BIO

Guerilla Toss met in 2012, crawling out of the skronky psychedelic punk fairytale that was their Boston DIY scene. Now based in New York, the currently touring and always recording art rock band have fully crystalized their brilliantly unhinged music. Along the way, they’ve played alongside Built to Spill and Parquet Courts, Os Mutantes and Mdou Moctar. And they’ve toured all around the world, hitting every festival from Pitchfork in London, to Treefort, to the Primavera Weekender to Pickathon.

In 2022, the band’s colorful dance punk took the form of Famously Alive, their Sup Pop debut. The record is the latest iteration of a carefully honed vision, an exploration of what it means to be alive (famously), to survive, to find strength in that survival, to be happy. The record was a revelation. A lazy river ride done while wielding a jackhammer. Electroclash by way of fucked up no wave. ESG by way of PiL by way of Brian Eno by way of Sonic Youth. Not long after, the band went on tour with Pavement, playing some of the biggest venues of their career. Now the long running band is back on tour, this time supporting Primus and Coheed & Cambria. They’ll be going from California to Chicago, playing songs that span the whole of their catalog, playing even bigger venues, reaching soon to be converted freaks around the country. 

Here is what it is like to see Guerilla Toss live: explosive, breathtaking. Kassie Carlson crowd surfs and moshes. She is a force to be reckoned with. High energy and raw, but also thoroughly composed. Guerilla Toss songs are all about hooks and grooves — they make music that basically requires you to dance. The band knows exactly what they are doing. If you’re supposed to dance, they’re dancing too. Jumping around and playing music that is totally caustic, ferociously creative, even a little bit feral. They mess with time signatures, making disorienting moves via all avenues at all times. “Guerilla Toss has a unique danceability to this day,” says Jake Saunders, a long time fan of the band, citing Peter Negroponte’s wizardry on the drums and Kassie’s ability to command a room in a way that almost feels like you’re possessed, bewitched, fearing for your life but also thrilled to be living it. And of course there is Arian Shafiee on guitars — a student of absurdly good and righteous hooks. Communing with this band is a kind of experience that is like: I can feel all the blood in my body. I want someone to cheerfully break a plate over my head. Jan Fontana of Godcaster puts it best. Guerilla Toss is “Explosive, Energetic, and Joyful.”

Artist’s Statement

Guerilla Toss

You’re Weird Now

Release Date: September 12, 2025

When NYC-based experimental dance punks since time immemorial (okay, since 2011) Guerilla Toss were in Vermont recording new full-length You’re Weird Now, Kassie Carlson would make what she called “punk lunch,” a communal meal where the Guerilla Toss frontwoman would raid the studio fridge for whatever was left to “put on the table…and [make] a sandwich of the most random ingredients ever.”

Regularly joining punk lunch were two weird music legends in their own respective worlds: Stephen Malkmus (Pavement, The Jicks….not sure who I’m explaining this to) and Trey Anastasio, Phish guitarist and owner of The Barn, the recording studio owned where Guerilla Toss (no strangers to the “weird music” tag themselves”) were making You’re Weird Now with Malkmus in the producer seat. (Engineer Bryce Goggin, who's worked with Malkmus since Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, was also part of the crew.)

While the idea of the guy from Phish and the guy from Pavement sitting around with Guerilla Toss congenially assembling sandwiches from random foodstuffs dug up from the bowels of a studio fridge might seem absurd, it also makes total sense. Because really, if there is any band who is the natural bridge between slacker punks who saw Pavement way before you did and wild-eyed wooks who’ve seen Phish more times than you ever will (and let’s throw in the eccentrics in 90s drip following one-time GT tourmates Primus around, as well), it could only be Guerilla Toss, a band so imaginative and consistently themselves that they’re basically the IRL manifestation of a utopian post-snob world where all musical ideas are worthy of expression and everyone is welcome.

