You may have caught NYC dreamgaze outfit PANIK FLOWER last year when they opened MilkBoy for our phriends partygirl. And, during a recent Zoom chat with four of the five members of PANIK FLOWER, I find out that it was apparently a highlight of their young career. This Thursday, June 12th, the quintet will be headlining the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection when they play Khyber Pass Pub in support of their sophomore EP, rearview, which dropped this April and has all but officially secured a spot on the year-end/Best of 2025 edition of Philthy Radio, my show for Y-Not Radio. During our half-hour chat, vocalist Sage Leopold, guitarist Jordan Buzzell, bassist Max Baird, and drummer Marco Starger tell me all about the recent EP, what you can expect of the live show, and just how much they all love being a band.
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Cihak: You recently released rearview, your second EP. How do you feel like the EP compares to Dark Blue?
Jordan Buzzell: A big difference, thematically, is looking inward, whereas before a lot of our songs revolved around personal relationships, reflecting a lot on the state of the world and whatnot, where now we’re really taking a chance to look in and get really introspective. Sonically, we’re really coming into our own, experimenting a lot more with spoken word on vocals, getting a little bit crunchier and shoegazier in the instrumentation, but hitting a pretty wide spectrum, too… what we like to call a contrasting dichotomy of sounds.
Sage Leopold: That was really good! I would just add that there was a big difference in the way we recorded this project. We went into rearview being like, “We want this to be an elevated live version of our set.” And our producer, James Duncan, really took that to heart… I think everything is just a bit more DIY with this, surprisingly, for a second project.
Izzy: You have a little more than a week of live dates coming up, which kick off right here in Philadelphia. What can be expected of the PANIK FLOWER live show?
Sage: First of all, we love Philly! We played there last year, and it was like our favorite show we played. We do a lot of camcorder in the car and we all rated Philly like a 9 or 10 vibe-wise [laughs]. We’re really excited to be back in Philly… But I think there’re a lot of dynamic shifts in the live performance, and I think the EP really captures the live performance. You can see the interpersonal relationships onstage, in terms of how we communicate with each other.
Max Baird: On this EP, it feels like everyone’s personality, their parts, and what we play are so connected. It’s so much fun in our live shows. The music’s intense, but it’s such a fun EP to perform.
Izzy: Do you have a favorite type of venue or space to play, or particular things about venues you think make for a particularly good show or performance, the way that you perform?
Max: Sage is such a good performer! I love the way that Sage gets into the crowd and gets interacting with people. You do it so much, you do it so well! And not every stage provides that…
Sage: There are so many elements to a live performance that contribute to why we may like a particular venue or even a particular night at a particular venue. Weirdly, I don’t love being so high up. I think it’s both a challenge and an honor to be performing around people, and I like venues where you can interact with the audience and challenge that wall. It’s always interesting to see how people respond to someone coming into the crowd. Some of the best performances I’ve seen are when the musicians are interacting with the crowd. I think it creates an interesting dynamic.
Izzy: What would you consider to be some of the personal highlights of PANIK FLOWER so far?
Sage: I think Marco joining the band! Marco joined in late 2023, and that really made everything come together where we were like, “This really feels like how it’s supposed to be.”
Jordan: If I hadn’t joined this band, I’d just be in my room playing, so being able to collaborate with other people and build something that’s greater than the sum of its parts is the most cathartic thing ever. And then getting to go on the road… I never would’ve gone to Texas, but we did a little trip to do some unofficial shows for SXSW. That was not only the highlight of the band, but of my life. It’s been so fun getting to hang out with this crew. Everything that happens onstage is just complimented by the time we get to spend together offstage, building these beautiful relationships and friendships. That feeds right back into the music making process and keeps getting amplified in terms of how much fun we’re having and how we’re exploring ourselves. It’s just been amazing.
Marco Starger: Yeah, I think even if we weren’t going on tour, we would strongly consider taking like a 10-day road trip together just for fun. It’s that kind of dynamic.
Izzy: On that note, what are some of your favorite things about being on the road together, in addition to playing the live shows themselves?
Jordan: Just exploring! All piling in the van and listening to our soundtracks together and experiencing new things, new foods, new people, meeting other bands, getting to hang out with them, making fun videos on the camcorder and getting to look back on all of it. We’ll have the for the rest of our lives!
Max: More established bands talk about touring like it’s a chore. God willing, we’ll get there maybe, but it’s hard to imagine, because we have so much fun! And I think that shows in the performances, too.
Izzy: Is there anything you think is especially important for fans to know about the band, whether relating to your background, your aim as artists, or even just your take on the current state of music, for better or worse… Or, is it all in the music?
Sage: That’s a really good question… That kinda threw me for a loop… Sometimes we’ll get these great questions, and we’ll be like, “We haven’t answered that one yet [laughs].” I think what’s nice – and what Mila, our fifth bandmate, has said in other interviews – is that the music, lyrically, can evolve sometimes. Sometimes I’m drawn to a certain lyric, and I don’t really know how this fits into my life right now, but then a year later, I’m like, “I know exactly what I was talking about.” So, I hope the music can evolve with people’s life stages. Maybe you come back to it and find new meaning in it. I think a lot of the new stuff that we’re writing — that we’ll play on tour — is a lot more political, just around the current circumstances. I’m excited for the state of music, because I think while we are living in really – this is gonna sound cliché – dark times, I do think really good art comes out of it.
