San Jose, CA · alternative

Star 99

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Bay Area duo threading giddy, lopsided indie rock through fuzz and abrupt tempo turns — short songs that end before they outstay the hook.

Star 99 formed in San Jose, California, when four friends, Saoirse Alesandro, Chris Gough, Jeremy Romero and Thomas Calvo, were living together in a house downtown. The band released its first EP, 'My Year in Lists', a nod to a Los Campesinos! song, in 2021, and built an audience through shows across the Bay Area and west coast tours alongside bands such as Scowl, Mom Jeans and Supercrush.

Star 99's songs run on fuzzed-out guitars, two voices trading and overlapping lines, and structures that switch tempo or drop out entirely rather than settling into a groove. Most tracks are brief, closer to the sub-two-minute mark than to conventional verse-chorus lengths.

The group's reference points sit in 1990s indie rock and pop-punk, but the writing is looser and more abrupt than either, with sudden stops, off-kilter harmonies and lyrics that veer between the deadpan and the anxious. Star 99 emerged from the Bay Area DIY circuit and has kept to that scale of room and audience.

In 2023 the band released its debut full-length, Bitch Unlimited, on Lauren Records, sharpening the fast, punchy, eccentric pop-punk sound they had been building toward. A follow-up, Gaman, added multi-instrumentalist Aidan Delaney to the line-up and turned toward slower, more personal material, exploring relationships with family, friends and lovers and the work of persisting through hardship. It was recorded and engineered by Grace Coleman at Different Fur in San Francisco and mastered by Andrew Oswald at Paradise Records.

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