Among the artist community, it’s become a tad cliché to cite 2020 and COVID lockdown as being a catalyst for heightened introspection. Nonetheless, lockdown-led navel-gazing was a natural, deeply human response to the pandemic, and not just for creative types. First off, what else was there to do? Second, I once had a therapist who told me about “the frictive wound” — in the psych community, this is ascribed to people who can’t (or won’t) sit still lest they be alone with their thoughts. Keeping incredibly busy is one way we avoid facing life’s hard stuff. A few years ago, Sadie Dupuis had to deal with her own “frictive” wound as Speedy Ortiz were pulled off the road. What she found would inform the contents of Speedy’s new album, Rabbit Rabbit, which is out today.

“You can only go on tour for so many years in a row where a global pandemic will force you to remember, ‘Oh yeah, it’s not exactly fine,'” Dupuis says dryly. The “it” in question encompasses a few themes: childhood trauma, workism, emotional detachment, activist burnout, and ethically squishy industry “leaders” who don’t live up to their stated values.

Calling in from the Philadelphia apartment she shares with Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi and their rescue pit bull Lavender, Dupuis is surrounded by pink walls and a green couch. At her desk is an elaborate, gold-plated Soyuz 017 microphone. This is where she tends to rehearse, write, and record demos before bringing them to the rest of the band, which has an updated lineup with Audrey Zee Whitesides on bass, drummer Joey Doubek, and guitarist Andy Molholt.

Together, the quartet have produced (with help from Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin) a record that is equal parts aggressive and melodic, with Dupuis confronting her self-ascribed “justice sensitivity” over swerving, effects-laden guitar and nervy, uneven percussion. Famously literate (Dupuis has an MFA in poetry and has taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), the singer/guitarist bolsters Rabbit Rabbit with metrical verses that toe the line between diaristic and opaque. Now that you can hear Rabbit Rabbit in full, read our breakdown of each track on Speedy Ortiz’s fourth LP.

1. “Kim Cattrall”

Wait, before I ask you about the song “Kim Cattrall,” can I get your thoughts on And Just Like That? Can I assume you’ve been watching?

SADIE DUPUIS: I sadly have been watching. Every time there’s a good joke, I’m like, “Thank you Samantha Irby.” I hate all these women, but I need to know what’s going to happen to them. And I’m dreading the reveal of how they will pluck Aiden from all of our lives again. But I know that that’s got to be coming soon. [Editor’s Note: We’re having this discussion one week out from the show’s season two finale.]

They really did Stanford dirty. There was no universe in which that character would ever have become a monk or abandoned his husband.

Why start the record with a song titled “Kim Cattrall”? How did Kim Cattrall, of all people, make their way into being the song’s title? I zeroed in on the line “I’m not like other girls and I am.” Is that in any way a reference to the actor’s now-famous tension with Sarah Jessica Parker and her feeling like an outsider on the set of Sex And The City? Or am I overthinking it?

DUPUIS: For sure. I should say the song was totally written before I called it “Kim Cattrall.” The title was applied later.

I think sometimes when I’m working on a song, I just know this is the opening track, this is the establishing shot. This is going to lay out what the album will do. Frequently I’m thinking of that in more of a musical sense than a lyrical sense. But when I made this song, I’d just gone to see PINKWASH, our drummer Joey’s band, play at Foto Club the night before. I was feeling very inspired by seeing that band and the other bands on the bill. I think this was the first time I’d been to an indoor show since the pandemic started. I came up with the music based on this experience of going to Foto Club and seeing PINKWASH play and seeing friends.

The way that it opens with all these different woven sound treatments and field recordings — when I first started demoing for this record, the first thing I did was do all these harmonized feedback songs, which we didn’t wind up using, but I clearly wanted to get into some of that sonic play. There’s tons of little details like that in the record. It felt like a good first song to show [how] this is going to have all these weird, noisy, and explicitly noise elements. But it’s also guitar pop and it’s more guitars than you’ve heard from us before, even though we already did a lot.

