Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.

This month’s column finds Martin traveling down to his old stomping grounds of Tacoma to speak with Jesy Fortino, the creative mind behind Tiny Vipers. He arrived at her home with lunch (more on that below) and they spent the next couple hours talking about Fortino's life and careers (both inside and outside of music). With this year's release of the archived compilation Illusionz Vol. 1 (1997-2004) and a new Tiny Vipers studio LP—Tormentor, out November 7th—2025 has seen the most activity from Tiny Vipers in a number of years. Martin and Fortino talk extensively about her music, her travails through the music industry, and the relatively new outlook she has on her artistic life.

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This story begins in the lobby of Tacoma’s storied sandwich counter, MSM Deli. 

A 25-minute wait stands between me and arguably the best sandwich in Washington State—and easily the greatest south of Skagit County. It’s par for the course to wait this long, behind this many people, at lunchtime on an average Monday for MSM. Why, you may ask, am I sharing an anecdote about sandwiches when I’m supposed to be sharing the story of Tiny Vipers—in my opinion, one of the most significant Seattle recording artists of the past 20 years?

Well, dear reader, Tiny Vipers impresario Jesy Fortino and I were arranging our interview for this feature and decided to speak at her home. She revealed she was a brand new resident of Tacoma, a place you may be aware I have a decent amount of familiarity with. She sent me the address and I flipped out because she lives within walking distance of MSM. 

Slightly amused, she replied, “People have been saying this a lot.” 

After picking up sandwiches for both of us and making the very short drive from MSM to Fortino’s home—a stone’s throw south of Hilltop—she dragged her kitchen table into a spot in the middle of the house. We chit-chatted about Tacoma and the Salish Sea music scene. I half-joked about cracking open the mystique of Tiny Vipers (to her credit, she was game). I wrapped up half my turkey club and saved it for dinner. 

Finally, I hit the “record” button and we dove into Fortino’s three-decade odyssey as Tiny Vipers. 

Jesy Fortino spent more or less her entire childhood east of Seattle, but not in the suburbs known as “the Eastside” to most Washingtonians—you know, Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond, where the tech workers lived when Microsoft had a chokehold on the first tech boom. Fortino grew up all around the more rural areas of Northeastern King County; Renton, Issaquah, and the unincorporated town of Hobart (just northeast of Maple Valley, in case anybody asks you to point it out on a state map). 

She says about Hobart, “It’s right on the boundary between two places that are very different from each other. The place where I actually grew up is on the edge of the Sierra River watershed; a lot of unincorporated lands and forest roads. So I spent a lot of time out in the woods, just investigating. There are a lot of mines and old industrial stuff in the woods out there. It’s really a dream for a kid.”

Fortino describes how she used to hike the woods and come across an old abandoned mine or mining equipment from the Industrial Revolution. It was a common occurrence for her to walk alongside deserted railroad tracks or to play on mine carts. “I still go back there if I’m being honest,” she says. “I still go back there and look for stuff. I love looking for stuff out there.”

When asked what music she listened to as a kid, Fortino quickly referenced the Pure Moods compilation. Released for the first time in the United States in 1994 (it was originally released in the U.K. in 1991 under a different title), Pure Moods is something like the Dead Sea Scrolls of the new age music movement. The comp not only featured some of the most recognizable names and tracks for a very specific strata of music fan—Ennio Morricone, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Brian Eno’s “Another Green World,” Angelo Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks Theme,” and, somewhat bafflingly in hindsight, Kenny G—it is perhaps most famously the first exposure for many North Americans to Enya’s world-beating single “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away).” 

In the 21st Century, Pure Moods made an enormous comeback for a spell as a cultural touchstone for an entire generation of ambient and experimental musicians. 

Although Fortino mentions Pure Moods and acknowledges that her parents were new age aficionados first, she also says was listening to a lot of Foreigner and “nice, easy listening rock music.” Tellingly, she admits, “I didn’t really like rock and roll, but I liked music that was very moody and emotional and kind of abstract.”

