Inside Alien Boy’s Painstaking Guitar Pop Metamorphosis

The Portland band’s third album, You Wanna Fade?, navigates disorienting life changes and expands their twinkly soundworld.

By Lizzie Manno | June 4, 2025 | 9:05am

Photo by Frank Martinez

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Listening to Alien Boy is like experiencing high-stakes romance on a molecular level. Every wispy, nasal romantic plea and rumble of succulent anglophile jangle courses through your veins like you’re 17 again and drowning in your first bout of lovesickness. From their 2014 mushroom-tripping Portland quartet’s third album, You Wanna Fade?, is aching proof.

Wrestling with heartbreak and nagging neuroses, You Wanna Fade? bears witness to big life changes. Through a beautifully trippy kaleidoscope of before, during, and after, singer-songwriter Sonia Weber ponders what remains when full-hearted feelings have shifted—and how best to honor those past feelings while rebuilding your sense of self. For an unabashed romantic like Weber, working on yourself in the midst of a breakup is rough. Like reading your own inadequacies in all caps through a 24-hour news ticker. Like painting your face with clown makeup and tap dancing through the deepest loneliness you’ve ever felt.

But even though she’s still wading through the aftermath, Weber is starting to settle into herself in a way she hasn’t before. “I think you can change anything and everything whenever you want—it feels really scary, but you just can,” she says over Zoom. “I felt like I wasn’t able to be fully open with myself because I was afraid of what was there, and I was afraid of sharing it with this person that I had been in a relationship with for a long time. And to fully feel and understand all these things that I was feeling, I needed to not be in that relationship anymore and have a pretty significant life change.”

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“I gave up the good life to live in a dream I don’t like / And I don’t even know what you’re like / But baby I’m free,” Weber sings on “Cold Air,” highlighting the growing pains and emerging lightness of change. But the further you delve into You Wanna Fade?, the more it becomes clear just how fragile and complicated the whole notion of transformation is. “Nothing’s fine, nothing stays / Not the feeling, not the way / It’s all stuck, everything stays / I can’t ever seem to change,” Weber intones on “Everything Stays,” illuminating the brazen contradictions that swirl when emotions are running high. There’s also an undercurrent of shame that intermittently rears its ugly head. “I don’t wanna be seen, yeah I don’t wanna be known,” Weber proclaims on “Changes,” lamenting both painful self-analysis and interaction with the outside world.

“I think once the record came out, that’s when I had this feeling of ‘I don’t really want to be seen anymore,’” Weber says. “There was an aftershock of how vulnerable it felt. Having written the songs so long ago, sometimes I listen to them or I sing them and I don’t feel anything, and I think when everybody else was hearing it, I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is actually super intense.’”

Guitarist Caleb Misclevitz is in the interesting position of holding inside and outside perspectives on the album’s themes. On the one hand, he has been close friends with Weber since high school, and he helped curate and sequence the tracklist from a grand storytelling lens. He also sold Weber on the album title during a particularly “glowy-brained” trip to Portland karaoke bar Baby Ketten on Thanksgiving Eve. But even Misclevitz describes his understanding of the record as “ambient,” which speaks to Weber’s ability to make you feel like you’re simultaneously living in the thick of her memories and stumbling through the funhouse of her mind.

But he does feel that the record embodies the intensity of Portland summers, as well as the emotional juxtaposition of a frenzied dreamstate and sobering morning clarity. “In the Pacific Northwest, summer feels like this big game that everything leads up to,” Misclevitz says, a feeling that’s perhaps explained by the brief period of sunshine that cascades over the typically grey region. “You’re spending most of the year worrying and fussing and preparing to get summer right, so I think this record feels like that summer to me—the stakes are really high.” Weber also hears a deep longing for self-embodiment. “I want to feel good in my body, I want to feel hot, I want to feel confident, and I don’t want to make myself feel small,” she says. “No one was making me feel small, but I was feeling small. I was like, ‘I need to explore all of this stuff to fully step into the person I want to be,’ and I see that a lot in the songs.”

The heady emotions within You Wanna Fade? resemble a painstaking purge, and musically, this same description feels apt. With a cinematic alt-rock scope marked by tasteful touches like clinking bottles, drum-machine breaks, and flute-like mellotron, as well as a foreground that quakes from their triple-guitar blitz, You Wanna Fade? is a beautiful, head-banging antithesis of slackerdom. While their 2018 debut LP Sleeping Lessons had a scuzzier, more gothic sound and their 2021 follow-up Don’t Know What I Am leaned on fizzing, no-frills songcraft, You Wanna Fade? feels like a gargantuan, thunderous attempt at guitar pop final boss-ery. Alien Boy attribute this level up to a number of factors, including more time and risk-taking, the addition of guitarist A.P. Fiedler, and sharper musicianship.

“I really love recording, producing, and engineering, but I’ve always been in the enger’s seat being like, ‘I don’t want to have too heavy a hand, or have too many cooks in the kitchen,’” Misclevitz says. “So every time we’ve gone into the studio before, I just observed and thought, ‘I wish we could do this or that’ and bit my tongue… This time, for me, it was about taking more agency, being less reserved, and pitching more crazy ideas and being willing to say, ‘Oh yeah, that is stupid, but there’s only one way to find out if it’s stupid.’”

