. The songs were written slowly, starting in 2019 and continuing over the next three years. Lead single “Yellow Paint,” a catchy and dynamic song, which offers an early high point on the album. The revving guitars deliver energy and strength, while the warbling synths add a layer of gauzy beauty and complexity.
“‘Yellow Paint,’ as soon as I wrote it, I was like “this is the one. This is the greatest song I’ve ever written!” Milman adds, “It was one of those moments where I was like “I can’t believe I wrote that.”
Writing the album was as much a process of transmogrifying old songs as it was coming up with new material; some of the songs, like “Aftermath,” had been reworked from early versions performed with previous bands.
“‘Aftermath’ was a really fast [song], it fit the Blushed world of the surf punk, super quick, chaotic type of thing, which we do a lot of in Puppy Angst! But something about it felt wrong to just take the song that Blushed wrote and record it verbatim on our album,” said Milman. “To record it, I wanted it to be a new song while still honoring some of that old song, like put it into the Puppy Angst world while also not taking too much from what Blushed did in the past.”
In contrast to the slow and intricate writing process, recording was done in a flash, with the band eager to finish the record in time for an (on-brand) Scorpio season release. “We went into Headroom Studios, just me, John, and Eric. We got all the drums and bass done in a day and a half,” said Milman.
Additional recording took place in the home studio of the sound engineer Joanna Baumann with the help of Dan Leinweber while Milman left for tour with Kississippi. “I was worried I just wouldn’t have the time or the creative energy to write all these guitar parts for an album, but I knew I wanted to have the bottom layers on it, to make it really textural, really lush,” said Milman.
“We finished mixing it in the summer of 2022 and put it out on October 24, 2022. So it was a long-winded process, but in the end, it was really quick,” said Milman. “I wanted it to be called Scorpio Season, I’d had this plan for so long… I wanted it to be for the fall and winter, I wanted it to match the season it came out in.”
The album indeed carries a punchy melancholy that feels appropriate for the autumn months; the album is colored with themes of both decay and renewal, a certain bitterness and pain, and is tempered with perspective and reflection. Even the songs that are by no means soft carry an unshakable vulnerability; on “Your Bones,” Milman sings, “I would’ve comforted you, I would’ve comforted you, but… you would never do the same.” The strong doses of anguish and abandon make the record feel at home in the darkest months of the year.
After the album’s release, the band embarked on an extensive tour, playing everything from college radio shows to two official showcases as South By Southwest.
“Our two official showcases were so, so much better than I ever could have imagined. Packed rooms! It was bizarre!” recounts Milman. “There were shows where the venue staff and bartenders were buying our merch. I was like, ‘You guys see so many bands! It’s so wild you would want to buy a tee shirt from us.’ That felt very affirming.”
The smaller shows were also memorable, with Milman noting that the younger audiences carry different (higher!) energy. “We played a really insane house show where Pauli was scared her beer was going to get knocked over by kids moshing,” Milman recalls, laughing.
Ultimately, the tour’s success has represented more than a good record; it represents a validation of individual and collective ambition, a deserved reward for Milman and the band’s dedication. In this way, Scorpio Season is a triumph, both personal and artistic.
“It’s been a really long process of realizing that I can put my own art, my creative pursuit first, it can be my first priority, and I can be all in on it,” said Milman. “Sometimes I feel like I’m making a fool out of myself. But then, on this tour, I was like, “No, the dream is happening! This is the dream.”
Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.
