GUPPY

GUPPY was born from 3 friends - J Lebow, Marc Babcock, and Ian Cohen - being bored one afternoon 7 years ago. J and Marc decided they wanted to play some music in the garage so they asked Ian if he could hop on drums. Having never played drums before, Cohen watched a single Youtube “how to drum (simple beat)” video before hopping behind the kit. Lebow set their Line 6 guitar amp to insane mode and the rest is history.

In the past 7 years GUPPY has evolved from their In the Garage EP origins, releasing 2 albums - In Heat and their most recent album Big Man Says Slappydoo. Joined in the last 2 years by their newest member Kabir Kumar (Sun Kin) on lead guitar and backing vocals, the band has expanded their musicality, moving beyond their garage punk origins into the realms of power pop, disco, country, and surf rock. With this latest evolution of GUPPY comes their most ambitious record yet Something is Happening…

GUPPY again teamed up with Slappydoo producer Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties) for their third album Something is Happening… recorded at Elliott Smith’s old studio New Monkey in Van Nuys. The songs on this album are GUPPY’s most collaborative effort yet made up of equal contributions from all four members. The result is a sonic hero’s journey venturing from ambient wistfulness, to post punk irreverence, to sincere indie crooning, to playful garage rock, and returning back again to the beginning, but this time you’re changed.

The themes of Something is Happening speak to a feeling of overall hopelessness born from the realization that the system is not here to protect us and an accompanying emergence of hope as we invest in and lean on our communities. GUPPY rejects nihilism, relishes in absurdism, and ultimately agrees with poet Khalil Gibran that “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”. The album is made up of observations about absurd specifics that either want to kill us or celebrate us and sometimes GUPPY can’t differentiate between the two:

“Why does it smell like scrambled eggs when I’m driving on the freeway? What’s the difference between love and hate when I feel it in my body?”