partygirl Share Lead Single ‘good night,’ Announce Debut EP Centering Conversations of Survival

Today is a big day for maximalist Brooklyn indie rock band partygirl: Not only have they announced their debut EP, but they are also sharing their new single, “good night.” It’s one of those tracks you can easily dance to, maybe even while processing some of your own emotions and shedding a tear or two.

Pagona Kytzidis first formed partygirl with her long-time musical partner, Colby Lamson-Gordon, as a way to process her own sexual assaults, the resulting trauma, and to challenge prevailing discourse on sexual assault and the violence of misogyny. Each track on the new EP also acts as a portrait of survivorship, with the new band intentionally focusing on confrontational and challenging material out the gate as a radical act of rejection, instead embracing a vision of a better world.

As partygirl relish in the new release and look ahead to an eventful latter-half of 2022, OFM caught up with Kytzidis to dish about the new band, their new track, the importance of sharing stories of survival, and the road ahead.

Hey there, Pagona! To start, I’m curious how the year is going so far? I’m sure it’s been busy given the release of your single and the upcoming EP.

Hi! First of all, thank you for your interest in the project! We are so glad you are excited about the single. It has been a really busy, but also amazing, past few months for us. We were preparing demos for the studio throughout January, went into the studio at Retro City Studios in Philadelphia in February and finished up the EP in Brooklyn throughout March and April. We also have played some incredible shows, including the Bowery Electric, where we were the first show to sell out in 2022, and Mercury Lounge. As exciting as the past six months have been, we are even more excited for the next six, as we release this music and play shows to support it.

I’m excited for you! That’s quite the year so far. I’m curious; as the two of you have worked together, what that collaborative process has looked like, or how it has evolved, especially in relation to the subject matter of some of partygirl’s messaging around psychological and political trauma and challenging conversations on sexual assault and misogyny?

Colby and I have been working on some of the songs on the EP, including “good night,” since the fall of 2020. That’s when we were able to begin playing together again (we both moved back home during the earlier COVID-19 era), and I had written lots of songs, including “good night”’s lyrics, chords, and structure, in the preceding months (as in the case of “good night”) or even years (as in the case of some of the other songs on the EP).

When the band was rounded out with Alec and Fran—and we had Bell Thompson (trumpet) and Zev Rose (drums) join us for the record—we were able to fully flesh out the songs as I heard them in my head. I would say this “personnel” difference is the main part of the songwriting process that has changed: The process went from two people playing the songs acoustically in a NYC apartment to being fully—and correctly—imagined with a large band for a record and for the stage.

This means now that I work a “rough draft” of the song to rehearsal which I write alone, then I bring a song to rehearsal or practice, and then we all work together to flesh out the energy of the song, the instrumentation, if we should cut, reorganize or rework sections, to best capture the purpose of the song in how it relates to the survivorship project of partygirl. Before we run through a song and work to complete it, I’d share with the band what the song is trying to communicate politically and spiritually, which I think through while writing the song alone and often writing a “essay” for each song, and then we all collaborate together to best realize that vision as a group.

It’s really interesting how those processes can evolve over time. Turning focus to “good night,” can you tell me more about the lead single, the process of creating the track, and what it means to you?

Absolutely! I first wrote our single “good night” in March 2020, while I was studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland. I wrote it in one night to process both the onset of COVID-19 and a sexual assault I had recently endured. The song is about about helplessness, searching for control in a world, both interpersonal and societal, that is falling apart, and yearning for meaning, permanence and a truth in reality. “good night” seeks to express the moment you realize “things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold” and through that all you are clinging for the center as it is dissipating (and you with it).

Its spirit is that of simultaneous recognition that this is how the world and life function, but also a heartbreak at this impermanence, transience, and solitude of postmodernity. To get the single from a chord sheet and the lyrics, so to speak, to the song we released today, that took a few months of collaborative arranging as we played shows, added new members to the band, and really felt out the emotional core of the song. Only after that process did the song fully flesh out to what it is today: Colby’s incredible walking bass line grounds the song’s movement and in so doing, makes the contradiction between grasping for meaning and knowing that grasping is ultimately futile evident; Alec wrote the horn parts to add a texture unique to this type of rock song and these parts express a reckoning with the tragedy of impermanence; and Fran arranged the outro of the song, including coming up with the powerful a cappella end.

How does “good night” play into the larger collection, and how would you describe the EP as a whole body of work?

