Alien Boy’s Sonia Weber isn’t shy about Smashing Pumpkins’ influence on her band. You can hear it in the project’s balance of angst-ridden grunge and irresistible pop melodies, sure, but in discussing the period of time during which the band’s third album You Wanna Fade? came together, Billy Corgan comes up numerous times, as Weber found herself listening to eight-hour podcast episodes on the band’s history, or sitting up with bandmate A.P. Fiedler all night listening through their discography.
But it’s just one of many elements that have informed Alien Boy’s sound over the past decade, evolving over the course of three albums to strike their current balance of shoegaze textures, power-pop bounce, and emo lyricism. With the guidance of their peers in Dazy, Supercrush, and the late-great Strange Ranger, You Wanna Fade? feels instantly canonical within this new chapter of ’90s-alt revivalism where slacker rock and noisy jangle-pop intersect. With the added assistance of Deafheaven producer Jack Shirley, each of these 12 songs also stands out from that canon with a uniquely serrated edge that also aligns them with bands like recent tourmates Glare.
With the record dropping this week via Get Better Records, Weber took the time to share six of the primary non-musical influences on the record as it came together over the past few years (add Taylor Swift to the incidental musical influences—another artist Weber found herself jamming throughout significant portions of the day). From a summer of “manic energy” to osmosing life in the Pacific Northwest (she’s not the first artist to express that particular influence to us this year), check out all of her picks below.
Summer 2023: “cocktail hour” and manic energy
I think summer really drives a lot of the energy in Portland—everyone’s always waiting for it, and that summer was particularly wild and fun for me. I was single for the first time in years and was super manic, I was barely sleeping and listening to Taylor Swift like eight hours a day. I would wake up, immediately put my big playlist on shuffle, and just have a ton of energy every day. The big crash of a huge life shift hadn’t hit me yet (didn’t come until the transition to fall that year) and I was just…vibrating. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Me and A.P. were hanging out a ton and developed a weekend ritual we called “cocktail hour,” where we’d make a new drink each week and hang out on our roof and just talk and talk. Every single time it would slowly devolve into us talking (screaming) about Smashing Pumpkins and we’d talk and listen to them all night. I think the energy from these conversations carried on through the writing and recording process. I thought I had most of the record written already, but I ended up writing/finishing “I Broke My World,” “Changes,” “Cold Air,” and “You Wanna Fade?” throughout that summer/transition to fall and they ended up being some of my favorites. The feeling of that summer was massively influential on the record, I’ll probably always look to it.
Growing up in Portland
Everyone in the band grew up in Portland except A.P., and I think the influence is hard to shake (not that I’d want to). This is more of an overall influence on the band in general than on this record in particular, but something happens to your music when it’s grey and rainy two thirds of the year. The music gets darker and more dramatic on its own. Something happens to your life when you’re so desperate for the sunshine, and always revolving your life around summertime (at least that's how it is for me). I think as my songwriting style changes and evolves, you can always still hear all that. There’s always a Wipers thing about it—it’s always a little darker, a little more dramatic, a little more desperate.
Bandsplain podcast
I don’t remember exactly when I got into this podcast—I’d been a huge fan of 60 Songs That Explain The ’90s (the whole band is, we listen to it on tour a bunch), and when I finally branched out to Bandsplain I was fucking psyched. I love rock docs, books, movies, anything about rock music or just music in general, so this scratched a serious itch for me. I remember listening to the Smashing Pumpkins episodes (all eight hours) in January 2024 when we were really in the thick of trying to finish the record. It was a tough time for my mental health, but listening to this podcast would always light a fire under my ass. I remember multiple times getting home from work and running inside our house to tell A.P. about something cool or hilarious I had heard that Billy Corgan did or said. It made me excited to make something grand, and also made me laugh. I love Bandsplain!
Nan Goldin’s photography exhibit/book Ballad of Sexual Dependency
This is another one that's more of an overall influence. I saw this exhibit in New York ages ago now, but it was the first time I saw art/photography that made me feel the same way music does. I look to this book a lot for photography/style references, and I think it's a theme I contemplate a lot in my music. It’s all about people and their relationships to each other, love, heartbreak, dependency, addiction—not just to substances, but to people. I think the photographs are beautiful, and I think about them a lot.
Elio’s father’s monologue in Call Me by Your Name
I love this movie, I probably watch it at least once a year. I always start it late at night, alone usually, and I always cry. Toward the end of the movie there's a scene where Elio’s father Samuel [Michael Stuhlbarg] gives him a speech about how special and rare that kind of love is, and you could harden yourself to it each time you get your heart broken or you can embrace all the feelings: beautiful, ugly, painful. I think about it a lot when I think of how I want to live my life in regard to love, and because of that it must have had an influence on the music. I’m endlessly curious about love, romance, closeness, real intimacy. It’s broken my heart and other people's hearts over and over again in my life, but this always reminds me that it’s what life’s all about. I love how these experiences have created and influenced my art. As painful as it can be, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I think that scene is beautiful.
Samulito Cruz from Toner saying “You wanna fade?” to me in the green room at Eli’s Mile High Club
This is gonna make me sound like a huge dork (accurate), but when we were on tour with Glare in June 2023 we played with one of Sam’s bands at Eli’s in San Francisco. We’d met and gigged a bunch in the past, but that day I was really gearing up to make my move to be real friends. I walked right into the middle of a crowd in the green room smoking section and probably said “Hey” or maybe I said nothing and just stood there, I don’t remember. But Sam said, “You wanna fade?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Like hang out or party or something,” and I was like, “Oh, yes, definitely.” We had a great night, stayed up super late talking. Mission accomplished.
Ever since then, I've wanted to write a song called “You Wanna Fade?” I liked how it sounded, and I got in my head this dual meaning, like partying or fading out of someone's life. I finally wrote the song a few days before we were supposed to go into the studio and texted Caleb, “I’ve got a song for the next record lol,” and he was like, “No, dude, we gotta do it for this one,” and then we did and we named the album that, too. Fated.