Which brings us to the point in Fortino’s life where she discovered a band that belonged to her in a sense, not one she heard through her parents or randomly on the radio. She says, “I remember I heard Skinny Puppy and it just blew my mind. And to this day, whenever I listen to them, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is such beautiful music.’ I can’t remember how I found them, but I just remember being mystified by them and their sound.” 

Fortino also raves about Skinny Puppy’s live show while lamenting she only got to see them on their final tour later in life. “They are very theatrical,” she says about their (notorious) concerts. “Blood’s spitting out and there are machines tearing them apart. And I was just like, ‘This is the wildest shit I’ve ever seen.’” Seeing videos of Skinny Puppy live introduced Fortino to her first favorite band and set the tone for the music that would become the proverbial soundtrack to her life.

As the title of the recent Tiny Vipers compilation, Illusionz Vol. 1 (1997-2004), suggests, Fortino began recording songs at the age of 14. She was already going to a ton of shows in Seattle while living in the Issaquah area. “I feel like Seattle was already my home base,” she says about her time before moving to Seattle proper. She went to lots of house shows, saw punk bands like Against Me! and Dystopia. She notes her love for crust punk and harder styles of music was informed by her admiration for Skinny Puppy.

When she was a child, Fortino and her family moved into a house that had a piano. She would plink around on its (out of tune) keys and write little songs; she notes that her process remained unchanged when she got her first guitar at age 12. She never formally took lessons; she just used the notes to create songs. “Actually,” she tells me about 30 years after picking up her first guitar, “the process I used then is still the process I use now, of just dinking through it and the way I remember [the notes].” 

Fortino was never the kind of guitarist who learned how to play “Free Bird” or “Stairway to Heaven” or said, “Anyway, here’s ‘Wonderwall’” with her acoustic in her lap at parties. She’s only ever used her guitar to write and perform her own material. She mentioned that over the years, she has been asked to contribute to studio recordings as a guest musician, to which she has had to tell the person inviting her that she doesn’t have a good enough handle on the technical aspects of being a musician.

“I was always envious of the person at the party that can pick up a guitar and play Sublime or something,” Fortino says. “But my brain just doesn’t work that way.”

Listening to Illusionz Vol. 1 is a revelation for longtime Tiny Vipers fans like yours truly, who found the project via MySpace in 2005. The idea that these early recordings are so singular and unusual belie the idea that the originality of Tiny Vipers took years of cultivation; Fortino’s signature style was there from the very start. 

Opener “Tired Horses” contains an eerie, looping guitar line and Fortino’s distinctive vocal timbre, belting out a poetic narrative. The collection’s final two songs clock in at a cumulative runtime of nearly 17 minutes. “Watch My Body Die” feels like a clear antecedent to Tiny Vipers’ stunning second album Life on Earth, with its patient, sparse fingerpicking and multiple song suites. The closing track, “Illusionz,” is emblematic of Fortino’s experimental nature; almost nine minutes worth of backward guitar and vocals, offering a chilling, surreal effect of being in the Washington forests not incredibly far from where Twin Peaks was filmed. It’s like if you found out the Log Lady had a room in her home full of guitars and looping pedals.

“I just wrote songs because I had these really big feelings inside that I didn’t know how to express,” says Fortino about her earliest recordings. “I would play them and my roommates and friends, they were just like, ‘You gotta record these songs.’ I don’t know, I always felt embarrassed that I wasn’t a real musician. But they were just really supportive, like, ‘Will you let me record it?’ You can even hear them talking on the recording, and they’re like, ‘Okay, keep going.’”

Those friends kept the recordings from when Fortino was a teenager, and that’s where the bedrock of Illusionz Vol. 1 comes from. 

This may be a matter of personal opinion, but I feel very strongly about the originality you can hear in the work of self-taught artists. They don’t learn the habits and preferences of whomever they’re taught by. They have no need to really learn how to put their personal touch on their work, because it’s already filtered into how they taught themselves to create. This art might look, sound, or read a little “off” to the trained eye or ear, but there’s something really special about that. 