The EP is a six-song introduction to partygirl, where each song represents a snapshot or portrait of survivorship. To us, the EP represents the very beginning of the partygirl project, and as such, a means to bring the spirit of radical survivorship to the public arena. As our first single, “good night,” is one of those portraits, particularly one which grapples with the pain of 21st century impermanence and instability, and how it relates to a numbness and desperation that accompanies my survivorship in the days right after that particular sexual assault.

We chose it to be our very first public introduction because it deals with a universal stress and trauma of our generation—that of the meaningless, helplessness and powerlessness of a postmodern society—and asserts a radical rejection of it by wishing, professing, and asserting that we could and should want more, the particular interaction of survivorship with this broader, more generational affect, and sets these themes to a dance-able, catchy rock song, to both emphasize the contradiction between societal reality of “nothing does and can matter” and political possibilities of a better world that we can build.

I really appreciate those as some of your aims from the get-go. Music can be such a great way to communicate important ideas and experiences. Can you also tell me more about the music itself? How would you describe partygirl’s sound and what inspires the composition and genre styles you embrace?

Yes! We are generally an indie rock band, but more specifically, an indie rock band that is making maximalist and imaginative art rock. We aim to create textured walls of sound that embrace countermelodies and rich harmonies while still honoring the movement and edge of rock ‘n’ roll. We make this music by pulling from a lot of influences—from classic rock (Led Zeppelin) to jazz (Charles Mingus) to today’s experimental art rock (Moses Sumney). Our most all-encompassing influences (everything from chord voicings to song structure to vocal performance to production) are Queen (A Night at the Opera), David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars), Radiohead (The Bends), St. Vincent (Strange Mercy), Fiona Apple (When the Pawn…) and Hiatus Kaiyote (Choose Your Weapon).

We write and arrange our songs with this maximalist goal as a critical part of partygirl’s political project: Not only does the ensuing drama of the songs reflect the emotional and psychological experience of survivorship, but also by making everything bigger, more complex, and intricate, we are asserting that the music is meant to express that the world must change because how we are living is unacceptable—an assertion that seeks to combat the “end of history” thread of neoliberalism and the cynicism and nihilism that plagues our society.

Through your lens, what is the importance of using music as a medium to address your own experiences and some of these challenging topics?

Generally, I fundamentally believe that the role of artists in this world is not just to criticize and represent society, but also to create visions for the future. For me personally, music is the art form that I connect most absolutely to: It is narrative; it is theatrical; it is performance. Playing music is a deeply spiritual experience for me, not only to enable the understanding, processing, and healing of my own personal experiences, but to absorb myself into a whole new world for a few moments.

Of course, this world becomes powerful as it is then shared as a communal space with my band members most directly and then also with listeners—be them audience members during live shows or digital listeners with the recorded music—as a means to expand and to fill this world. Music is communal; it is ritual world-building, but it is also performance and it is fleeting. It requires focus and precision, connection, and attention, presence and being. Music allows me to understand my experiences to heal from them as an individual, allows me to connect with others in a way that reminds us all that we are fundamentally in this world together, and allows me to help build something new, all the while reminding me that this world-building will be difficult and will require effort and vision.

How does it feel to be sharing the first tracks with the world? What do you hope listeners get out of the music?

It feels really amazing—cathartic and liberating, really—to bring these songs to the world. I feel like they lived solely in my head for so long, and then solely with the band and the other people who helped make the record, and now I’m really, really excited to share them with everyone. I hope fans and listeners, especially survivors, are able to connect to the music and find comfort in knowing they are not, they are never, alone. I hope we can come together to build survivor worlds—through art and politics, where everyone’s selfhood is celebrated.

To people who have not endured sexual assault, I hope the music offers a window into our experience and a means for empathy to transform into actual political, social, and cultural change. And of course, I hope that fans and listeners will want to help us revolutionize rock ‘n’ roll, merging the old with the new, and flipping the epistemological script, to be “extra” because things matter and if we don’t try, we’ll have nothing left.

Do you have anything else planned for the rest of the year or the future you’d like to mention?

Yes! Besides releasing the singles and the EP throughout the summer, we are excited to be playing shows both in New York City and Philadelphia. We’ll be playing the Bowery Electric in New York City on Saturday, June 25 as our single release show. Then, on Sunday, July 17, we’ll be playing Milkboy in Philadelphia. We hope to be playing more shows in New York City and around the Northeast through the fall as well!

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you for giving us this platform to share our music and our message! We are really excited to get started.

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Stream “good night” here:

For more from partygirl, find them on Facebook, Instagram, and their official website.

Photos courtesy of Natalie Tischler