Boston, MA · alt-rock

Pixies

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Loud-quiet-loud's inventors — the band your favorite band ripped off, with 'Debaser' through 'Where Is My Mind?' still setting the terms.

Joey Santiago and Black Francis met as students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1984 and began jamming together. Francis placed an ad for a bassist who liked both Peter, Paul and Mary and Hüsker Dü; Kim Deal answered despite never having played bass. David Lovering, a friend of Deal's, joined on drums, and Santiago picked the band's name at random from a dictionary.

Pixies formed in Boston in 1986, with Black Francis on vocals and guitar, Joey Santiago on lead guitar, Kim Deal on bass and David Lovering on drums. Their sound joined surf and blues-derived guitar figures to abrupt shifts between hushed verses and bellowed choruses, with lyrics drawing on surrealism, biblical imagery, science fiction and Spanish phrases.

Their run of releases went from the 1987 mini-LP Come On Pilgrim through Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Bossanova and Trompe le Monde. Records including Surfer Rosa, Doolittle and Bossanova made them one of the most influential American alternative bands of the late 1980s, though they found only modest success at home; they were bigger in Britain and Europe, and left their mark on Nirvana, Radiohead, Modest Mouse, the Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer.

The group split in 1993 and reunited in 2004 for sold-out world tours. Deal left in 2012 and was briefly replaced by Kim Shattuck before Paz Lenchantin took over, becoming a full member in 2016 and recording Head Carrier, Beneath the Eyrie and Doggerel with the band.

Lenchantin was replaced in 2024 by Emma Richardson, formerly of Band of Skulls, and that lineup released the ninth Pixies album, The Night the Zombies Came, the same year.

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