Why Petey, and Pop Punk, Were My Surprises of the Year

My first published piece of writing was a poorly composed review of an album by a local punk band called Mr. Solid for a publication run by the University of British Columbia’s campus radio station. Lacking any real skill, I’d sent a barrage of deeply uncool pitches to the magazine until its editor, responding with equal parts irritation and pity, chucked me a bone.

The year was 2001. I was 18 and keen to write what I knew, which at the time consisted of thrashing around all-ages punk shows at community halls on Saturday nights. Being neither big nor strong, I stayed at the edge of the crush of bodies in the pit with my elbows up, rarely venturing into the violent, trampling middle where it would be harder to get out. I often attended these shows in the company of an ill-fated crush who burned me CDs of Matthew Good’s demo tapes from the early 1990s.

These formative, fleeting moments laid the foundation for the years ahead. By the mid-2000s, I was among the crowd flooding the now-closed live music venue called Richard’s on Richards for the sets of post-punk acts like Pretty Girls Make Graves and the Futureheads. Or rolling down the I-5 to catch New York City art punks Les Savy Fav at the Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle, a tour stop in support of their 2007 album, Let’s Stay Friends.

Many people have these experiences. Which renders so many of us ready for Petey, a pop-punk-inflected outfit with Midwestern emo roots that is helmed by Los Angeles musician and comedian Peter Martin.

Petey released USA, its major-label debut with Capitol Records, this fall after some earlier recording efforts with Terrible Records in 2021 and 2022. Flecked with sunny optimism and a disarming absence of irony, the music elicits an odd, welcome nostalgia among 40-year-old listeners like me.

Part of what Petey, aged 32, enjoys about making music runs parallel to why listeners like it: music holds the possibility of retrieval, the strange thrill of revisiting the younger self you once were.

“I have the most fun when I’m going to see a pop-punk band that I fell in love with when I was 15,” Petey told Billboard magazine in October.

“Bands like Say Anything, Motion City Soundtrack... I just love the energy that it brings out of the audience. I love how it looks on stage. So I try to bring that feel to the live set.”

Petey brings this youthful exuberance to his recorded musical offerings too. His work will be appealing to listeners who came of age alongside the likes of Modest Mouse or Death Cab for Cutie — maybe while learning to drive stick along empty winter stretches of Vancouver Island highways, or skulking about on winter break in your boyfriend’s NOFX hoodie.

“I want you to feel how I feel when I watch this movie. So what are you doing tonight?” he sings on “Skip This One,” USA’s surfy sleeper standout. “Do you wanna come over and watch a man with depression make friends with an octopus? That could be you and me. That could be all of us.”

I was surprised at the unselfconscious earnestness of Petey’s music because I had first come to know of him through his comedy during the socially distanced winter of 2021. My friend Sarah had sent me a sketch about a married couple’s shared reality shredding over the revelation that one of them didn’t like the alternative rock band Incubus as much as the other believed they did. Petey smartly, effortlessly roasted the solipsism of those early social-distancing years while also skewering the alt-comedy scene in which he was starting to gain ground.

The whole enterprise was improbable from the start, which to this day remains part of the charm of both Petey’s music and comedy. Martin had signed to Terrible Records in 2020, but the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to any opportunities for performance. So he passed the time with his friend and manager Will Crane, who helped him shoot and direct a series of sketch comedy reels on TikTok that featured several Peteys in the same frame, each a different character. Together, they skewer the band Train while asking what it means to be “down for music, in general.”

Similar to Petey’s lyrical prose, which includes depictions of him crying in the grocery store due to the abundance of choice in North America, his comedy tackles coming to grips with this particular moment in late capitalism where many things feel simultaneously possible and terrible — that same privilege of choice drowning out the cruelties that set the foundation for such an expanse.

Sometimes, this resonance presents as a disconnect — Petey’s comedy gesturing towards a darker edge that isn’t necessarily as self-evident in his music.

But do his younger fans perceive this disconnect in the same way I do? Or are his earnest lyrics resonating with the thousands who turn out for his live performances because of a collective desire for a kind of sincerity that offers something different from the more cynical posturing with which I grew up?

Earlier this summer, Toronto culture writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrote an essay in the New York Times about the profound catharsis on display at the concerts he attended this year. “We were properly crying, the sniffling and sobbing type, absolutely overwhelmed with joy,” he wrote.

“I wept when Taylor Swift played ‘The Archer’ at her Eras Tour in a 60,000-person stadium. I bawled my eyes out when Joni Mitchell took the stage at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington state for her first announced concert in more than two decades, as the sun set behind a venue overlooking the Columbia River. I was overcome again watching a fan cry-sing into Phoebe Bridgers’ shoulder onstage during a boygenius show.”

Abdelmahmoud asks his readers if they’ve experienced this, too.

Despite my cynicism, I have. There’s something uncanny and sublime about being alongside scores of other people, all of you suddenly witnessing what you’ve been thinking about alone with your headphones for months or years until now.

And so it is with Petey. For all the funny characters he plays online, concert footage of his USA tour speaks to a joyful sincerity that it seems many have sorely missed for a long time.

We’re collectively facing outsized problems as we stare down the final days of 2023. Feeling overwhelmed is part of why I find myself returning to Petey’s music and comedy. From his home in Silver Lake, he offers a glimpse at another way through this: simultaneously silly and serious, self-reflective and ultimately hopeful. Maybe there’s something we can all learn from that.