“I’ve always thought about music as, ‘Do as much as you can get away with,’” Fortino says. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it wouldn’t matter what style or genre. Whatever I could get away with to make the song sound as cool as possible, in my eyes, I’d try to do it. Even if the guitar part’s really hard, or the vocal part—we’ll figure out a way to memorize it.” 

Fortino has amassed hundreds of reference tapes of her own recordings, much of the space on them containing explanations of how to play the songs. When we touched on the subject of Fortino being self-taught and Tiny Vipers sounding kind of unusual in the best way, she made it clear that she intended to sound at least fairly similar to her influences at the time, which include Skinny Puppy (of course), Sonic Youth, Radiohead, and Neutral Milk Hotel; the latter of which she cited as a big influence. 

“Really strong, melody-driven music” was Fortino’s directive for the essence of Tiny Vipers, which is certainly what she captured. Whether or not her influences translated directly is a far more subjective matter.

“To me, I was trying to make it sound like real music,” says Fortino. “And I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder when I would hear a group that sounded more like something defined. It was really weird because I wanted to sound like a proper musician.” She explained to me that when she was younger, she aspired to sound like one of her aforementioned influences because she felt famous musicians were famous because they were the cream of the crop.

Fortino reveals, “It took me a long time—maybe an embarrassingly long time—to realize you don’t actually have to be like them. You can just do your own thing.”

While Fortino was gigging around Seattle, making a name for Tiny Vipers locally, someone began coming to her shows. He asked her to record some of her current material at his house. And, according to Fortino, he turned out to be an A&R representative for Sub Pop and these recordings ended up being demos he presented to the label. He came back to Fortino and invited her to sign with the Northwest’s most notable record label. 

“I was really just shocked,” she says. “I went from freshly playing—playing my very first shows—in people’s living rooms to being signed to the same label as Nirvana.” 

The period surrounding the Sub Pop signing was an emotional whirlwind. Fortino describes herself as being nervous, confused, and dumbfounded. She was excited, but never too excited. She was worried somebody in the Sub Pop office made a mistake, worried the offer was going to be rescinded for some reason. 

When she was moving to Tacoma recently, she found an old Sudoku book she bought around the time she signed her contract. She had just started working at the Cha Cha Lounge and Bimbos Cantina and needed something to pass the time. “On the edge of one of the puzzles, it just says Sub Pop Sub Pop Sub Pop Sub Pop. I’d written Sub Pop over and over again.” 

Ultimately, Sub Pop did not make a mistake when they signed Tiny Vipers. Fortino’s debut album, Hands Across the Void, was released on July 24, 2007. I know not because I looked it up on Wikipedia—though I checked because human memory is an extremely unreliable mechanism—but because I bought a CD copy from the long-gone Queen Anne location of Easy Street Records minutes before its release date, back when the shop stayed open until midnight on Mondays for anyone who wanted to buy freshly released new albums. Pour one out for New Release Tuesdays, the Queen Anne Easy Street, and record stores having enough customers to justify staying open until midnight once a week.

Hands Across the Void came at a unique time for artists operating under the “indie folk” umbrella. 2007 was just a year or two removed from the “freak folk” genre being a perfectly acceptable and not at all mortifying genre term, a year before Sub Pop signed a fellow Seattle-area band putting a modern spin on folk rock (Fleet Foxes), and just over two years prior to neo-classical folk experimentalists Grizzly Bear going baroque pop on “Two Weeks”—and Solange Knowles dragging her sister and brother-in-law to one of their shows.

Neither as geared for mass appeal as their successors (which includes possibly the most tangibly successful of them all, Bon Iver) nor as willfully cloying as their predecessors, acoustic guitar-toting indie musicians of the time were recording sort of weird, very personal, incredibly distinct songs. (See also: the debut full-length from Brooklyn collective Woods, At Rear House, released about six months prior to Hands Across the Void). 

“Sparse” was a frequent descriptor of the first set of Tiny Vipers songs, to the point where you can argue (like I did at the time) that silence was deployed as a musical instrument. Opener “Campfire Resemblance” and closer “The Downward” contain flourishes that feel massive considering the few moving parts instrumentally—distant, sometimes foreboding whistling on the former and a low, droning bassline in the second movement of the latter—and the album is bisected by the distortion which engulfs “Forest on Fire” as extensively as its title suggests.