Izzy: Have you noticed patterns amongst your fans, or the people who seem to be most into it? Because you definitely do, sonically, reference a lot of early-mid-’90s alt rock kind of stuff.
Sage: We get The Cranberries a lot, and I’m like, “Really?” because that’s one of my favorite bands! With the song “rearview” (That outro is completely improvised, so we never play it the same way twice.), I think it’s really interesting to see how far we can push the audience. We’ve been surprised quite a few times, where we were like, “Oh my god, I don’t know how people are gonna respond to that,” and then people are like, “I’m obsessed! I lost my mind to it, I was in another dimension!” Those moments are really encouraging, where you’re trying something, and maybe it’s a little out there, but people are really resonating with it.
Marco: We’re in an environment where songs are getting shorter, movies are getting shorter, musicals and plays are getting shorter, and our shorter songs do a little better than our longer songs, and we’re wanting to fight back against that a little bit. You can’t control what people do on Spotify, but at a show, you can say, “I’m gonna play for six minutes and you’re gonna listen and it’s good for you,” or something [laughs].
Sage: That’s a good point!
Izzy: Do you get a lot of young people? I mean, even referencing The Cranberries, who are so Gen X… Are you getting younger/older, or a mix?
Jordan: It’s a mix, but I think what really aligns that age range is those common interests and appreciation for those that came from the generation before us. Or you’ll get some people who kind of just stumble in and don’t have that taste at all, but maybe this is a pathway, like, “Where did you guys get that sound, and where can I hear more of that?” Which is really cool!
Izzy: Instead of asking artists about their musical influences, I think it’s a lot more interesting to ask them about some of their favorite albums, so I’m curious what are some of your all-time favorite albums… whether collectively or individually?
Sage: I think there’re gonna be some different answers here, so I’m super interested to hear what you guys say… I’m obsessed with Yves Tumor, and their 2020 album – Heaven to a Tortured Mind – is something that I come back to consistently, top to bottom. I just think Yves is a genius.
Jordan: I was also gonna say Yves Tumor, and the 2023 album Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume. The song “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” is so important to me. Sage got me onto Yves Tumor. That is just like lifechanging stuff.
Marco: It feels too easy, but Loveless was a big album for me. I definitely listened to it when I was younger and really liked it, and when things were shitty just blast it. And then when I joined PANIK FLOWER, and we were playing shoegaze, I went back to it, because I had not really listened to it since I was younger, and it very much just returned as the thing I blast when I’m feeling a certain type of way. Not a lot of music works both for me when I was 13 and now, which is sort of a statement of how good it was.
Jordan: Plus one to Loveless! I’m just piggy backing off of everyone else’s answers here [laughs]. But just to take the shoegaze thing one step further, I really like some of these more recent shoegaze renaissance bands. This band Kraus and the album Path, the song “Bum” is so good. They have this sound that is the same cathartic-ness, but with a little modern spin on it.
Max: I haven’t listened to Radiohead a lot recently, but I was obsessed with them in high school, and I was thinking about OK Computer and how influential that was. Similar to Marco, that meant so much to me when I was 15, but I didn’t listen to Radiohead for like a decade after high school, but some of its ambitiousness, some of those really out there songs, it’s fun to think about.
Izzy: You’ve released a number of cool music videos, and I’ve heard you and the directors discuss the recent ones individually, but do you consider yourself to have particularly significant influences behind the visual elements in your work in general, or is it kind of different with every project?
Sage: It’s been different with each project, but we’ve made a concerted effort with this current project to reign things in a little, in terms of things like color palette and our Instagram and whatever. I’m also a filmmaker, so music videos are really important to me. I think they’re another element to the music. And I think — in this world, where we’re always looking at our phones and our computers — there’s a ripe opportunity to try to build a visual language around music. We’ve really harnessed that and really delved into the music video world.
Izzy: I’m a huge cinephile nerd in every way. I live in a studio apartment, and yet I have a literal Criterion closet in my kitchenette with my Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays…
Sage: Woah!
Izzy: I’m like that kind of obnoxious [laughs]. So, since you mentioned being a filmmaker, I’m curious if you have any particular favorite filmmakers or movements or genres?
Sage: For the “rearview” music video – a good friend of mine, Harleigh Shaw, directed it – I think, because there’s something off-putting about the song, something that doesn’t sit right, we were really inspired by Lynchian films. I’ve always been drawn to that kind of pushing the boundary of discomfort in filmmaking, and things that are not necessarily beautiful. I think that also goes for the “Dark Blue” music video that we did a while ago. There’s something quite bizarre about some of the imagery in that video. I also love a lot of old Korean cinema and Japanese cinema. There’s a lot of amazing references in there that were so ahead of their time.
Izzy: Finally, how else do you hope to spend the summer, in addition to these upcoming dates? I have to admit, sonically, you don’t remind me of the most summertime-y band…
Sage: We have a few more New York dates in the summer, but we’re writing an album, so we’ll be getting up to that, and just continuing to play and get our music heard… write and all that… Did I miss anything, guys? What else are we up to? Barbequing [laughs].
*Get your tickets here.