Lyrically, the first line is the title of the Jenny Hval book Girls Against God, which I really liked. This is about a band that’s a coven of experimental artists, and they’re doing these widespread social protests as their spells, and it’s also about death metal and making art alone and making art in a collective. It’s a great book. I feel like there’s questions I’ve been asking in my music since I was a teenager and continue to ask, which is I don’t understand my own connection to my own gender. I feel like the song resolves to be fine with not having those questions answered. It resolves to be fine with looking back at poor decisions I made in my 20s and wondering, “How the fuck did that turn out okay?” But I’m grateful I’m here. Making those chaos and trauma-informed choices led me somewhere good, which is where I am now.

All that said, looking back at your trauma-informed decision making of your 20s as a 35-year-old, you’re hopefully making better decisions for yourself where you’re not sitting through misery because you feel that you must. Kim Cattrall was giving a ton of interviews at this time about how no amount of money would bring her back to Sex And The City. Everyone was a bully, [it was a] toxic work environment, and I really liked the strength of those kinds of statements. So the “I’m not like other girls and I am,” I did think that separating herself from the four archetypal women of a sitcom tied in with some of the lyrics I already had.

2. “You S02”

Speaking of TV shows… I saw that this title does actually reference You on Netflix.

DUPUIS: I have a whole problem with retroactively applying TV show characters, actors, and titles to the songs that didn’t start off that way.

We had a 10AM band practice today. It’s my favorite time to [practice]. I was initially going to practice alone today, and Joey, our drummer, was like, “If I go at 10AM, will you come with me?” I was like, “Yeah, I will. I love the 10AM practice.” I was joking, “If I was at home, I would be practicing to TV, which is what I always do.”

Hang on, you practice to TV? And you don’t find it distracting? Maybe I can’t get past my own audio deficiencies.

DUPUIS: Yeah. It’s just on and I’m playing. Sometimes I feel like the splitting your brain helps you get into the muscle memory part a little bit better.

This is something that I think came out in a Cloud Nothings interview, but Steve Albini is always doing the crossword on his phone while he’s mixing. That way if something jumps out to you, it jumps out to you. And if you’re just hyper focusing, you don’t always pick it up. So I feel like watching TV and practicing, you can get deeper into that muscle memory thing where you’re not hyper-focusing so you can see the big picture. Or maybe I’m just using this as an excuse to have seen seven seasons of Riverdale.

Well, the framing of this song in your press materials talks about how you’re addressing union busters, apologists, and generally activist-type figures who don’t live up to their public ethos. I know I’ve experienced this in my field. We all have. Without naming any names — or name them if you want to — was there a pivotal time in your career when you realized that this type of hypocrisy was a thing?

DUPUIS: Yeah, I mean, as you just said, you’ve experienced this a ton in your career, I have too. Everybody we could look to in every media city has at least 10 examples like this.

The song is set in LA, I suppose, only because LA drivers do that thing I’m describing in there, which is just pull in front of you from the right. I feel like more so than any other city, that is the thing I need to look out for when driving in LA. It just felt like a good metaphor for people who could certainly stay in the lane they’re in, but are eager to take advantage, eager to get ahead regardless of who’s behind or what kind of pile up they’re leaving in their wake. So, it’s not like an anti-LA song. It’s really an anti — exactly what you were describing. People who build their career on stated ethics that they are quick to abandon the second it could convenience them.

I was thinking of a few different examples. We certainly all know the trope of the punk boss — and putting this in big scare quotes — the “ex”-punk who was politics-forward early in their career, suddenly becomes in charge of a company and is as godawful of boss as any other. I’m thinking of the very outspoken musician whose social politics are on the level, and then they will have the back of the person who’s the scene racist. I’m thinking of a lot of different people like that. The people that I know who are like that are different from the people you know who are like that or are different from the people that our other friends who work in media, work in music, work in entertainment know, but the stories feel parallel.

3. “Scabs”

With “Scabs” in mind, could you talk about the work you do with United Musicians And Allied Workers (formerly the Union Of Musicians And Allied Workers)?

DUPUIS: I do think that UMAW plays a factor in why I wound up writing [“Scabs”]. I wrote this song in the post office. I have a voice memo of me humming it in the post office. I can’t believe I did that. But it was about seeing other customers at my post office, which serves a huge portion of West Philly, just berating a postal worker.