In of composing the record’s signature interwoven guitar parts, they describe the process as a “slow descent into madness,” exemplified by hallucinatory naps—including one near a space heater that almost set Misclevitz’s hair on fire—and swigs of kettle-heated pho broth, plus one headache-inducing day spent solely working on guitar . “We were just hanging and playing guitar until we couldn’t anymore,” Weber recalls. “I thought everything was going to go way faster than it did, but really, I just made Caleb and A.P. watch me play guitar for like five days straight … [A.P. and I] both got really into the Smashing Pumpkins, which we talk about all the time, and we were so excited to be like, ‘No, we’re going to make real guitar solos!’” Weber says while sporting a Siamese Dream T-shirt.

Other reference points came from a playlist they made to soundtrack a five-hour trip to Anacortes, Washington for a writing retreat. “We all listened to it, and we wrote down one thing from each song that we thought was cool and could be a jumping-off point,” Weber explains. “If I didn’t have an idea, I would try to write something from one of those prompts. One that I can think of is that song ‘Web in Front’ by Archers of Loaf. ‘Pictures of You’ doesn’t sound like that at all, but I was thinking about that song when I was writing it, because I took one of the progressions.”

“Another one is ‘You Want Me Too,’ there are a few different songs that we looked to for that,” Misclevitz says. “There’s that Posies song, ‘Solar Sister’—the way the harmonies come in and out on that song, and the structure. And that song ‘Fix Me’ by Doughboys, there was something we used there too.”

Weber’s experience as a seasoned music teacher also provided a source of guitar inspiration. “From the time I started this band to now, I’m so much better at playing and being able to articulate, and I’m so much more knowledgeable, and now I find it’s the instrument that I’m most excited about teaching and playing outside of work,” she says. “I had this one kid during the pandemic who only wanted to learn Elliott Smith and Unwound songs, and they were too hard for both of us. But we just put our heads down and worked on them together every week, and I going into recording [Don’t Know What I Am] and being like, ‘I am so much better at guitar because of this kid making me learn all these insane songs.’ That shit is really sweet—it’s a gift, you know?”

Though Weber was hesitant to include it, “Morning” is another sign of development on You Wanna Fade? It’s the quietest Alien Boy song to date, showcasing Weber’s chops as a tender balladeer and vocalist. “Anything to soften our little world / In the morning I’m all for you,” she sings with unassuming conviction and without the relative safety of dense guitar fireworks. “It’s definitely been a journey,” Weber says of her time as a lead vocalist. “I started off being like, ‘I’m scared and I’m drunk’ at all of the shows. But with every record, I feel really happily surprised that it gets easier for me, and I have all of these ideas that I can pull off, and I just feel so much more confident now… I spent a lot more time singing for fun in my house, in the car, and in the shower. I think there’s an element of being less shy in general that helps me actually practice that. And I love singing to Waxahatchee—it’s my favorite. Those songs are so hard! If I get any reps in, that’s where I get them.”

Upon Weber’s revelation of her Katie Crutchfield fandom, I humbly send a vision of Alien Boy covering Johnny Marr chime, and the distinctly sunny melodies of the Stone Roses. For someone like me who caught the Britpop bug early on and can’t seem to shake it, Alien Boy is a breath of fresh air—which might sound counterintuitive with ‘90s rock revivalism in full swing, but hear me out. Growing up as a queer kid, I never saw myself in any of the bands I spent numerous hours listening to through grainy concert footage on YouTube. And I can assure you that no one else at my Ohio all-girls Catholic school was trying to dress like Liam Gallagher or mining the internet for La’s rarities. But seeing a queer person like Weber front a band like Alien Boy for the first time meant something to me—even though I was in my mid-20s by that point.

Telling Weber that I earnestly cosplayed as the silliest man in rock and roll—and kind of still do, to be honest—is quite possibly one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever told an interviewee. But it did spark a heartfelt moment of queer solidarity. “It’s something I thought about a lot more when we started the band, and it honestly is a really sweet reminder,” Weber says of the band’s queer visibility. “I did want to have a band like that—Britpop, shoegaze, post-punk, ‘90s rock, all of that stuff—and there was this element of me being like, ‘Now this is for you guys, by a queer person.’ I feel like there was a lack of representation there too, and whenever I find somebody who has a similar experience to me, it feels really precious. I’ve very rarely seen somebody who I felt like I could relate to, and I would love to take up that space. And I mean, we are, but yeah, it’s definitely what I want.”

Amidst all the melodramatic (and queer) longing on You Wanna Fade?, weighty questions hover: Do I feel deserving of love? Are you still gonna be around? Who am I now? But perhaps the most central question is “Was any of it real?”—a need to have something to show for all the pain, the validation that life can feel that electric. And at least as it relates to Alien Boy, the band, You Wanna Fade? seems to fulfill those two voids. “I set my expectations pretty low when we started this band,” Weber says. “I just wanted to be able to do it at all. Now, to get to a point where it’s like, ‘No, I can do it, and I can see something that I want and grab it.’ That’s been really special.” Sounds pretty fucking electric to me.

Lizzie Manno is a former Paste editor, with bylines at Stereogum, Pitchfork, SPIN, Billboard, Flood Magazine, The Recording Academy and Cleveland Scene. Follow her on Twitter @LizzieManno.