Alien Boy - Don't Know What I Am [Clear Vinyl]

Alien Boy is guitarist and songwriter Sonia Weber, drummer Derek McNeil, and a rotating cast of Portland, Oregon scene stalwarts. As her band’s Wipers-inspired name might imply, Weber is a PDX lifer, and anyone who’s spent time in the last decade’s DIY circuit will recognize something undeniably West Coast in Alien Boy’s sound: a sharpened, focused take on the heavy guitar pop of the 1980’s, chorus pedals and punishing drums the canvas for bold strokes of recollection and yearning. The band coalesced in 2015 around the recording of that year’s Never Getting Over It, an 8-song pop sprint that boasts an brash debut charm and heartbroken fervour ‘not to men on an overnight, practice space recording session origin story’ that’s shamelessly the stuff of underground rock legend. In fact, Alien Boy is the rare band to have digested decades of guitar music mythos without regurgitating cliche at all. Weber may have called a song ‘Only Posers Fall In Love,’ but many of her most impactful lyrics come packaged as references that feel deeply genuine rather than forced.