It was [around] the same week as some budgetary cuts and just employment changes. Schedule changes had happened that the mail carrier unions had widely opposed, and this is being reported everywhere, and it’s also summer of 2021. So, people very much still have their “support essential workers” signs up in their yards and are, again, publicly purporting to have the backs of people who are forced to work in the pandemic and then are screaming at someone working at the post office, [who is] clearly overburdened by the volume of customers, mail, and changes to their work position that their unions are trying to fix. I found that frustrating. In lieu of creating more stress, anger, and volume in the post office, I went home and wrote a song rather than reprimand someone publicly.

It did help me to put in context some other more music- and entertainment-specific dualities. That was the No Music For ICE campaign, where we were asking artists not to do new exclusive work for Amazon while Amazon’s tech was powering customs and border patrol and deportations and police surveillance and other godawful violence. This was a pre-pandemic campaign, so as the pandemic went on, we saw stories of people dying in Amazon warehouses because they had literally been locked inside during hurricanes. We saw people dying on warehouse floors due to COVID and people being forced to continue to work next to their dead coworkers. The godawful stories like that of the people are driving vans that are hot enough to cook a pizza on the dashboard and yet are being timed so drastically that they cannot take any bathroom breaks their entire shift.

It was a ton of reasons to not work with Amazon, and yet you’d see people attacking the Amazon organizers online or saying that this was irrelevant to them because they’re working musicians and they want to be doing things with Amazon despite there being demands drawn by the Amazon union organizers. So yeah, I took it from the local hypocrisies that I found frustrating to the more professionally local situation of musicians organizing — or failing to support — adjacent organizers.

4. “Plus One”

Is there a chance that the line “sucker punched to pucker up” was a reference to Placebo’s “Every You Every Me”?

DUPUIS: Oh my God. I wasn’t thinking about it, but I do love that song. I was actually talking about it just this morning because there’ve been a couple of times where I’m playing something in practice and I’m like, “Oh shit, I think this is something else.” There’s a part in “Ghostwriter” that sounds like that song. It’s like a rhythm guitar part when the drums have cut out. [Though] not an intentional reference, I guess there’s only so much “sucker” and “pucker” you can do. It’s definitely the era of my listenership that I was mining for musical reference points. If it slipped in subconsciously, I’m not at all shocked.

What were you thinking about in the thematic sense?

DUPUIS: This is yet another song where I don’t even say the title in the song. When I started working on this song, some of the earliest songs I did were very much in that vein that “You SO2” and “Scabs” are where it’s a lot of finger-pointing, particularly in my field of work. I had to take a half step back and think about, “Why am I so quick to get into that mode of ‘J’Accuse…!‘ and ‘You’re a phony!'” What is causing me to so quickly occupy that role as a songwriter and as a peer of the people I’m musically calling out?

I started to reflect back on my childhood, and there is child abuse in my past that I have not had to reckon with publicly and have really tried to spend as little time thinking about as possible. But it was starting to come through in some songwriting I was working on just prior to when I started working on this record. I did some co-writes over the pandemic, and in particular, I did some lyrics for the New Pornographers. And the first drafts of everything I did was very much about those experiences, and I had to put it away for a second, but it seemed like it was time to start writing about it for whatever reason. So this song is not entirely about that, but it is about how those patterns either replicate as you grow older or also about the maladaptive coping things you do because of them that could go in the other direction. So I’m either trusting the wrong person too easily or I’m too quick to judge and dismiss someone whose intentions are right.

And in this song, I think I have not always been good about recognizing when my boundaries aren’t being respected or when a friendship is transactional for the other person. This song is about coming to terms with those kinds of relationships, by which I don’t mean romantic, like friendship or professional or just anybody who’s using your time solely for themselves and learning to be better at drawing those lines for your own self-preservation. I had the “Call me when you need a plus zero” [lyric] and I wrote the rest around that.

5. “Cry Cry Cry”

Speaking of coping mechanisms, “Cry Cry Cry” made me think about my personal relationship to tears and crying.

DUPUIS: Are you bad about it or are you good about it?

As a kid, I cried constantly. Usually out of frustration. Then it was like, once I started, I couldn’t turn it off. My crying leveled out over the years — I learned how to cope with anxiety, I got older, I moved to LA, I found more of a sense of control over my life. I also cried so hard once that I gave myself an ear infection, so that I think scared me a little.

