Consequence’s recurring feature series CoSign highlights a rising artist that’s captured our eyes and ears with a great new release. For September, we’re celebrating the Los Angeles quartet Rocket and their great debut album, R Is for Rocket.
Picture a garage band: four young musicians plugging in to practice and pretend for an hour that together, they are the next great rock act. They play loud, maybe a little too loud; their sound reverberates past the garage’s thin walls and floods down the street, angering neighbors and pissing off old people. The musicians couldn’t care less. To them, their hooks are indestructible.
This may be a stereotypical scene straight out of a 2000s film, but it’s exactly the kind of ethos that Rocket are bringing to the table. The Los Angeles band have known each other since they were adolescents, but rather than hash out their rockstar dreams in someone’s garage, they did it in an unmarked shed. Their musical intuition forged over a decade of shared references and inside jokes; since officially forming in 2021, the quartet — comprised of vocalist and bassist Alithea Tuttle, drummer Cooper Ladomade, and guitarists Desi Scaglione and Baron Rinzler — have zeroed in on fuzzy, anthemic rock.
Their debut album, R Is for Rocket is out Friday, October 3rd, and it’s indebted to their telepathic musical language. “We’re so comfortable with each other,” Ladomade says. “We just all kind of have the same thought process when we’re working on music or when someone brings a song… we’re into the same kind of stuff and we have the same ideas and that’s what I feel like makes it work so well.”
Tuttle agrees, praising the fact that they share a musical mind. “If Baron plays a guitar part, it’s nice that we know where it’s coming from,” she says. “We don’t take it in a completely different way and then he has to be like, ‘oh, it was actually completely not that vibe.’ That hasn’t ever happened to us.”
They also share a similar philosophy when it comes to dynamics. For anyone who caught the band opening for Sunny Day Real Estate, Smashing Pumpkins, or Ride, they’ll know that Rocket are loud. The latter opening gig was particularly fascinating, as you’d expect shoegaze pioneers like Ride to be more than happy to turn the dial knob to 11. But it was Rocket who made the most visceral impression, swirling through the tracks on their debut Versions of You EP with crashing cymbals, scorching guitars, and heaps of energy.
