Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Pet Symmetry combines decades of industry experience and an incalculable drive to keep exploring. Evan Weiss (Into It. Over It.), Marcus Nuccio (Ratboys), and Erik Czaja (Dowsing) all belong to bands that are the lifeblood of Chicago’s prolific emo scene. Individually–but most importantly together–they breathe new life into age-old DIY sensibilities, from conception to artwork to final release, all while engaging fans via Patreon and elevating the next generation of their local scene by helping them access vinyl pressing plants.
Their new album, Big Symmetry, provides a necessary morale boost, especially following 2021’s Future Suits, a harrowing indictment of late-stage capitalism. I caught up with Weiss (vocals/bass) and Nuccio (drums) to chat about going bigger, balancing other personal and professional pursuits, and what they love about Chicago.
Your album rollout began in August of 2023. Is that typical? How’d that come to be?
EVAN WEISS: We actually started recording this record in February of 2021, which was before our last record, Future Suits, came out that August. We’d been slowly working on these new songs. In 2023, we got asked to tour with The Flatliners, but we hadn’t put out any new music in two years.
To help promote the tour, we figured it’d be cool to take one of the tunes from Big Symmetry and put it out as a single. It was also the push we needed to start teasing a new record. We made a 7” flexi of “Big Island” and sold it for the tour.
Then we wound up tracking more guitars and bass. On that song we put aux percussion. Our friend Seth [Engel] plays bongos all over it. By the time we rolled out “Big Steve” on Halloween, the record and all of the artwork was finished.
The long album rollout wasn’t intentional. We run our label and do everything ourselves. We were able to take our time because we had a bunch of other life things going on. I got married, Erik got married, and Marcus was busy with Ratboys. It was easy for us to stall the album release until we were able to tour and give it the attention it deserved.
How do you work around your respective projects and find time to come together?
EW: This might be the best we’ve ever been at being thoughtful after learning that lesson many, many times. I only can speak to my experience of album cycles for the bands that we’re in. If Into It. Over It. or Their / They’re / There are putting out a record, that would become the singular focus during that time, but we’ve always had multiple irons in the fire.
While those tours and promotions and shows are happening, there’s also other albums being made. Historically, we’ve been good about separating release dates. There’s been some overlap throughout the years, but touring schedules have always been the hardest thing to align because you take the tours you’re offered.
MARCUS NUCCIO: It’s a lot of carving out time in Google Calendar and communicating as much as we can as soon as possible. Like Evan mentioned, these are lessons we’ve learned over the years. Even if there’s a hint of something that might happen with one of the bands, no matter how far in the future, we make sure to put it in the calendar.
EW: For all the people that we play music with collectively, which is somewhere around 25-30 people, it’s probably universally agreed upon that making records is everyone’s favorite part of being in a band. Touring has the most challenging time constraints.
MN: You can’t be in two places at once. I tried to float that idea and it didn’t go well.
EW: That should’ve been the big wish in “Big Wish.”
Do you think Covid helped carve out time for everyone to come together and write?
MN: It was pre-vaccine, so there wasn’t much to do. We got a cabin in southern Illinois for two weeks. We wrote and recorded the drums in about seven days, which was a very quick turnaround.
EW: We also had this dead time at the beginning of 2021, where we had just wrapped up Future Suits. There’s always that chunk of time between finishing an album and the release date, which we occupy with interviews, planning tours, making music videos, or whatever else to pad the release of the project and develop assets.
We usually take around four years to put out a record anyway. We were given a gift from a fan that was inspiring to the trip.
The narratives that appear on Big Symmetry about hope, love, and gratitude were written when times were different. How do those themes endure into what we’re living with currently?
EW: A lot of the lyrics were actually written in 2023 and 2024. I didn’t write most of the lyrics when we initially sketched the songs and tracked the drums. That stuff always happens way later. I usually start with melody and then write lyrics.
Some of the lyrics on Future Suits were written after the pandemic started, so a lot of them focus on existential dread, capitalism, and the evilness of the world.
Coming off writing that record and diving immediately into this one, the experience we had writing Big Symmetry was so full of love. Big Symmetry was meant to be a positive follow up from the darkness of Future Suits.
There was a lot of good stuff going on in all of our lives at that time. Erik and I both were getting married, so there was a lot of love circulating in our friend group. The pandemic was beginning to subside and our friend group felt more connected than ever.
There were a lot of good feelings to share, and we felt like the world needed that. Writing an album full of love songs was harder than it sounds. I’d never done it before. I get a much different feeling of warm and fuzzy listening to this record than I do from Future Suits.
Future Suits is largely about existential dread with loose themes of capitalism and the evilness of the world. Coming off writing that record and diving immediately into this one was such a love-filled experience and literally a very psychedelic one. It was a very conscious effort on my part to do something that was not based in darkness. Big Symmetry was meant to be a positive follow up from the darkness of Future Suits.
What did you listen to growing up and how do your tastes overlap?
MN: All of us came up listening to punk and hardcore. We all met at DIY punk shows here in Chicago. We connected over our love for bands like The Promise Ring and The Get Up Kids. Evan comes from an east coast hardcore scene, so we learned about different bands together. I remember Erik showing me Rival Schools, and Evan and I bonded over Pinback.
EW: I came from a grunge childhood, which led me to emo and hardcore as a teenager. Of all the bands that I’m in, Pet Sym has the most versatile taste in music.