DUPUIS: That is wild. That’s trophy-worthy.

Yeah, I have very little drainage in my right ear. Anyway, with a line like, “A cactus bristling and flexible through lifetime specials,” it sounds like there’s not a lot of crying on your end.

DUPUIS: Yeah, I can’t do it. I think when I’m reflecting on “Why am I like this, why do I do this, why am I so protective of other people?” I think about the things I was experiencing when I was young, and it became modeled for me that to cry made situations worse. It didn’t matter how bad it was getting or how unfair it was or how painful anything was — if I were to cry, that made everything worse.

So, it’s very rare for me to cry, and it’s something I wish I could do, and I wish I could get in touch with some of the more physicality associated manifestations of grief or sorrow or just frustration, anything.

This song is about that. Similarly, reflecting back on those origins of being unable to cry, thinking about the things I do instead, which is put it towards music or doom scroll, this feeling of needing to control everything through knowledge, through research, through using alcohol as a coping mechanism, I think, is part of what’s in this song. And that because I can’t tap into feelings of self-pity, which sometimes I think I have probably earned, I go literally for the jugular, coming for your neck.

There’s so many great songs about crying and even songs that have this title. There’s a Peggy Lee one, and there’s a Johnny Cash one. I feel like, of course, there’s a lot of more contemporary sounds in it. Some of it, I tried to take a keyboard from Metric, like an electroclash keyboard. There’s also a lot of layers in it that nod to songs from the ’50s or even the ’40s. There’s a 12-string guitar that’s doubled by a baritone.

It feels like I am able sometimes to put those emotions that I can’t feel in my heart or through tears or through my pulse or whatever, I can channel that into music that evokes that feeling for me. The instrumental of [“Cry Cry Cry”] was just as much an exercise in exploring that as the lyrics were, and it’s the song I’m most proud of on this record, and I think for Speedy in general.

6. “Ballad Of Y&S”

Who are “Y&S”?

DUPUIS: I read a book by Heather Clark called Red Comet, and it’s a biography of Sylvia Plath. If you ever wanted to know all the [details] of Sylvia Plath’s entire life, you should start it because it’s 1,000 pages long. [It talks about] one of Sylvia Plath’s very brief college boyfriends, who also dated Yoko Ono.

I love bygone gossip. I love to know which Britpop musicians were breaking up in 1988. I really want to know gossip that is no longer relevant. This was an incredible gossip to me, and it really made me think about some overlaps between Yoko Ono and Sylvia Plath’s lives that I hadn’t considered before, because I really don’t think of them as from the same era. And yet they were in college at the same time, or a year or two apart from each other.

They both did — and continues to do, in Yoko Ono’s case — this adventurous, groundbreaking, and confessional art that broke ground and experimented with their respective forms. Yet their work, in Sylvia Plath’s life and in Yoko Ono’s life while married to John Lennon, was really overshadowed by their male partner’s work. Their own artistic accomplishments were overly analyzed with their biographies and with their connections to these male partners. It made me think about how the current state of songwriting has really trended towards this hyper-confessional art that not only do the lyrics need to lay bare something about your biography, but then you’re going to genius.com to back that all up, and then also doing a video, or you’ve made an Instagram Reel to explain it. I guess we’re basically doing this right now.

I just started to think about how I do think of my own songwriting as in that memoirist lineage. I look to a lot of memoirs for inspiration. Eve Babitz has been a really big influence on my writing. I’m going through a big Annie Ernaux phase. I really like that art, but I also worry about the commercial co-optation of it. My lyrics are not super literal, but they do feel diaristic at times. And for that to be the current thing that’s in vogue feels very odd.

7 “Kitty”

How does Speedy’s present-day lineup reflect what we’re hearing on “Kitty” and Rabbit Rabbit?

DUPUIS: When we made Twerp Verse, I was moving to Philly and everyone else was starting to focus on different things. The [Speedy Ortiz] lineup changed to a touring lineup. Audrey [Zee Whitesides] and Joey [Doubek] had been touring for quite a while. Andy [Molholt] played on half of Twerp Verse, but he’d joined the band maybe a month or two beforehand. We couldn’t make fun of each other’s texting styles yet. Is that the token of knowing someone well? You know exactly how they text?

