“I’m so sorry,” Kassie Carlson proclaims on the opening track of Guerilla Toss‘ new album, emphatic enough to instantly register as irony, “I came to party.” She gets lost as her head throbs on the way to another party on ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull’, where her friend is “Telling me he’s gonna eat the sunshine/ Though he isn’t walking in a straight line.” The burst of positivity is hallucinatory, intoxicating, and downright maddening, yet it also makes complete sense considering how and where the experimental rock band made You’re Weird Now, their second album for Sub Pop and fifth overall. With Stephen Malkmus on production, the follow-up to 2022’s Famously Alive was recorded at the Barn, the recording studio in Vermont owned by Phish’s Trey Anastasio, who plays guitar on ‘Red Flag’. Malkmus sang on a few songs, just one of half a dozen voices adding to the frantically layered, unapologetically radiant, and characteristically GT concoction of noise. The album keeps twitching and triumphing in its communal cacophony, precise-engineered to convince you that even if today feels a lot more like a hellhole than a party, you are certainly not alone in it.
We caught up with Guerilla Toss’ Kassie Carlson and Peter Negroponte to talk about Voltaire’s The Optimist, night skiing with Stephen Malkmus, the Contortions, and other inspirations behind their new album You’re Weird Now.
Voltaire’s The Optimist
I feel like Famously Alive sprung from a place of optimism, which the new record strives for as well, while also rejecting this Panglossian mantra of “all is for the best.” I’m guessing that’s how The Optimist feeds into a track like ‘Panglossian Mannequin’. From my understanding, it’s more about this idea of cultivating your own garden.
Kassie Carlson: It’s kind of like how, in the story, he grows up believing everything in life happens for the best, but then he hits the real world, and there’s war, and suffering, and all kinds hardship. His childhood professor, Dr. Pangloss, instills this philosophy that all things that happen are for the best, but once he has these experiences, he’s like, “You know what, fuck that.” The lyrics play off that idea of him growing up, riding the bus from east to west, being forced out of this safe space into this wasteland existence. Panglossian Mannequin is that lifeless doll, frozen in a ray of sun, maintaining optimism but not really feeling it. A toxic positivity kind of thing, which I feel happens a lot. He’s reconciling with this idea of the problem of evil, human suffering, how to process all of that heavy shit, and just be alive somehow without internalizing it. As you were saying, “I cultivate my own garden” – that’s the conclusion the character makes: focusing on improving your own life and immediate surroundings before becoming consumed in this abstract philosophical whatever.
You mentioned sunlight, which comes up on the record a lot as a metaphor for optimism, without that kind of philosophical weight.
KC: Yeah, sometimes it’s really difficult to distill your feelings into a topic. A lot of times if I get in that space, I’m searching – reading, watching a movie – just to find something that distills the idea I’m feeling.
Is distilling an idea something that arises when you’re working in a group context?
KC: I guess the lyrical idea is kind of my thing, but Peter helps me mold it into more of a structure, and helps me sing it in a way that feels natural. That’s something we’ve both been working on a lot lately.
Peter Negroponte: ‘Panglossian Mannequin’ is all you, I didn’t touch that one.
KC: I know, but just having it relate into a song and really work.
PN: Definitely.
Online chess
PN: I think a really important part of the creative process is how you unwind around it, and I really like playing online chess on the chess app against strangers in other countries. It’s really funny to play strangers in a 10-minute game. I’ve gotten pretty good, and my favorite thing that happens sometimes is when people start to talk smack on the chess app. I think that’s the funniest place to talk shit, on the chess app.
KC: I think it’s funny when we’re sitting nearby each other and I just hear him, like, “Fuck that guy! Fucking shit!” [laughs] I’m like, “Are you playing chess right now?”
PN: Yeah, I get all pissed. It’s the one time I get slightly aggro, on the chess app. I’m not trying to really start shit, but I do get there, like, “This motherfucker just got my fucking queen.” I get all funny. But it’s one of my favorite ways to relax.
It’s funny that there’s a chat function at all on the chess app.
KC: Oh yeah. Like, why?
PN: It’s totally bizarre. Maybe you’re supposed to talk about your moves or something, but sometimes you get into a real conversation with someone, which is really funny.
Do you play games as a band?
PN: I think I would kick everyone’s ass in chess hardcore if we played as a band, so I spare them. But we had a touring Scrabble board. But then Jake, the guy who plays synth in the band, he’s one of those assholes who’s really good with words and has a big vocabulary, so he just schools us, and it’s no fun. We play mini golf sometimes on tour – that’s a good one. On our last tour, we were driving through some mountainous area in Idaho, and we were playing Extreme Scrabble – that’s when you play Scrabble in the van. But not much of a game band. I don’t think any of us are very competitive, which is cool. I think there’s maybe zero sports talk in this version of the band.
