photo by Mika Lungulov-Klotz
Brooklyn’s newest shape-shifters, pets — the collaborative brainchild of brothers Jonny and Nick Campolo (Pill / P.E.) alongside saxophonist Chase Ceglie — have announced their debut full-length record 🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark), out October 21 (pre-order available now). To mark the occasion, the band has shared its lead single, “history,” with a self-made music video that bends genre and expectation in equal measure.
“history” and the art of unmasking
On the single, guitarist Nick Campolo describes “history” as “a sly nod to the empty shell of American idealism’s present tense. Abandoned Highway strip malls reanimate as ‘history’ taunts, ‘you cannot rely on your classic style.’ We groove around a sampled country-rock lick now flipped with bossa swing. Like some kind of déjà vu dub… History has its eyes open, and it isn’t afraid to sing what it sees.”
It’s an eerie thesis and a fitting first taste of 🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark), an album that treats songwriting like séance — summoning ghosts of the American songbook and feeding them through samplers, drum machines, and modular synths until something new and slippery takes shape.
Eleanor Friedberger on 🌀❓
Singer-songwriter Eleanor Friedberger has already co-signed the project, writing:
“Allow me to introduce you to pets and their new album 🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark). At first, just a voice in the darkness, raw but ready… It’s where piano and saxophone lay comfortably side by side with modular synths and constructed beats. pets feel at home in our chopped and screwed landscape: a warmth pours out of them and their music. It gives me space to think of my old room and all the things I would or wouldn’t do, in a luxurious loop.”
A band born from strange encounters
Raised in coastal New Hampshire, Jonny and Nick grew up steeped in classic songcraft and ’90s radio, sharpening their ears through formal choir training and DIY recording. By 2021, those influences collided in Brooklyn, where Jonny’s glass art studio became a crucible for experimentation.
That same year, Jonny crossed paths with Chase Ceglie in a graveyard — one dressed as a gray clown, the other as Freddy Krueger. Their impromptu duet of “Send in the Clowns” sparked a creative kinship, and pets was born.
Drawing inspiration from Neil Young, Carole King, Arthur Russell, Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen, The Blue Nile, and Talk Talk, pets embrace contradiction: intimate yet expansive, nostalgic yet fractured, mournful yet wry.
The sound of the spiral
Recorded at Studio Windows and Figure 8 in Brooklyn with Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liars), and later expanded in Ceglie’s home setup, the record blends piano, guitar, saxophone, clarinet, flute with sample-heavy electronic textures. Mixed by Jake Aron, the final product plays like a rainy walk through memory, colliding analog warmth with digital distortion.
Ballad-heavy yet restless, 🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark) doesn’t feel like a breakup record so much as a breakdown record — equal parts collapse and catharsis, with a dim light flickering closer through every track.
pets Live
To celebrate the release, pets are bringing their spiral to stages in Los Angeles and beyond — complete with guest magician Ben Schechter and an outdoor set at Elysian Park. Expect the unexpected.
Tour Dates
• Oct 11 – Newport, RI @ Broadway Street Fair Festival
• Oct 24 – Los Angeles, CA @ Non Plus Ultra w/ GMO, Coral Web
• Oct 25 – Los Angeles, CA @ Elysian Park w/ GMO, Hormone, Ben Schechter (magician), Jane Margarette
• Oct 26 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon w/ Brad Oberhofer, Expresso DI, GMO DJs
• Nov 8 – Brooklyn, NY @ Pete’s Candy Store w/ DYAN, Sally Family Band (Caroline Says)
🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark) is a hall of mirrors, an experiment in haunting, and a reminder that music is people — messy, mysterious, and mercifully unfinished. See you in the spiral.
(Spiral Question Mark) is such a loaded title — equal parts symbol, emoji, and mood. What does it represent to you in the context of this debut full-length?
Jonny: The title originally came from seeing the icons next to each other in my most used emojis. I screamed: like a pictoral fortune telling, it immediately twisted a cryptic concept with a light heart – and I now see it as a star sign for the present moment. Honestly, although initially the title had nothing to do with America, and was purely pictorial, it became predictive. American apocalyptacists, conspiracy theorists and double-thinking doubters aside, the music and album title have me looking all the way in, to beg the important question: Am I OK? This isn’t so much of a breakup record, but a breakdown. So see you in the spiral.
“history” flips a country-rock lick into bossa swing and dub déjà vu. How do you approach bending genres without losing the thread of your identity?
Nick: One thing that’s beautiful about the present is that we have become media fluid. I like to think of my more traditional songs as a sewing practice, threading lines (some clean, some crude, some abstract) between ideas that have moved me. Maybe we haven’t had the idea yet, maybe we’re waiting for the synapse to recoil and what we are hearing is the raw spark, a reaction to all the data. It may sound cliché as hell but when talking about western scales, to me it’s all one song. We are communicating with the player piano roll at different moments in time with new agendas. Sewing through lines in wet sand. The needle is the signature – being present for the idea is where we find our identity. Always running on intuition and desire over here!
Nick described “history” as a sly nod to American idealism’s empty shell. How do you balance political critique with the playful, almost surreal textures in your music?