I think that they spent a few years just playing songs other people had arranged and written on, [but it] gave us a lot of time to get really close to one another as friends before we had to figure out the [next record]. Playing together for a show is different than the collaborative relationship for arranging and recording.

When I wrote the song, I kept the same process I’ve always kept, which is I do the demos in this room. I was going to say in my black hole, but as you can see, it’s pink, green, and purple. When I was working on this record, I dressed in a different color every day for whatever song I was working on. “Kitty” was like, what color is it? Kitty is blue. I must’ve been dressed all in blue when I worked on this. Blue eyeshadow, I did the whole thing every morning.

The way that this one specifically would pertain to my bandmates is, it’s about Philly. It’s waking up and someone is standing in the street across from my apartment screaming, “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.” That is for sure a Philly thing I wrote down. people would street race on my block, which they really should not do. It’s completely ripped up with potholes and trolley tracks, as I put in the song.

I feel like everything got a lot noisier during the pandemic because everyone was really stir crazy, and I found myself woken up by all kinds of sounds. Instead of feeling frustrated, I’d just be hoping that a few blocks away Audrey wasn’t hearing the same thing or that it was a little quieter where my other friends are sleeping.

So that’s the nice sentiment of the song. I will tolerate my neighbors yelling at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night. I hope that my friends are sleeping a little better than I am. It’s a loving homage to Philly, but also, people are screaming expletives in the middle of the night.

8. “Who’s Afraid Of The Bath”

DUPUIS: Musically, this is a direct homage to “Digital Bath” by Deftones, which is a song I love. I listened to Crosses for four hours yesterday. Criticisms are coming from a place of love. But when I go back to some of the songs that I was obsessed with as a 12, 13-year-old, there is a lot of gratuitous violence towards women done for the sake of an artistic display. [“Digital Bath”] is about the random murder of a woman at a party through electrocution in the bath. Putting that in its own little box, I’ve experienced stalking. So, in part, I’m writing about that experience. “Don’t wear a ponytail, don’t go alone” is advice I got about [going] running. If you are subject to stalking, it’s easier [for them] to grab your hair by a ponytail.

A lot of that stuff is more literal than other things I write through. I was trying to work in the mode of the advice that you get when you are preparing to file a restraining order or prepared to collect evidence. After an experience like this, you have to keep very detailed notes of where and when and exactly what, otherwise you don’t stand a chance. Even still, it’s a total crapshoot whether you’ll be taken seriously.

When you are experiencing stalking, someone else’s reality, fantasy, [and] desire — completely unrelated to you — is being projected onto you. This happens to people of all genders of course. It’s not something that explicitly happens to women or femme people. I think about all the media I consumed when I was younger, where a song is detailing a violent fantasy, and it happens randomly, and that is part of the artistic narrative.

So I guess it’s a musical return to “Digital Bath,” but thinking about where I sit sandwiched between these two things: the violent media that I enjoyed and still do, and then also how I had found myself the subject of someone else’s violence. “Who’s Afraid Of The Bath” sounds like something you’d say to the dog, but I was really thinking of “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Who’s afraid of the digital bath?” We did wind up sampling my dog, Lavender. She is doing some weird vocal layers in the intros and instrumental breaks.

What’s been cracking me up is, I catch myself every time that I have to explain this [song] starting with, “And I love Deftones and I love Crosses, and I’m not coming for Deftones.” I feel like stan culture has so conditioned me to preface everything with, “But I like this. I’m critiquing from a place of liking it.” I’m sure you’ve gotten all kinds of death threats for giving something a positive review.

The mute button and I are good friends now, yes.

DUPUIS: I’m bracing myself for someone to be like, “Why is she shit talking Deftones?”

9. “Ranch Vs. Ranch”

DUPUIS: This is a song that I just did not want to put on the record.

I was like, “This is the silliest one.” Every time that I am unsure about a song, and everyone convinces me to put it on the record, it becomes a single and it’s the one people like, and I think it’s stupid and I resent having to play it. “Ranch Vs. Ranch” is the one for me.

This one is stupid. I was not really down with this one. In hindsight, I’ve reconciled [that] the silly, puzzlely lyrics are about being in my mid 30s and reveling being a scary person who doesn’t give a fuck. But my bandmates were insistent on this one. Then it turned out that you take the little poll of what everybody wants to be a single, and it was every booking agent, every publicist, every radio person and our manager, and all of the band all want this one to be a single.