The three of us together are very active participants in music beyond being in bands. We love showing each other new things. That informs our songwriting and recording in a way that’s much more broad compared to any other band that I’m in. We pull influence from a lot of different places even though it might seem subtle.
MN: I was late to this call ’cause I’m doing the nerdiest thing of all time right now. I’m going through my record collection and downloading all the records I have in FLAC files so I can upload them to my modded iPod. Right now I’m on Black Sabbath.
EW: If you look behind Marcus and me, we both have very sizable record collections. Music is the biggest singular driving force in both of our lives. I’m fortunate to be playing music with two people who love talking about it and have such open minds.
The three of you individually and combined have experienced so much music. How do you compartmentalize what matters?
MN: What matters to me is when I get an immediate emotional response. Music has this ability to make a person feel so deeply and that’s why we’re all so obsessed with it. When a song triggers a deep emotional response, that’s the reason I’m here.
EW: Beyond what Marcus said, which is the perfect answer, I always love to listen for moments in which I’d be like, “I wish I wrote that.” Those moments make me feel like there’s so many more ideas to be had.
What songs have caused those moments lately?
MN: Today’s a big release day. I’m excited to go listen to the new PUP record.
EW: I’ve been revisiting the piano player Bill Evans lately. Beautifully recorded jazz music from the fifties on Blue Note.
Marcus and I do a music league with a bunch of our friends, and this Pavement song I forgot about popped up called “Shoot the Singer.” I hadn’t heard it in years.
The new Deerhoof was a great listen and I’ve been digging this band called 22º Halo. Numero just put out this record by this band called X-Cetera. It’s three 10- to 12-year-old girls from rural California writing pop songs in their bedroom and singing into a voice recorder. Someone’s mom sent these songs to a German producer friend, who wrote drum and bass to go underneath their vocals.
My friend Seth has a band called Options that Storm Chasers, the label I run, put out a record for. They’re kind of the local hero around here. That’s a band that we all, and anyone who’s involved in Chicago music, has massive respect for.
MN: I’ve been obsessed with this record by Nourished by Time. I played it in the van the other weekend. The song “Daddy” perked up our guitarist Erik’s ears.
I love this band Another Michael from Philadelphia. While I was doing my FLAC file project this morning, I was listening to their record New Music and Big Pop.
What’s so special about the Chicago music scene? And you can’t say “the people.”
EW: Marcus, Erik, and I all came up during a very specific moment in a thriving scene with a bunch of great bands that were all emotionally and creatively aligned. For a long time, it was very much like, “where’s the show tonight?” and everyone in the extended universe would go to every show that was going on. Maybe it makes me sound like a fuddy duddy, but that kind of scene doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe it does, and we’ve aged out of it.
The desire for people in this city to make stuff happen, whether the outside world is paying attention or not, is special. There isn’t a ton of ego here. It’s a lot of folks doing the things that personally drive them and sharing it with other folks.
MN: I love the support and the Chicago scene. Like Evan said, bands are always lifting each other up. Something I love about Chicago is that there’s a couple of big rehearsal buildings and you’re constantly running into other musicians. That collision of people in the hallways or in practice spaces leads to a lot of collaboration and friendships.
We’ve been in this building, Wright on Carroll, for around 15 years. Seth Engel from Options, the band Evan mentioned earlier, has a room right next to ours. We see Seth and his bandmates all the time, and we like to introduce ourselves to newer bands.
Maybe these big practice spaces aren’t unique to Chicago, but there’s three or four of these big rehearsal space buildings and they feel tightly knit. They’re a special place for creativity to happen.
EW: The building we’re in has around 400 rooms. The four-room radius that we’re in has Options, Red PK, Patter, Sincere Engineer, Floatie, Into It. Over It., and Pool Kids.
MN: So many folks are on our floor. When you put a bunch of people in the same building, you’re gonna run into each other all the time.
EW: The floor below us is Braid and Hey Mercedes. Maps & Atlases is on the first floor and Retirement Party is across the hall.
It’s such a cool city to be in. I don’t know if anyone in Chicago thinks they’re gonna get big. It’s affordable and we have all the assets here. Bands can rehearse at a good price. We have dozens of clubs that are all ages and 21+ that supply an endless amount of places for people to perform, not to mention all the DIY spaces.
There’s tons of awesome record stores here and a vinyl pressing plant right up the street, and it’s in the same building where we built our recording studio. Plus touring is easier because you can get to most places relatively faster than if you were living on either coast.
I moved here from Philly because we didn’t have these resources at the time. When I left, it felt very competitive and weird. There weren’t many places to play and there weren’t people lifting each other up. It was harder work with a way worse attitude.
I’m a huge fan of opportunity. I love being able to say yes and to have the resources to do them. That was the big attraction to moving to the Midwest.
Last question! What song from Big Symmetry are you most excited to perform live?
EW: I’m excited to figure out how to play “Big Water Cooler” and “Big Donk.”
Our buddy Jimmy [Montague] is playing keys, so that opens up a lot more opportunities for us to play songs that maybe don’t work as well as a three-piece. Having an extra musician for some of those songs opens up the ability to do other tunes.
I like playing “Big Engagement.” It’s in the pocket right now.
I’m excited to see what songs resonate with people. Right now, we have no idea, apart from what streaming services are telling us, but that doesn’t mean anything.
MN: “Big Mileage” is fun ’cause it’s a big shouty, fast punk tune. I love putting a bunch of energy into that one.
Big Symmetry is out now via Storm Chaser Ltd./Asian Man. Keep up with the band on Instagram.
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Giliann Karon | @lethalrejection
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