KC: Oh my god, I know nothing about sports.
PN: I respect elements of it, but I know nothing.
KC: I wish I did. I could talk to more people.
Buy by the Contortions
KC: I was thinking about how in 2012, when I first joined Guerilla Toss to replace a saxophone player, I was living on Cape Cod at the time. Peter and I played a show together, and we started talking about creating a band. I didn’t have a car or a license, but Peter generously let me borrow his car, even though I didn’t have a license. I didn’t have a smartphone because I was very against it at the time, and the only thing that worked was a CD player. There were a bunch of CDs in the car, but the only ones that didn’t skip were Buy by the Contortions and Rather Ripped by Sonic Youth. So all these practices where I was borrowing Peter’s car and driving from Boston to Cape Cod – maybe an hour and a half, longer if there was traffic – I would just be listening to those two CDs over and over. Buy was helpful for me in thinking about the band’s transition from saxophone to voice. Pat plays his slide guitar, using it in these non-traditional ways. A lot of the earlier Guerilla Toss stuff was based on that exciting time in music, like the No New York compilation.
PN: Brian Eno made that comp of No Wave bands from the early ’80s. It was sort of a game-changer for us. There’s very gestural playing of the instruments, and that was a big thing for us in the beginning, and some of that appears on this record, specifically in ‘Psychosis Is Just a Number’, that gestural guitar movement. It was fun to fit that into this new record in a way in context with what we’re doing now.
Night skiing with Stephen Malkmus
NP: When we were recording, we were working with a bunch of great people. Bryce Goggin was one of the engineers, and Ben Colette. Bryce is most known for doing Pavement, and then he went on to work with Phish, which is how we ended up at the Phish studio. He’s done a bunch of stuff. Bryce is great, but he’s working 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. — he’s not going all night, not anymore at least. So we were wrapping up these sessions on the early side for rock and roll, which was great. A lot of nights we were done by then, so we were sort of hanging out with Steve Malkmus. He was staying up at this little cabin on the property. One night we went bowling — that was our first big night out. Took Steve bowling, got some Thai food, it was amazing. He’s a great bowler. And then I knew he skis, so we had joked about it in the months leading up, like, “Dude, we gotta take him skiing.” And then we did, and it was the best thing ever.
KC: He’s really good at skiing. It’s funny because he’s super tall and skinny, and he just goes straight down.
PN: I mean, he knows how to brake, but he was going down those black diamonds pretty effortlessly. It was pretty funny to watch.
KC: Yeah, extremely chill. He did look kind of funny in the beginning, but stunningly chill, yeah.
PN: Somehow he applies his slacker thing to skiing in a beautiful way.
KC: He’s got this big beanie that’s too big, and these big mittens.
PN: He was recognized at the ski mountain lodge, and they were playing Pavement in the lodge. It was pretty funny.
KC: I feel like it happened when we went bowling, too. Oh, bowling is a thing that we do as a band. Our bass player, Zach, is also really good at bowling. He pitches the bowling ball. It’s insane, like a softball pitch.
PN: Yeah, that’s another Guerilla Toss tour game. We try to bowl when we can. But night skiing with Steve was an inspiration. It was a good bonding moment – not that that guy is at all hard to bond with. We hit it off pretty quick, and we’d already known him from the Pavement tour a couple years earlier, but we were really vibing that night. If you’ve got some money to play with from your label or whatever, highly recommended you take your producer night skiing if they’re down. Jake, who’s playing synth with us, was kind of new to the band at the time. He hadn’t been in, like, 15–20 years, and he really stepped up that night, got on the skis crushed it.
What about the two of you? Are you experienced skiers?
KC: I maybe went once as a kid, and other than that, I’m pretty self-taught, like, from YouTube. But yeah, I’ve been skiing a few times the past couple seasons. Peter and I have been going. I don’t go down the black diamonds — I’m too anxious for that – I’m kind of an intermediate skier. It’s zen for me. Hearing the ice and the snow crunching, feeling the wind on my face.
PN: I went when I was a kid a handful of times in upstate New York, and I totally sucked. I hated it. And then during the pandemic, Kassie got me a gift card to the local super shitty ski mountain, and I went, and I was like, “This is the best thing ever.” So during pandemic times, when there wasn’t much to do, we got passes, and I was going, like, twice a week. I’ve gotten pretty good. It’s a fun activity.