I was still feeling unsure about it and then we started getting into it in practice, recording, playing it as a full band. Between Joey’s drums and Audrey’s bass part and all the cool textures that Andy has thrown in there, I now really like the song. It’s solely because of all the cool things that they’re doing. That is what they bring to the table as full collaborators. They bully me into keeping a song on the album and then make me love it. If it was just me, it would be like, “Cry Cry Cry” is the single and “Brace Thee” — all the difficult, weird ones.

10. “Emergency & Me”

So I have to assume that “Emergency & Me” is a Dismemberment Plan reference.

DUPUIS: Yeah, 100%.

A lot of these songs, the title would be, like, “7/23” because I wrote it on July 23, so I come up with the title a little bit later. If I go to my original notes, the tempo, the date I worked on it, and the color I wore while arranging it.

There’s a call-and-response vocal in the chorus that says, “Emergency you and me,” and I think it was because I knew I wanted to do this Dismemberment Plan joke with the title, a long overdue grammatical response to Dismemberment Plan.

[But], the grammatical lyrics debate has been cracking me up because I really don’t think lyrics do have to be grammatically correct. Except for mine, which I need to format to look like perfectly coherent blocks of prose. The way that I like my lyrics to appear in print is these paragraphs. They need to read as a paragraph, or I will not sleep at night.

11. “The Sunday”

What did you mean by “Sunday’s becoming Monday”?

DUPUIS: I wish I could go back and remember what the original lyrics were for this because I feel like it was a lot more involved, and I just kept going in and crossing things out.

I really puzzled with this one. [I write] bios for other artists, and there were a few different people I spoke to about records that came out in the pandemic who were talking about using the time away from touring to reflect back on their childhoods and trauma — the same themes I’m talking to you about, where I’m figuring out why I respond the way I do based on things that happened a long time ago.

I spoke to David Bazan for the Pedro The Lion record, which I wrote the bio for, and he was talking about some of those kinds of themes. There’s this great song “First Drum Set.” “To play sports about my feelings” is a line that really stuck out to me, how he was so eager to learn drum fills and to play, and that was the place he could put his feelings.

It reminded me of when I was 17 and I’d already played guitar and was writing songs and playing in a couple bands, but I had never played drums. My mom bought my friend’s dad’s drum kit and put it in our basement. Another friend would come over and teach me lessons. She was like, “You’re so angry,” in a loving way. “Maybe this is something that can help, and you can put it into there.”

Starting to play drums unlocked some different part of playing music for me. It really feels like an emotionally evocative instrument to me, or it has a lot of potential for that. I tried to use this song to talk about that.

This “Sunday’s becoming Monday” malarkey, as someone who has struggled with serious depression, it’s about when a day is just completely void to you and you have to push everything you intended to do, even the basic things to take care of yourself, to the next day. Maybe that day is also going to be hard, but you have to just hope it’ll be better. Sometimes, music can pull you out of those stuck points, that lethargy.

In many ways, a hopeful song. Also, something I’m trying to puzzle through on this record is the trickiness of being drawn to the validation of playing music. That same thing where I said, “Putting a little puncture in the ego of it,” there’s an ominousness of finding power through anything and music is not an exception.

12. “Brace Thee”

With “Brace Thee,” I noticed there’s some opposing conditions. “All the shapes you backed me into, an outline I cannot shake off, but with praise washing over me, I’m fine.”

DUPUIS: That’s exactly what I was just talking about. I really want to remember who I’m quoting when I say this because I just did this the other day. I’ll find out and I’ll send it to you.

I read some interview with a comedian who was being asked what drew her to comedy. She was like, “Nobody who hasn’t experienced trauma is drawn to making a room full of complete strangers laugh,” which I really related to. I think in terms of memories of child abuse, [“Brace Thee”] is the most — it’s not even explicit, but it feels the most emotionally next to the memories of that.

It came late in working on the record, and it felt like something I was dancing around. A lot of, “Oh, that thing makes me do this explicit thing,” but not, “What is that thing?” And this is getting to the heart of the thing.

