Destroy Boys

FOIE GRAS, Destroy Boys’ fifth album, feels like the record the band has been working toward all along. It’s bigger, stranger, and more confident than what came before, without losing the immediacy that got them started.

Roditis and Mayugba formed the band when they were 15, playing DIY shows around Sacramento while still in high school. Over the past decade, Destroy Boys have grown from those house shows into an international touring band, opening for Blink-182, Pierce the Veil, and Rise Against. Their songs have gotten harder to pin down, too: punk remains the foundation, but grunge, pop, post-punk, Britpop, bossa nova, and jazz all find their way in.

Produced by Zach Tuch, with additional contributions from Frank Iero, FOIE GRAS pushes that restlessness further. It’s the sound of a band finally giving itself permission to follow its instincts, no matter the risk—and, in the process, making its best record yet.

Sarah Tudzin is in high demand these days. Not only is she a lauded engineer and producer who has helmed recent records by boygenius, Weyes Blood, and Speedy Ortiz, but her own band, Illuminati Hotties, has also emerged as one of the sharpest and most sensitive acts on the pop- punk side of indie rock this century—“tenderpunk,” she has often called it. On Illuminati Hotties’ radiant and bittersweet third LP, Power, Tudzin pairs that sense of modern professional busyness with scenes inspired by the extreme highs and lows of her personal life in recent years. To wit, the day before Tudzin released 2020’s surprise Free I.H, her mother died. But weeks before that, Tudzin had met the person who has since become her longtime partner, the one with whom she can share all these troubles. It’s not hard to imagine, then, all that propels Power.

This is an album, though, neither about loss nor love but instead about the life that we live amidst such ups and downs. While there are some beautiful blues here, like the tender finale “Everything Changes” or the haunted “Rot,” Tudzin mostly looks for an exuberant way through these tangles. The inescapable “Falling in Love with Somebody Better” is a pop-punk treasure where she wishes her mom had met her new love, while the breezy “Sleeping In” finds contentment in the compromises that a good relationship demands. Loaded with guests who alternately complement Tudzin’s unfailing melodic instincts (Cavetown, Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr, John Congleton) or help her cut loose from them (especially Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis during the riotous “What’s the Fuzz”), Power is a prime culmination of all the things that have kept Tudzin busy in recent years—her skills in the studio, her knack for a hook, or the mere travails and triumphs of existence itself.

The Rat Utopia Experiment is a girl-fronted “circus” punk band from Washington state—aka, the PNW’s favorite circus act since 2022. Now in five shiny colors: Phia on vocals, Francis on bass, Maddox on lead guitar, Drix on rhythm guitar, and Christian on drums!

With the release of their newest single “Lobotomize Me” and the freedom of graduation from school, the band has branched out of their local stomping grounds and gained a large underground following. Carrying a love for theatrical performances, intricate lyrics, and intense riffs, The Rat Utopia Experiment blends political messaging and emotional storytelling in a high-energy, tear-jerking, dominating, and overall terrifying stage presence.