partygirl On Their Maximalist Sound, Origins, and New Music

New York City-based non-traditional  maximalist rock band, partygirl, breaks and exceeds boundaries with their music and live shows. The six-piece group includes, Pagona Kytzidis (vocals, keys, guitar), Fran Pastore (guitar), Claire Lin Jenkins (violin), Jenna Love (saxophone), Andrew Jordan (bass), and Jonathan Ashley (drums).

partygirl is known for their powerful vocals, orchestral ballads, and guitar and bass-heavy rock songs that kick-start a mosh pit. partygirl is gearing up to release their first full-length studio album, “I’m so charming, I forgot who I was,” later this year. 

How did the band begin and how did it transform into the people that we see today? 

Pagona: I started the concept of this band when I finished college. I've been in a band since I was 10, 11, 12. I've always been in a band. It's my favorite thing in the whole world to do. But at that time, I graduated in 2021, I was trying to reckon this world that seemed like it was falling apart. It was Covid. I was dealing with some kind of insane gender-related trauma and anxieties, and I wanted to make sense of the things that were going on. And so I wanted to work on this backlog of songs. I won't do anything with it until it's right and it's perfect, and I really am the one to say that it's right and it's perfect. But I wanted to kind of formulate this into a coherent project. It has a coherent agenda, a coherent vision, that I was leading and we were going through, both sonically. I feel like the music I like to make, we now make together, is very tangible rock music. Everything is purposeful, everything is detailed. We never use synthesizers, we don't use backing tracks. Nothing is made in a bedroom. It is all very organic. It is very tangible. That was kind of something I wanted to play with as a musician and opposed to what was very popular, I guess at the time. I'm not interested in making music in my bedroom alone, personally. I love making music with people from the first stage. So this was a philosophy that we’ve kind of held dear. The project began with a few of my college friends and we worked on that first EP. Fran joined that fall. I was looking for a very specific partner. I was looking for a lead guitar player and a producer who was not a man due to the feminist praxis in this project that's very explicit. And Fran appeared to me out of thin air. We met through mutual friends.

Fran: It was like three months after I moved here. I moved in July and I was in the band by October.

Pagona: And I think I had a week before I discovered who she was online, and I was like maybe Fran will be a good fit. And I played in many bands and I've never played in a band with a female lead guitar player. So this was a very special moment for me. I like to think we have something very special. 

Fran: It was like musical platonic soulmates.

Pagona: We sometimes say the same musical ideas at the same time, and this was something that just got solidified the more we worked together. We worked on this EP, I was writing new songs, Fran was producing, and it kind of formulated in this really beautiful way. So that's how the project started, and it's changed a lot since then. That was an embryonic stage. We had turnover with people. Jonathan, who is our current drummer, joined the band after we recorded the EP, but before this second phase we met him because he posted an ad and we got him. 

Fran: He posted it and it was like, “12 minutes ago,” and I was like, “Pagona!” We were looking for a drummer at the time and I was like, “you have to message him,” force notify, force notify.

Pagona: And that was really awesome. He's an incredible player and brings something really special. All of our bandmates bring something very special and unique. I think that's one of our strong-suits. 

Fran: We all come from different backgrounds pretty much. And we all know how to communicate really, really well when we write. And everybody is really good at leaving their ego at the door when we write together. I think we bring out the best musicianship out of each other.

Pagona: Claire and I went to college together. We weren't friends in college because I think we both did not really like where we went to college. So we kind of lived in more sheltered universes, but we knew each other. We were in each other's orbit, but never past the friendly acquaintance threshold. And then she came to a few of our shows and we reconnected, and then she moved back to New York because she was living in Boston at the time. And I was like, “do you want to play some violin maybe with me and Fran?” The rest is history. All the orchestral arranging is all her, and it's amazing. It's really epic. And that's something I got to learn more about, and she helps me a lot with the visuals. Jonathan brought in Andrew; Andrew's the bass player. He and Jonathan, I think, are what me and Fran are to each other musically.  Andrew's the only chill one in the band. The rest of us are divas, is what I like to say. 

Fran: We all just have anxiety. 

Pagona: And then we met Jenna this year, who plays sax. The sax player who worked on our full record, which we recorded last October, had to leave the band for personal reasons. But we got to bring in Jenna, who's fucking fantastic. She's toured with very famous people. She's the coolest chick ever. And she loves to perform, just like us, and I'm really excited to have her. So yeah, that's kind of it. 