In a way, me being drawn to playing music was a form of escapism from that. It was something that I was being seen and being recognized for, and I could have healthier connections to people or different opportunities or attention paid to me from it. That’s part of what I’m teasing through with “I’m fine with validation.” That’s not true. Validation doesn’t make you fine, but it is a bandage you can use. And this is a description of that bandage.

Dylan [Baldi] thought this should be a single. He’s always picking confrontational things, but I really was dead set on this slow tempo. I think it’s 66 bpm. We could have made it 66.6, but I was really obsessed. If I’m thinking of more literal reference points, I was thinking of Failure and I was thinking of Mars Volta again, but there’s a Charli XCX song called “Cross You Out” with Sky Ferreira.

That’s one of my favorite Charli songs.

DUPUIS: It’s so confrontationally slow. You’re expecting the snare so many microseconds earlier than it is. I wanted this to have that same, “Come on, come on, come on” [feeling].

I feel like there was some question as to whether we keep that or whether we speed it up. I was like, “I think it has to stay at this uncomfortably slow pace because that’s reflective of what it’s describing.” Insisting on that allowed us a lot of places to experiment and build and add different flourishes to unsettle the steadiness of it.

This is one where we recorded this at Rancho De La Luna, primarily there. I love a lot of things that come from that studio, but The Desert Sessions has always been an exciting influence to me. I like the idea of a bunch of friends just meeting up to work on something and then there’s something new and it’s a product of everybody’s thinking.

That’s been an influence. Before I started doing Speedy, Steve Hartlett from Ovlov and Mike, our original drummer, and I were going to do a Desert Sessions-style thing with a couple other friends from that scene. It’s always been in my mind to do Desert Sessions-type stuff. I just didn’t know it would be the Desert Sessions studio.

We wound up getting Devin McKnight, who was formerly in the band and fills in with us once in a while, to play a crazy guitar part all over this. It’s very inventive and out of this world and very Devin. Then Darl Ferm, our old bassist, similarly added a couple little guitar parts throughout. They’re almost a rhythmic flourish. Instead of a woodblock, it’s like Darl giving a guitar stab. They added a lot of really cool details that we wouldn’t have thought of without them. I like that this song could be a place to bring in friends and incorporate a wider history of the band. Especially since it’s such a dark song. Got to find the fun parts.

13. “Ghostwriter”

To what extent is “Ghostwriter” another meditation on growing up and/or being in your mid-30s? Or have I misinterpreted the words “How to grow up?/ Lately, I don’t really push much/ I’m tired of anger/ How to move on?”

DUPUIS: This is very much about activist burnout. There were a couple projects I was working on towards the end of 2021. One was for UMAW’s Philly Local — we’re working on a gear drive to bring equipment to incarcerated musicians at Pennsylvania State facilities. We were driving all around Philly, picking up people’s unwanted amps and guitars and microphones and things like that. We’ve also been involved in Narcan and fentanyl test strips distro on tour.

All those projects in and of themselves are really rewarding. This could similarly be a “don’t read the comments” song because comments about projects that are there to do good for other people are some of the most egregious. When you are advertising that you’re part of something that’s distributing Narcan, the comments section are wishing for people to die. When you are advertising that you’re trying to get equipment to people who are incarcerated, the comment sections are like, “That should go to a child.”

Which sure, it should, but also, everybody is wrongfully jailed in my opinion. And even if you don’t have the abolitionist perspective I do, tons of people are in jail on drug charges that absolutely should not be there and are part of a political agenda that basically exists to make money off putting people in jail wrongfully. It can feel maddening to try to use all your energy to do something good for other people and then see that there are others out there who just want suffering.

In the midst of all that, I think I read that 2021 was the year that the most environmental activists had been killed while protesting. And of course, we’re constantly hearing about activists being killed while protesting. It just can feel incredibly demoralizing. Sometimes I feel like I’m waking up at 8AM with my heart racing from anger and can’t go to sleep for the same exact anger-fueled adrenaline.

I think it’s less so about growing up, even though that’s the conceit of the song, and more about trying to figure out how to live with a little bit less rage so I can do the things that will make small changes and that hopefully we all can do the things that make the small changes into bigger ones.

Rabbit Rabbit is out now on Wax Nine.