Tomorrow night (8/30) Brooklyn feminist rock band partygirl return to the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection! During a recent Zoom chat, I discover that partygirl founder, songwriter, and frontwoman Pagona Kytzidis is actually from the area, and the band (who first emerged during the pandemic) has already made several stops in town since 2022. Tomorrow they’ll be playing a sizeable set at Center City’s only remaining rock club that will include both the group’s forthcoming 2025 LP in its entirety and rearrangements of the songs of their 2022 self-titled EP. Earlier this week I got a chance to chat with Pagona, in addition to partygirl producer and lead guitarist Fran Pastore, who give me the history of partygirl…
Izzy Cihak: Since this is a Philadelphia publication, I have to ask your thoughts on the city, as you’ve played here a handful of times, with shows at Kung Fu Necktie, Ortlieb’s, and PhilaMOCA. And I know you also recorded your debut EP here…
Pagona Kytzidis: I grew up in Cheltenham, so I spent a lot of time in Philly for the first 18 years of my life (I moved to New York for college.), so it’s near and dear to my heart. I have a Greek family, and we basically exist in Philadelphia, Southeastern Pennsylvania, Greece, and that’s it [laughs]. So, it’s really special to me. I have a few really close friends that are still there, the food’s amazing, the music scene’s amazing. We’re a New York band, for sure (This is where we all met, this is where we’re from.), but it does feel like it’s a second home in lots of ways. We’ve had some of our most fun shows in Philadelphia and I’ve recorded twice with Matty Muir. I did my EP in high school with him and that’s how we got hooked up at Retro City. It was a really great experience. Fran and I were working together for the first time, and I think it was really great to be in a different place and work and have that be Philadelphia… Fran, I don’t know if you wanna…
Fran Pastore: My best memories are playing shows in Philly… ‘Cause Pagona’s family shows out!! It feels like hometown shows, completely. The energy of a crowd in Philly is just so crazy and so un-self-conscious about goin’ off! Whereas I feel like in New York sometimes people can be can be like, “oooh, yeah…” and vibey, whereas Philly’s more like, “Let’s Goooooo!”
Izzy Cihak: How is it that you all first came together and decided to make this thing and be this band?
Pagona: I love telling this story… I’ve been in bands my whole life. I’ve been in bands since I was like 11 or 12. I’ve been writing songs since I was like eight or some stupid age [laughs]. When I graduated college, I wanted to formulate a really coherent project around a lot of songs I’d been writing and didn’t really have a home for. I graduated in 2021, so there was no ability to go out and make music, so it was all kind of in my head. I was working on pulling together a lot of life experiences that I was going through, and the world was kind of crazy – it still is crazy… — at the time, and I feel like I was trying to reckon with a lot and come to terms with who I am in this space. I wanted a project that addressed a lot of that. A lot of that was gendered experiences and the crazy scenario in which we found ourselves…
I started this band with my college friends, who are no longer in the band, and that’s who’s on the EP. I wanted a lead guitar player and producer, so I sought out Fran through the webs of the internet [laughs]. Fran started playing with a mutual friend of mine, so we started working on music together. With my music, I kind of frame it as I’m the songwriter, Fran’s the producer, and together we can make this very large and ambitious music, which has been really exciting. In 2022 we got to really launch the full, new, large, coherent, theoretical vision that is our ambitious project – maybe too ambitious – that is partygirl on our first album, which doesn’t have a release date yet, but sometime next year. I’m So Charming, I Forgot Who I Was is the name of the record… At some point we met our drummer [Jonathan Ashley] because he posted an ad in like a Brooklyn music blog…
Fran: Yeah, we found him in like 12 minutes, or 10-and-a-half… I was like, “Take your phone off ‘Do not disturb!’ You need to message him right now!”
Pagona: I was working my 9-5 and Fran was like force notifying me! And that worked out perfectly because he’s a perfect fit for us and he really pushes us musically and is a huge collaborator. I went to college with our violin player [Claire Lin Jenkins], but we didn’t really get to be friends until afterwards. She came to a show of ours, and I was like, “Do you want to play together sometime?” I had this vision of having a very large, multi-instrument rock band that is kind of genre-bending in a very discreet way. She hopped on and she does all of our orchestral arrangements and backing vocals, and she works a lot on the visuals with me. Our bassist [Andrew Jordan] was good friends with our drummer, and the two of them are like a package deal…
Fran: They’re monsters at their instruments…
Pagona: Yeah, they’re monster players… And we met our sax player this year. The sax player on our record had to drop because he moved and he was working on different projects, but he was amazing, also a monster player. We found our current sax player through some Philly musicians that I know. She grew up in Upper Merrion, and I had relationships with a few Women in Jazz players from Philadelphia, and through that we actually got to meet Jenna [Love], which is really exciting, how these networks work… There’s another Philly shoutout!