But there are long stretches of time where it’s just Fortino’s voice and acoustic guitar; parts of songs where notes trail off into the empty air. And although most of its songs contain soft, instrumental accompaniment—a barely-there electric guitar here, a glacial bit of mellotron there—the most striking parts of Hands Across the Void are on songs like the bleak “Swastika,” where the quiet takes over completely over the low-rumbling drones and acoustic guitar entrails. 

By virtue of Hands Across the Void, with its stark, twilit beauty, being released on Sub Pop—at this point, known best as both the doula of grunge and accidental benefactor of indie music’s highest-charting sellers—mainstream media most certainly took note of Tiny Vipers. For Pitchfork, the great Eric Harvey called the album “as sobering as folk music gets.” Listening to the combined 19 minutes of the record’s final two tracks is indeed much like the daily morning ritual of Mark Ruffalo’s character on the HBO federal agent miniseries Task: dunking one’s head in a sink filled with ice water.

As if a favorable review on Pitchfork wasn’t enough, Hands Across the Void was also spotlighted in a short blurb for the New York Times. Fortino considers the reaction to the album good, though she admits being preoccupied by not really knowing if she was doing a good job. She mentioned being confused about the process of being a first-time artist on a big label. She feels like her first few tours didn’t work because she was essentially opening for rock bands in clubs and theaters. The release of Hands Across the Void and subsequent promotion of the album was a trial by fire for its creator.

“I kinda missed out on the excitement because it was mostly just me,” Fortino says about not having a band alongside her to navigate the music business as a more-or-less brand new artist. “I wanted to do a good job, but I wasn’t sure how. I wanted to show good faith to Sub Pop because they invested in me.” Fortino recalls being apprehensive and nervous because she didn’t want to get signed to her hometown’s biggest label and then flop. 

When it came time to record her second album, 2009’s Life on Earth, Fortino was confident enough to handle the album’s production duties herself. “I don’t really choose,” she says as a general statement about her work. “I don’t really sit down and think about what I’m gonna write a song about. It just comes out.”

Life on Earth is even more stripped down than Hands Across the Void; the former damn near makes the latter sound like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band. In her own way, Fortino is a little more ambitious and assured in every category. Her vocals and fingerpicking are a little more confident; a little more willing to bend, harmonize with themselves, show their individual emotion. The songs are mostly longer; the album itself has a runtime of nearly 20 minutes longer than Tiny Vipers’ debut.

And the instrumentation is as minimal as it gets: Fortino’s voice, her acoustic guitar, and some occasional flourishes. The songs on Life on Earth are even more patient than the ones on its predecessor. Its ten-minute title track is a masterclass in slowly unfolding a song. “Tiger Mountain” is the type of epic that artists sprung in her wake have been chasing for over a decade. I have personally cried to “Dreamer” many times in the past 16 years. 

“I recently learned it again to play it during shows,” Fortino says about “Dreamer,” maybe the closest thing Tiny Vipers has ever gotten to a “hit.” “I forgot how hard this song is. It’s a very simple guitar part, but vocally, it made me learn how to be a different kind of singer.” 

Fortino told herself that if she’s going to sing a song like “Dreamer,” she couldn’t hold back. She had to shore up every bit of confidence she had to belt out the unforgettable refrain toward the end of the song: “I’m dying for a way out.” Fortino pushed herself to the limits of her musicianship on “Dreamer,” but as the cliché goes, pressure makes diamonds.

The biggest difference between Life on Earth and Hands Across the Void, in Fortino’s mind, is the fact that she produced the former herself. Hands was co-produced by Fortino and Chris Common, so there are aspects of the sound she didn’t get precisely the way she wanted, though she is largely happy with the way it turned out. “You know, I was trying to make it sound like other bands on Sub Pop,” she says. “With Life on Earth, I just wanted it to be as simple as possible. I was okay if it didn’t do well because it was too plain; that’s what I wanted. I kind of wish I recorded Hands Across the Void like Life on Earth. I had to learn how to do that.” 