How does having these unconventional instruments in a rock band, such as violin and sax together, contribute to the band’s sound? 

Fran: I feel like that was very intentional. 

Pagona: I love weird rock music. It's the thing that moves me the most. I had never thought about non-traditional instruments until one time in 2020 I was having a conversation with some guy who went to my college and he was an artist, like a visual artist, and he was talking about textures. And I never thought about textures in music in that way. That really stuck with me. All the music I was gravitating towards had this elaborate string of horn sections on top of what would have a traditional rock band. And I guess the rest is kind of history. Once you start with one of them, you can't stop. And the thing that's really cool about us is that we do have the wall of sound thing going on, but because every instrument has a different range and also tone, it doesn't sound like there's literally too much hitting you in the face because you're covering such a large sonic range. 

Fran: It's also really cool to say I write something on a guitar, but it sounds flimsy on guitar, but you can make a violin play or the sax play and then it transforms the whole thing. And then that causes other people to have different ideas, so it's really nice to have that. 

You said that partygirl “centers intentional and creative storytelling through progressive, genre-bending song composition and lyrics that combine feminist praxis, emotional rawness, and dark comedy.” How did the ethos of the band come about? Was it set from day one when you wanted to create this group, or has it changed as you've gotten older?

Pagona: It's gotten deeper over time. When I started this band, honestly, I was in the midst of a personal crisis as many people are at 22. And like I said, lots of this was related to my experience as a young woman, although not just young women have these experiences. It is any sort of feeling where you are outside of your body and you're trying to be a cool person, and for some reason these crises are just happening to you and you're failing to live up to what you expect the world to be. The world is failing to live up to what you think it's supposed to be. I started off very strongly wanting to tell this story, this story in my brain that I was also just trying to sort out to say sane. And this had a very coherent narrative, this ended up being the first album. With my lovely partners in the bands, we could pick them out and sort them, and I could give Fran ten words and Fran could deliver me a riff with those ten words and with my lyrics. Then together we can sort that. Since we’ve developed that, and as we've been playing more, my life has changed a lot, obviously since I'm not 22 anymore. I can go deeper in those themes and critically analyze them in terms of creative storytelling. I think I meant that by “this is the story of the song,” but now it's so much more than that. It's like, these are how the parts interlink with the confusion that I was feeling, and here's how these time signatures can play off of each other. And it's actually far more detailed than I ever imagined it initially. I had an idea, but I didn't know how deep the ideas could go when I started. And lots of that is working with everybody else. You can't work by yourself on this stuff. You need partners to pull things with you and tease them and really make the music the best it can be, and the concept. 

So let's talk about “I'm so charming I forgot who I was,” the forthcoming full length album. You said, “the project tells the story of being a 20-something in the early 2020s and coming of consciousness in an America marked by gender conflict, systemic violence, a global pandemic, and political instability.” Walk me through the album; where did the idea originally come from? What was the inspiration for all those songs? What was the recording like? What was it like putting those themes together?

Pagona: There was a period of my life during that time, where a lot of our album [came from], and just when you think it can't get worse, it does. And like I said, I was trying to solve it, and I turned to the one thing that would allow me to express my fucking thoughts and how I was feeling. The ideas really developed and songs came differently. Some of the songs on that record, I think it's only one, took ten years to write. Sometimes, a few of the songs on that album, I'll just sit on it, and then I'll revise it maybe like two years later, and then I'll revise it again. Something will happen that will make me turn back to this song and I'll edit a stanza. I'll change the music. Or I was lucky enough to meet a group of people that I was like, “we're going to work on this. This is the idea. This is what I have, but I'll still be changing words.” I have changed words on this album after we recorded. I made them go back so we could re-record this singular line. But I'm always trying to nail something down, to make my argument sharper every single time. And so there's some songs, the first song you'll hear tonight, had very three or four clear revisions So there's this fragmentary, each song could be a short story collection, or it could be like the whole thing is a novel. The dark comedy theme that we have been using now for some time is frankly way more freeing, creatively. You have way more to say. I have way more to say and we have way more to play around with. We're not restricted. We're actually opened up by the seriousness of our topic. 