Izzy: You mentioned your first full-length, which is set to drop sometime next year, which you said is a very large project… maybe too large [laughs]. What would you tell fans, and potential fans, that they can expect of the release, whether it be sonically, sentimentally, thematically, or maybe all three?
Fran: There’s every emotion on it, so, what’s the cliché? There is something for everybody!
Pagona: Like I said, I think of myself as a writer who likes to write with coherent narratives and broader themes that I’m interested in exploring or that I see reflected in my life. I work on songs for a very long time. Some of the songs on this album I first wrote when I was like 15 or 16, so that’s like 10 years, and I just won’t stop until it’s perfect or I find the right people. And sometimes I need them to tell me to stop just to get it done [laughs], which is the great part about having collaborators.
I had a bunch of stuff I was sitting on and I wanted to tell this coming of age story. We’re a feminist band, and it’s framed in this gender framework about how I was experiencing certain forms of relationships, both interpersonal and also structurally large. It’s so corny, but I’ve been saying, “This is a classic postmodern story where a young girl is faced with the world and it’s not what she thinks it is.” And then what does she do? She kind of tries to reckon with that, tries to change who she is and shapeshift, and kind of loses her mind a bit in the process. You can’t really tell what’s real and what’s fake and what’s a dream and what is the reality that you’re actually experiencing. And you’re trying to find the political language and personal language to explain it and nothing is ever really satisfactory.
I think the album tells this story in a way that was pulled directly from my life. Again, it’s the classic trajectory that pretty much everyone goes through. So, the album kind of moves through these motions. Like, you have two coherent halves. The first half is really trying to put the world together as you think it is sold to you, despite repeating things that are happening, and trying to hold on to truth in a way that’s very desperate and very sad and causes extreme emotions. The second half is more coming to terms with that as a response, but also as the kind of defeat that you have to sometimes face to get through the metamorphosis. There’s some darker, funnier sides to the second half of the album in particular, which I think was a way for me to embrace what I was facing. I do think that it’s kind of a funny record. I don’t know if other people think it’s funny…
Fran: Funny in the way that Fleabag’s funny, ya know?
Pagona: Yeah! It’s a dark comedy. I love dark comedy, and I think that’s a very fulfilling medium. We were all trying to do this in a way that’s not too explicit, not too in-your-face. In pop music today there’s this trend to be hyper literal with your words in a way that I just don’t like [laughs]. I know that it’s a reaction to everything I’m talking about, a reaction to being faced with confusing circumstances and you’re trying to claim reality.
Our band, which has a lot of musical themes that are looped throughout songs or the record, and also can kind of be confusing in a dreamlike way. I wanted the language to reflect that in a way that I feel like is reclaiming and I want it to be surrealistic, or focus on the beauty of the language itself, as opposed to just stating the reality that was going on. I wanted the music and the words to be, in a corny way, more aesthetic than just talking about my experience. I want it to be a worldbuilding kind of phenomenon. And I think that, in a band where we have six members and so many different instruments and different backgrounds, it’s a real opportunity that I didn’t realize we were seizing until we were doing it. I think that’s probably the most rewarding part of the album.
Izzy: Since this is your first LP, I’m curious if you have any favorite debut LPs in your own music libraries?
Fran: Marry Me by St. Vincent is a really good one.
Pagona: The debut thing is throwing me! I usually have these answers locked and loaded [laughs]. Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos! That’s 100% hugely influential for me… I have a lot of favorite second albums, I’m realizing as I’m looking through all of these [laughs].
Izzy: Feel free to share them, as well!
Pagona: No, I think I can do this [laughs]. This is a great question, that’s why I wanna honor it… I would definitely say Little Earthquakes, I would say Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair… When I was 12 my aunt gave me the first two Tori Amos records, the first two Fiona Apple records, and the first two PJ Harvey records, and they just changed everything for me. I started learning them all. I feel like Little Earthquakes really changed how I viewed songwriting and specifically piano playing, because I was briefly classically trained on piano. And I was just like, “Okay, you can do so much more with this instrument,” that I was not familiar with. I discovered Liz Phair and Exile in Guyville later. I put on Exile very frequently, because that’s a masterpiece.
Fran: No skips!
Pagona: Yeah, there’s no skips on that record! And I saw her perform it live, which was insane.