KC: What about your Greek grandfather, who was an Olympic skier or whatever?
For real?
PN: My great-grandfather was the first Greek Olympic skier. Look it up.
KC: I was like, “Dude, it’s in your blood, you gotta do it.”
PN: I feel like I missed out on those genes, but maybe I got a few of them. He was in the Hitler Olympics. He did not salute him. He knew what was up.
Do you remember what you recorded after going night skiing? Were you feeding off that energy a little bit?
KC: I don’t think so, but I think it just kind of set the tone.
PN: Yeah, it set the vibe. I think it was earlier on in the session. Things were going great, but after that night skiing it was like, “This is the best.” We all knew this was the best week ever.
It’s not mentioned in the bio or anything, so I’d love for you to tell me more about how you linked up with Stephen Malkmus.
PN: Basically, he came and saw us play in Portland in 2019. It was really funny because he sticks out — he’s tall, he’s Steve Malkmus. He was standing in the middle of the room during our set, and people kind of gave him space. So there’s this glowing tall man there, just standing there pretty deadpan watching us play. I looked up at the last song, and he was gone. I was like, I hope he liked it, we didn’t get a chance to talk. A couple weeks later, he tweeted something. He used to be pretty active on Twitter, and he was kind of crushing it. He said something like, “Guerilla Toss, great live band.” We were like, “Fuck yeah, this is awesome.” Then, 2020, pandemic goes down, and maybe in 2022 he slid into our DMs on Twitter. Classic slide. He said something like, “Do you want to open for my old band, Pavement? Big fan of you guys.” We thought it was a scam at first, like, “What the fuck?” But sure enough, we did some shows with them, and we hit it off. A year later, I slid back into his DMs and was like, “Would you produce our record?” And he was like, “Fuck it, let’s go.” The rest is history.
I love the idea of a scammer hacking into Stephen Malkmus’ account to DM you.
KC: [laughs] It’s always a fear. I don’t know about you, but my mom is older, she had me really late in life, and I’m always worried she’s gonna get scammed on Facebook by someone to, like, give them $1,000. Like, “I’ve been talking to Brad Pitt, he’s in rough shape…”
PN: [laughs] Not a scam, though. It was the biggest not-scam in history.
I feel like you’re very intentional on the record about when his voice is actually heard. I don’t know if that was just a decision made naturally in the studio, or if it was baked into any of the songs.
PN: It was totally last-minute. It was the best. We had gotten a lot of the tracking done. We were like, “Steve, would you please sing on a few things?” He was a little apprehensive at first – not in a rude way, just kind of like, “It sounds so great.” And we were like, “We’d love for you to sing something.” And he was like, “Alright, I’ll do it.” We didn’t even really have an idea for what he would sing or which parts, and we were kind of just throwing stuff at him. I think Kassie was like, let’s have you do ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull,’ and it was incredible. Kassie wrote that hook down for him. It’s so funny, because we’re hanging out with this dude for, you know, 10 days, he’s such a humble guy, and you kind of forget that he’s this mega genius. So he gets up to the mic, and he just sang that hook, like, 15 times or whatever. And it was just effortless. We were all just sitting there with our mouths open, reminded of the power of this dude’s artistry. We got it all on tape – we stuck it on our Instagram. And then ‘Life’s a Zoo,’ doing the “You’re so uncool” – I think I’d always thought that would be a cool move for him to do, and he did it.
KC: We did a ton of singing overdubs, specifically with ‘CEO of Personal and Pleasure’ and ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull’. All of our friends were there at the barn. There’s no isolation or anything, so everyone’s just hanging out, and you just gotta get as much as you can while you’re there for those 10 days with all of your friends, and then sort it out afterwards. It was kind of a maximalist approach: get as much recorded as you can, then sort it out later.
PN: A lot of vocals, yeah.
KC: So it’s a lot of hanging out, but it’s also a lot redirecting the energy, right? Because everybody wants to hang out and chat.
PN: Yeah, the recording session was quite the hang. The way the studio is set up, there’s no isolation, even where the board is, so everyone’s just hanging out in this room. It’s a little nerve-racking, because you’re kind of playing for all your buddies. They’re taking pictures, sort of assist-engineering. That was the vibe.
KC: But it was really good vibes, because it was all my chosen family there. Willie, Johnny, Ben, my band, which is also my chosen family.
PN: There were multiple dogs.