Fran: As the producer, and when you're working very closely together to form the demos and before we actually bring it into a full band, it's a lot of, “okay, give me the lyrics. What are you saying? How can I make the arrangement of the song reflect what you're saying? Or how can we invert it so it sounds even more chaotic?” It's like, you're singing about something happening, but the music is doom. Or you’re singing about something really fucking awful, and it's like little major chord arpeggios. I love a calendar and I love my charts. So it was a very meticulous recording process. But we started with, obviously we've rehearsed these songs, played them live so many times that before we went into the studio, we know what we want to fucking do. If we have time at the end to add things, sure, but that was not the priority. We had everything arranged, ready to go as soon as we went in. First three days are tracking the drums and bass, so that way you get the live feel. And then after that, if it needs to be overdubbed, we redo guitars, or do guitars on top of what's already there. Then we go one by one with the sax, violin, keyboards, and then obviously at the end, the vocalist. 

Pagona: We brought in some friends to do some amazing backing vocals. It's really awesome.

Fran: I mix everything in my room. 

Pagona: I will also say going into a studio, for me it's like I have to be very vulnerable. My phone's off the entire day. 

Fran: We have to dim the lights and make sure you have four different beverages. We treat you like a diva.

What are your in-studio essentials?

Fran: Carmex. 

Pagona: Carmex. 

Fran: We're both Carmex girlies. Chapstick always. I need coffee, always. I think I drank five cups of coffee a day. My laptop, but specifically my Google Sheets. It's like the virtual whiteboard of, “Did we finish the guitar for this specific song? Yes. Check.”

Pagona: Your clipboard. 

Fran: My clipboard with all the lyrics. When we were doing vocal takes, I would print out the lyrics and then as she was recording it, I’d write down, “this specific line, great take on number two.” And then she would do like four or five. When it's in real time and actually having to listen, you want to remember which take because it's also easier at the end to edit it. 

Pagona: The four beverages, definitely. My notebook so I can take notes because I have to get in my place. I got to talk to my theater friends about how I can safely enter and exit this space, which is just something we're not taught. So I have my practices to enter my space.

Fran: For mixing, I have a template that makes my life easier. So it's all the things that I usually use for drums, bass, guitar, sax, strings, just as a way to start off. I start with drums, make sure those are nice and cute and fun and punchy. Then bass, make sure that they work together. Then guitars come in and I spend probably too much time on guitars because I am a guitarist. Thankfully they don't need as much work as the drums, just like drums are like a fucking beast to mix. Then it depends if it's a sax or string-heavy song, which one gets priority. Then obviously vocals. And then once the vocals come in, sometimes if I have trouble, because you have a beast of a voice, trying to find ways for everything to fit. A lot of cussing in Pro Tools.

Everything is lowercase, your band name, and your song titles. Why? And is that going to continue into your next album? 

Pagona: That's me. Everything but the “i” in the next album. Honestly, just because it looks better to me. With the band name, that was just an aesthetic decision. One of my closest friends from college did all our visuals. She's so fucking talented, it's crazy. Her name is Natalie Tischler. She and I talked about capitalization for a long time. I decided I wanted the “i” in “I'm so charming, I forgot who I was” to be capitalized, but I don't think the rest of it will be. I think it goes with the whole theme of who you are in this kind of vague world, and obviously what am I conveying with not having proper nouns where I'm not obeying the grammatical rules? This is one of the things where it's actually not that deep. It just looks better. 

So far what has been the moment that you've been the proudest?

Fran: When we recorded the album and then listened to it back. I think I was crying by the fourth song just because we had spent a year-and-a-half writing it. We worked so hard for this thing, and it sounded as good as we wanted it to sound, like we actually achieved it. And then listening to it mixed all the way through too. Definitely that. 

Pagona: I cried so much. Hearing the mixes and the masters. It's just crazy for me to have these things; they exist in my head, and then to hear them. I also think that going on this tour too. This is our first regional tour.

Fran: A lot of blood, sweat, tears and brute force went into it.

Pagona: And I'm really proud. We've grown a lot. I'm really proud of what we've done and I'm excited for what we have yet to do, because it’s just the beginning and good things take time. And I have to remember that. But yeah, hearing those mixes, that is crazy. It was amazing. 

Follow partygirl’s journey on Instagram, Spotify and their website.

Photos via Tori McGraw (@afterr.hourrs)