LA band Rocket on supporting The Smashing Pumpkins and releasing debut album 'R Is For Rocket' • Interview • DIY Magazine

In 2016, Alithea Tuttle was torn away from what she thought was her path. The then-16 year old was on course to become a professional dancer, practising for hours after school, already with years of experience in rhythmic gymnastics training under her belt. Then she suffered a stress fracture in one of the lumbar vertebrae in her spine. That was it, the doctors said. She would never become a dancer.

She was, it seems, being redirected - not that she realised it at the time. She wouldn’t know that music was her calling until lockdown, coaxed towards singing by her guitarist boyfriend Desi Scaglione when he suggested she sing on a demo he was working on. “I feel like people who are passionate about music are musically inclined to some degree,” he considers, sitting beside Alithea at home on a Monday morning while intermittently trying to stop their cat from walking in front of their camera (and failing). “I think that if you have good taste, you automatically have a leg up. I just had a feeling that this was something you were interested in,” he says, turning to Alithea, “just because of how interested in music you were to begin with. You definitely took a big chance because you had never done this before, and she dove headfirst into the deep end, for sure.”

“I had no idea if it was going to be a total waste of time, or if I was going to end up not being good. Because, obviously, at the beginning, nobody is good,” she responds, sipping lemon, ginger and camomile tea to soothe her sore throat. Early on, nervousness pushed her to hide in her mum’s closet to sing into her phone’s voice recorder so that she couldn’t be overheard. As she practiced and grew into herself as a singer, she realised she was finally welcoming creativity back into her life. “I was so relieved to be like, ‘cool, I found something that maybe I could pursue’. That’s obviously a problem for so many people and I had been thinking, ‘what am I doing with my life? What do I even enjoy doing?’ I had had every hobby under the sun, as I’m sure most of us have, and it was nice to just find something that I wanted to put everything I have into. I felt like I had finally found something that I wanted to get really good at.”

The other helpful part was the supportive structure she had around her, which came from assembling the band from people she and Desi were already very close with - drummer Cooper Ladomade (who Alithea had known since pre-school) and guitarist Baron Rinzler. “[Being in a band] takes a lot of mutual trust in each other, and on top of that, a mutual understanding of the music that we like,” says Baron. “I think we all have pretty similar tastes, and we get to show each other music - whenever we discover a new band, we all get to share it.”

“I felt like I had finally found something that I wanted to get really good at.”

— Alithea Tuttle

Those tastes have since coagulated to create Rocket’s singular sound; a glassy, dreamy style of rock with an occasional gentle wash of shoegaze. It leans brighter and more melodic, not quite modern or vintage, as if there is no timestamp on it. Of course, they still have plenty of ‘90s touchstones - not least The Smashing Pumpkins - but there’s a lot of music beyond that they hold plenty of reverence for. “We never really thought, ‘okay, this needs to sound like it’s from the ‘90s,” explains Alithea. “But obviously we’re flattered when people say that, because I think that that generation and that time in music was very honest and raw.”

Since releasing their 2023 debut EP ‘Versions Of You’, Rocket have been taken under the wing on tour of everyone from Ride, Sunny Day Real Estate and Silversun Pickups. More recently, they opened for the Pumpkins at their huge show at London’s Gunnersbury Park this summer. “They were truly the nicest people, and very caring,” says Alithea. “It was a very comfortable environment.” Did they get the origin story of the band’s name? “They didn’t ask!” quips Desi.

The day after, they played their first UK headline show at the Windmill in Brixton, the first time they’d headlined outside of their native US - and they sold it out. “It was absolutely crazy to us,” Alithea remarks. It’s no wonder they’ll be back over here for a full UK and European headline run in February.

By then, they’ll have a pocketful of new songs. Everything they’ve learned from playing live comes filtered into their debut album, ‘R Is For Rocket’, which Desi produced and engineered single-handedly. “I think when we play live, we just figure out stuff that we didn’t know we wanted to play necessarily,” theorises Cooper. “And I think you just get to constantly try out new things. It’s nice to play a bunch of songs for a while to different people before you go and record it - we recorded some stuff last January, and we went on tour for a while, and we played a bunch of those songs over and over again. At least for me personally, there was a big shift in the fills I would do, or how I would play.”

Of course, Rocket want what most bands want - the big stages, the human connection, the ability for their music to let them see the world. Their bigger dream, however, is to soundtrack peoples’ lives. “I just think having your art be impactful to someone in some way is probably the most important thing to me, and probably the best thing that could happen,” says Desi.

“We talk about this a lot, but everybody who likes music has relationships with songs or albums or artists where they soundtrack specific moments in your life. Just knowing that’s a possibility for our music with anyone is awesome.”

‘R Is For Rocket’ is out now via Transgressive.

#AD