Nick: I recently saw Willie Nelson perform at age 92 – he sang a tune called “The Last Leaf on the Tree” – and I kept thinking, it’s important to be aware of the fact that things are on edge now. Even the old man on the mountain is feeling the weather. That is the landscape, this country, this time period. Though I am living my life and asserting my own desires, within the context of the song I’m speaking to the idea that these generational forces are big and surreal in nature, and while we press on, there’s a sort of intangible loss resonating, an inertia, but hey I’m still going to the club, that state of play; that’s where humanity is at.
Eleanor Friedberger paints your sound with references to The Blue Nile, Talk Talk, Harmonia. Do those comparisons resonate with you, or do you see yourselves elsewhere on the map?
Jonny: Those references, although locked in a time period, are right on the nose. We revel in heartfelt, gushing tell-all type songwriting. It’s writers like Paul Buchanan (The Blue Nile) and Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) that paved the way, with ice. Forget heart on your sleeve, they’ll give you the shirt off their back. Their records, especially Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit of Eden’ and Blue Nile’s ‘Hats,’ are perfect 10’s to me – they are my everyday emotional barometers. I warm up my voice with them before shows, and if I’m in a bad mood, they bring me back to life. Their power is in their realness – sometimes I walk the streets of NYC, listening to The Blue Nile, scanning the faces of strangers and can’t help but think, “is this what everyone hears in their head?”
Your music feels like a collision of modular synths, saxophone, and found rhythms. What’s your process for weaving such disparate textures into something cohesive?
Nick and Jonny: We have a layered process in which we perform and record all the tunes. For (Spiral Question Mark), we mixed traditional songwriting practices with a collaborative electronic setup in the studio. Songs came together in different ways: some were written live in realtime on a modular synth and piano, often improvised on the octatrack, and then others came from a more traditional solo writing session on piano or guitar. Once we brought these ideas into the studio, we combined the best of both worlds: analog and acoustic textures stretched out into an electronic environment. It’s intimate, ear bending at times, but it’s also music for dancing, expanding into the club. It’s possible to be both sweaty and sad.
pets isn’t just a band but a cross-pollination of art and music worlds. How do your visual practices inform the way you write and record songs?
Jonny: Art and music are very alike, in that their worlds are made up of PEOPLE. Any bridge I build from one world to another is because of a special connection to a friend’s support at that time. We are lucky to be close with so many musical and visual artists. These people are the ladders I use to look over the wall of Can’t. I’d be nowhere without them. No one is an island! Personally, between my art and music practices, it’s taken me a long time to realize that the line between these worlds is made up, and irrelevant. Each informs the other. Paint a dance, play a poem, draw a song – it’s all the same!
The Tony Oursler connection places you in a lineage of avant-garde visual storytelling. What did collaborating with him on “hush hush” open up for you creatively?
Jonny: I worked in Tony’s studio during some very formative years in my 20s. Tony comes from a group of like-minded artists that at their core are cultural hoarders – like Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler is a world maker. He builds a myriad of spiraling references into each work, and when you’re in his studio, it’s impossible not to fall in and come out a little dizzy. Always inspired, he is a zen practitioner of multimedia – more like all-media. To put it lightly, the guy reads! A lot. He’s currently amassing ephemera ever-obsessed with angels, aliens, magic and the occult. Try to find all of those influences inside the video for “hush hush,” and you’ll be on your way to sneaking into the door of his studio practice. After filming with Tony for just a day, we noticed we had changed: Nick had a third eye, Jonny became a digital witch and Chase couldn’t stop crying every time he saw a clown.
You’ve got shows planned at Non Plus Ultra, Zebulon, and even an outdoor set in Elysian Park with a magician (!). How does the live setting shift your relationship to this record?
Nick: We live for the performances, and the magic that unfolds in real time. We want the songs to breathe in a live setting, so we use a hybrid setup consisting of analog drum-and-bass and organic acoustic guitar, sax and piano. When you’re at a show of ours, things feel simultaneously locked in-step (cold) and fluid in feeling (hot!).
There’s a warmth and almost haunted nostalgia in the way Eleanor described your sound — like sinking into a tub of memory. Do you see (Spiral Question Mark) as a nostalgic record, or is it more about the present?
Nick: pets has a shared love of songs that at times feel both timeless and solitary. That and we love the late 80’s, hehe. You could say that the tunes were lost to time, or that they found Time. Songs that you can live with. I think for us, the nostalgic aspect is more of a soft lens, or a guiding force. Hazy happened then, but what does it feel like now? The inspiration for the songs themselves are more personal, pulled from life, and grounded in the now.
pets have roots in Pill and P.E., both bands that carved sharp edges into underground music. How does this new project build on that history, while breaking into something entirely its own?
Jonny: Speaking of “history,” bands are like us: they’re born, they live, then they die. Most recorded music is a document of what already happened. It’s all cumulative; and although we have all been genre bending for years – Pill with no-wave, P.E. with experimental electronic – pets feels like the most honest and apt form of expression I’ve ever had. Every great band is a container for a feeling. Music has this way of pulling yourself out of yourself, it’s magic in that power. At this moment, pets is a singular spiral, pulling three worlds (people) together, and believe me, we don’t even know where it will take us, and that’s exciting.
