The Paranoyds have made a name for themselves as one of the most exciting Los Angeles bands since forming in 2015, playing festivals like Coachella and touring with the likes of DIIV, Albert Hammond Jr., Sunflower Bean, and BRONCHO. Today the band finally announce their long-awaited debut album, “Carnage Bargain”—a raucous blend of garage rock grit, new wave swagger, classic horror film soundtrack campiness, and a myriad of other left-of-centre influences. The exhilarating ten-track LP released via Suicide Squeeze Records.
It’s ironic that the band’s moniker winds up being an apt summary of the band’s general outlook on technology and modern culture given that The Paranoyds’ humble beginnings can be traced back to a friendship forged between Staz Lindes (bass/vocals) and Laila Hashemi (keys/vocals) over Myspace in their early teens. Bonded by a shared interest in local underground music, the pair eventually moved their online friendship into the real world. Laila’s childhood friend Lexi Funston was brought into the fold and the first vestiges of The Paranoyds began to take shape. “We would all go to our friends’ shows and it hit us that we could start a band and play shows too,” Funston says. With the addition of drummer David Ruiz in 2015, the band found the perfect personnel for their sonic balance of jubilant energy and foreboding undercurrents.
To celebrate the album announce, The Paranoyds share the record’s lead single “Girlfriend Degree.” A mid-tempo stomper of clap-along beats, fuzz guitar leads, and call-to-arms vocals described by the band as an ode to “being a badass woman who’s taking time to make sure she’s doing things for herself,” “Girlfriend Degree” makes the band’s mission to reject the status quo clear on this initial track. Read a bit more about the track below, and watch the Ambar Navarro-directed (Cuco, Soccer Mommy, Stef Chura) music video.
“‘Girlfriend Degree’ is a call to arms, a reminder to be a supremely self-loving woman, to just do you. There’s all this pressure about being ‘the ideal woman,’ and it’s easy to get caught up in that—to spend your time trying to be all these things that others think you should be. Getting a ‘girlfriend degree’ is about settling, selling oneself short and not believing in yourself—valuing your partner’s beliefs or opinions over your own. It’s cool to be a girlfriend or wife or whatever, but there’s so much more to being a woman than that. This desire to be above that is also somewhat a telling of how our band came to be. We were all going to a bunch of shows and obviously having a great time and it took us a bit for us to realize that we could also make and perform our own music….and that nothing was preventing us from doing that besides ourselves. We all have power and we should use that power to exercise our own agency.
“We’re living in the dystopian future. Our lives are completely tracked and programmed, our extension of ourselves is a handheld computer with a microphone and camera that stays on while were unaware, and, on top of everything, the extreme right is gaining continuous world power,” The Paranoyds explains of its name. “What isn’t there to be paranoyd about?”
“Carnage Bargain” captures this chemistry perfectly—channelling the genre-mashing weirdness of guitar-and-keyboard provocateurs like The Intelligence on tracks like “Laundry,” the fever-dream kitsch of early B-52s on “Ratboy,” krautrock’s motorik groove on “Hungry Sam,” and the beguiling pop of Blondie on the sweet-and-salty highlight “Courtney.” The band may indeed be paranoid, but they offer a solution to our modern ills through the simple act of being an inspiring, independent, and unflappable musical force.
Pet Cemetery EP came out back in November 27th, 2020, on Suicide Squeeze Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 