KC: Yeah, there were three dogs at one point, so it was dogs coming in, dogs wanting to go out, then barking outside. It was just a big party. It’s a humble barn – you think, Phish, it’s gonna be super fancy, but it’s really not. It’s very down-to-earth and open, with exposed wood. All the coffee cups are totally random because they’re from different people who left them there. Even the barn itself, it’s made with hand-hewn trees, and you can see all the bugs that lived in the tree before it was actually a barn, there’s all these pathways. There’s also a huge porch on the front of it, where you can see all of Vermont. It’s very beautiful, back in the woods, so you’re with all the bears and squirrels and coyotes.
PN: It’s really the best. We’re very grateful to have been able to record there.
The Calvin Johnson compilation We Will Bury You – Female New Wave / Punk 1977-’82
KC: It was part of a series of tapes Calvin Johnson of K Records made, but this particular one I was listening to a lot when we were writing and recording this album. It’s very eclectic. It has some harsher punk stuff, but also some punk stuff that’s more sing-songy.
I saw the Raincoats on there.
KC: The Raincoats, the Bags, Westside Lockers, Honey Bane. Some of those songs, like ‘Yankee Wheels’ by Jane Aire and the Belvederes, have this ’50s girl group vibe, but they’re also kind of punk. That’s what I was thinking about with ‘CEO of Personal and Pleasure.’ In the beginning, I wanted it to have this saloon vibe. We have all these takes, but it didn’t end up sounding like that in the end.
PN: There was a tiny piano on there, right?
KC: Yeah, like campfire, but also saloon, but also punk, but also Guerilla Toss. Using that very eclectic compilation as an influence, because it’s all these different songs coming together onto one compilation. I’m a DJ on public radio, and I’ve taken a lot of songs from it and put them into my playlists.
Mixing with Jorge Elbrecht
PN: I just wanted to shout out Jorge, because it was such a pleasure to work with him. He’s so talented and such a sweet guy. There were a couple different phases of mixing. We outsourced to a few different people, weren’t sure what direction we wanted to take, and Jorge pulled through last minute. He crushed it. He’s a great producer, a hell of a mixer. Toward the end he invited me out to LA; I went to his studio for a couple days and we just messed around and had fun. He’s credited as a co-producer on the record as well. He put so much into that mix. The music is very dense, with lots of layers, and he went all in. I’m a big fan of his work. He’s also a songwriter, he has a lot of writing credits, which is really special to me, to work with someone who as an appreciation for that.
KC: Super easy to work with, too, down-to-earth and chill, for having such an extensive, beautiful resume, working with some pop stars there too.
PN: A lot of it was done remotely, but we were going back and forth constantly, all day every day for weeks. He really went the extra mile.
I don’t know how specific your memories are of that back and forth, but a song where I really hear his influence is ‘Favorite Sun’. Something about the space in the mix.
PN: If I remember correctly, he was most proud of that mix. He was really psyched about where he got it, which was funny.
KC: It’s always helpful to have a guy like that that’s taking things away and creating space. I remember Bryce saying, when we were mixing, “Everything doesn’t need to be a seven-layer cake.” He was joking, but it’s true. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and pile everything in. Having another set of ears to look at it and help you discover which overdubs shine or translate better on an album.
PN: It ended up being a hundred-layer cake, but a really tasty one.
This David Lynch clip
He talks about ideas like seeds or fish you catch, which made me think of this line from ‘Crocodile Cloud’: “Magic made you poor but free/ So swim beneath the reeds/ In fishponds of relief.”
PN: David Lynch is just in our DNA at this point. That was the most crushed I’ve ever been by a celebrity death. I love that clip – he has such a beautiful way of speaking. When you catch the idea, you just know. One of my jobs is teaching music to kids – I show them that clip, and they usually get it. I can’t speak for Kassie’s lyrics, but I definitely hear David Lynch’s influence.
KC: Of course. He’s got his tentacles in everything, even after death.
Do you ever feel daunted by the endless possibilities of ideas, or the infinite ways of bringing them to fruition?
PN: That’s the most exciting part.
KC: Totally. Even something like ‘CEO of Personal and Pleasure’ – in some alternate universe that is a saloon song, or just someone playing it on acoustic guitar.
PN: When we work on these songs as a band in the studio, we try many, many different ways. We go down the rabbit hole. But it’s one of my favorite parts of the process. And we usually return to the early ones, but it’s fun to know the other ones wouldn’t work. Maybe it’s a waste of time. But I don’t think any time is wasted when you’re doing creative stuff or “catching ideas.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Guerilla Toss’ You’re Weird Now is out September 11 via Sub Pop.