Izzy: Considering that the band is still relatively new, if not very new, what have been some of the highlights of partygirl so far?
Fran: This is more personal, but having five other people who want it just as bad as you do. It’s hard enough finding one person, but getting five? It’s amazing, compared to every other band I’ve been in. I’ve never met anybody else or many more selves that are so dedicated to wanting to make this their life. And they also have so much reverence for the music itself, rather than just, “I wanna do this because it’s fun.” It’s more than that. It’s a way of being and a way of operating throughout the world. It’s just so apparent that we all really, really care.
Pagona: That’s a very sentimental note, Fran, but I do echo that. I always say meeting Fran changed my life. My bandmates have become some of my closest, if not my closest, friends, and the people I talk to most on a daily level. It does feel very beautiful to have a family that you are invested in this common goal with and trust, more than anything, to figure out if you’re doing something good or bad. To have really trusted partners to be like, “Let’s reflect on this. And you’re gonna be real with me on any creative decision.” I’ll agonize over any one chord change for weeks, and only will their reaction to it actually settle my mind, which maybe has to do more with my anxiety than anything else [laughs], but still! That’s probably the biggest broader response.
But, in terms of discreet experiences, every time we have a show. We’re a feminist group, so our music particularly connects with young women, but anybody who comes to talk to us and gets to react in a really honest way, that feels more special than anything. That’s what I want and that’s the community that I need and like to build. This is with people I don’t know, but even some of my bestest friends in the whole world who will come to every show of ours and be in the front row and just going crazy. I make music for them, and I make music for all the unnamed people that are like us, too.
Just being able to connect on a personal level, that’s the best thing and it stands out every single time, and it feels really, really special. It grounds you in what this is really about. Unfortunately, this business is lecherous, in literally a soul sucking way and also more discreet ways. It really does feel like those moments are the most special moments. They remind you why you’re doing this in the first place. Every time we’re dealing with any other bullshit that we deal with every single day, those are the moments that make it most worth it and provide you with the soul strength to keep pushing and keep going and take it seriously, because it really matters to at least one other person in that moment.
Izzy: You have a handful of upcoming shows, including this Friday at MilkBoy. What can be expected of the live experience, whether for those who’ve seen you before or those yet to see you? This will be my first time seeing you! What does your live performance draw inspiration from?
Fran: We’re gonna shred!
Pagona: [Laughs] We are gonna shred. It’s very high-energy. I would also wear earplugs, that’s important…
Fran: We do not stand still! That’s for sure!
Pagona: I like to move around, personally, which is really fun to do, because I often wear high heels, so it’s like trying not to fall, but sometimes I do fall [laughs], so there’s that hazard… I’ve never been asked this question before, so it’s fun to try to summarize the experience… In Philly, in particular, you’ll have my family there, so there’ll be lots of Greek people of varying ages present and going crazy, which is a fun thing, although maybe they wouldn’t appreciate me putting that in writing [laughs].
Our sax player is free, as I call her. She has a clip-on, so she wanders around the crowd, which is really fun. And there should be some fun surprises. We have stage antics, and I don’t know what we’re gonna pull out, because I feel like it’s very organic and in-the-moment. Something really great about this show is that we have a really large block of time to play, which we like, because we write very long songs that, when we play live, have even longer solo sections [laughs].
Fran: We’ll utilize all of our time!
Pagona: We will utilize all of our time! And we will be playing the whole upcoming record, so this is the one time you will get to hear it before it’s streamable. I guess I should’ve led with that! The show will have all of the unreleased music played! We’ve also been working on rearranging our EP that is already out, so we will be playing all those rearrangements with these new band members, and I will say it’s pretty awesome. We will be playing those for the first time on this tour. So, although we’ve played our upcoming record a lot, and we have played it in Philly before…
Fran: We haven’t played the new versions of the old songs!
Pagona: I also play keys, but I don’t play it a lot live, because it’s a pain in the ass to lug around a keyboard and a guitar, but I will be bringing the keyboard on tour, so we will actually have full soundscape situations going on, and we will have certain songs we can’t play when I’m playing guitar. It’s really exciting, because we don’t get to play them a lot, like some of the ballads. You can expect a show that both has a power ballad and a moshing song in one set, which I think is pretty fun. It’ll be a really great time and hopefully there’ll be lots of dancing and singing along in the crowd. I feel like those are my favorite shows to play. And, like Fran said, we always get that energy back in Philly, so I’m really excited.
Fran: The crazier the crowd is, we’re like, “Okay, challenge accepted! Let’s go for it!”
*Get your tickets here.