This is the message powering You’re Weird Now, Guerilla Toss’ fifth album and second for Sub Pop. A hugely creative and joyful statement about the joy of creativity, with You’re Weird Now Guerilla Toss reclaim the word “weird” for everyone brave enough to let their freak flag fly and stay true to their artistic vision no matter what—a way riskier act than it’s ever given credit for, and one that requires a certain amount of serene self-confidence that it takes time and effort to cultivate and sustain.

Serene self-confidence is a hallmark of You’re Weird Now, in some ways Guerilla Toss at their Guerilla Toss-iest, keyed-up as ever but more clear-eyed, every musical choice engineered for maximum impact. When drummer Peter Negroponte half-jokingly calls the record “Guerilla Toss’ Greatest Hits that didn’t exist until now,” it actually feels…true? “As a band, we’re always sort of trying to reinvent ourselves,” he says. “But with this record, instead of being like, what should we try that we haven't done—since we’ve done a lot of crazy shit—it was like, what have we done that’s the strongest, and how can we work off that. Let’s reach back into our own musical history and try to make even better the things that I thought were already the best.”

The record opens with the “Krystal Ball,” a charging positivity pop anthem with an industrial breakdown and boingy-sproingy hook so sticky it seems impossible you’ve not already lost your shit to it several times at some DIY festival, yelling along with Carlson as she declares, “I’m sorry! I came to party!” Following that is “Psychosis is Just a Number,” a glittering no wave skronk anthem about staying present in the chaos - imagine post-punk Pylon meeting the cheerleaders from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, but they’re obsessed with The Contortions. Highlight “Red Flag to Angry Bull” builds to a campfire sing-a-long-worthy outro featuring Malkmus and Carlson duetting over a chatty, classically Phish-y -y (there really isn’t any other way to describe it) solo from Anastasio. (The band shares that the humble Anastasio was shocked and honored when they asked him to contribute; Carlson further offers that he even seemed a bit nervous and did several takes, proof that even music icons can feel like outsiders deep into their careers.) The cacophony of voices is triumphant and cheerful, emphasizing music’s power as a mode of expression and connection—communication at its purest and most free-flowing. 

If it’s trendy now for rock-adjacent bands to add ambient, electronic, bubblegum, jungle, and dance elements into their music, it’s worth remembering that Guerilla Toss has been doing the genreless thing from the start, and they’re still doing it on You’re Weird Now, an impeccably stacked “14-layer cake” of musical ideas, to quote Carlson. Take the ice-cream-for-breakfast sugar rush of “Life’s a Zoo,” a breathless song about overstimulation that itself gleefully overstimulates by cramming a million sonic hairpins into its snappy run-time, everything sewn together with a zippy chiptune hook that’ll pixelate your brain. Negroponte notes that the song has so many disparate influences that Malkmus mentioned the impossibility of pinpointing a single one. “That’s winning,” he says proudly.

Malkmus’s laid back production style allowed GT the space to trust their own instincts, a lesson that Carlson found very meaningful. “His incredibly relatable down to earth approach to music and trusting yourself as an artist had a massive effect on this album and myself as a musician,” she says. “Working with Malkmus, Bryce Goggin, Trey Anastasio, touring with Primus—all of that made me realize that what I’m doing is not wrong. The work is clear, important, and necessary. It's not always easy or clear in direction or purpose, but creating, making, performing music is vital to my life, and a healthy earth.”

“These people have been doing this forever, and they've internalized that they are musicians and their artistic choices are right for them and they believe in them,” she continues. “It’s really just realness and being true to yourself—whatever that means for you.”

The band hopes the message of You’re Weird Now will resonate not only with music heads but anyone who struggles with feeling weird in a world where it will always be hard to be different. At the end of the day, it’s all about the spirit of punk lunch: there’s room for everyone because music is for everyone. “Everyone loves and appreciates music,” says Carlson. “If you don’t like music, you’re kind of an asshole.” That’s not weird—that’s just true.

Preorder here: https://music.subpop.com/guerillatoss_youreweirdnow