An enormous lesson Fortino had to learn in the recording process for Life on Earth was how to be steadfast in making artistic decisions. Or, in her words, “It’s okay to be the artist.” Previously, she was worried about the length of her songs not being right or her music being too quiet for radio. But at a certain point in the process, she realized it was more important to make a record that she liked and was proud of.

After touring for Life on Earth wrapped up, Fortino found herself at a crossroads. “I was in my late twenties,” she said, “and I just realized I really needed a career to fall back on. Because I was working at the bar and I was touring, but I really don’t see people in their fifties and sixties in any of these environments.” 

Not to get all “astrology girlie” on you, but there is this thing called a Saturn Return which happens to everyone every 27-28 years—it’s called that because it is when Saturn finds itself in the same planetary position as it was at the time of a person’s birth. This is the astrological reason why so many people in their late twenties ask themselves questions like, “What am I doing?” and “Where do I want to be in 10, 20, 30 years?” 

The concept of Saturn Return is a whole thing, but ultimately, I’m a music journalist and not an astrologer. Certainly not in this particular space. It just makes perfect sense to me that this was the point in Fortino’s life where she seriously considered her future.

Stressing the realities of depleting her savings account and taking time off work in order to tour, Fortino decided to pursue a degree in engineering. She describes it as the hardest thing she’s ever had to do, pointing out (more than once) that she’s not great at math—as well as the fact that her music career was going relatively well and, in a lot of ways, she felt like she was quitting while she was ahead.

Early on in her university education, Fortino began a collaboration with Liz Harris—who you might know as the creative mind behind Grouper. They knew each other from playing shows together, and Fortino noted their similarities as artists. So when the idea came about for her and Harris to record an album together and release it on the beloved Chicago label kranky, she jumped at the chance. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, this is a big opportunity. I wanna do it.’”

Harris and Fortino named their duo Mirroring, and the sole full-length to come out of that partnership was titled Foreign Body. Four of the album’s six songs exceed six minutes in length, and they all either split the difference between the atmospheric beauty of Grouper (opener “Fell Sound”) and the minimalist heartache of Tiny Vipers (“Silent from Above,” played on an amplified acoustic guitar)—or cleverly blend the two. It’s a very good album, if maybe a little titled toward Tiny Vipers and Grouper completists. Of which there are plenty of both, and I consider myself squarely in the center of that Venn diagram. 

Fortino opines that perhaps recording Foreign Body was bad timing on her part, because she was in engineering school and worked two jobs to subsidize her income. It was difficult for her to find the time to drive down to Harris’s home in Oregon on weekends, but she ultimately made time, because as she describes it, it was “a very important musical thing.” 

There was a point in her musical career when Fortino didn’t want to be distracted by music and tried to convince herself that being a musician was in her past. “That’s something you did in your twenties,” she told herself. She told me, “Nobody in school even knew I was a musician. I never talked about it or anything.” 

Of course, that period was brief, because she recorded the compositions that ended up on her 2017 album Laughter while still deep into her engineering studies. 

Released on Ba Da Bing! Records, Laughter is distinct from the preceding Tiny Vipers albums because there is not an acoustic guitar to be found in any of its 41 minutes. It also contains limited use of Fortino’s singing. Opener “Boarding Charon’s Boat” features manipulated, wordless, harmonized vocals from Fortino, but more as a compositional element in that track’s psychedelic stew. “K.I.S.S.” is the only song on the LP that features actual singing. The remainder of the album is built around instrumental pieces played on a keyboard into a four-track recorder. Just as I noted earlier that silence feels like a musical element on Hands Across the Void, tape hiss figures so heavily into Laughter that it’s hard to not consider it an instrument in and of itself.

The only reason Fortino doesn’t have a four-track set up and ready to record at a moment’s notice during our conversation is because she is still unpacking from her recent move to Tacoma. Otherwise, it’s an essential part of her process; it is how she’s written music for decades. When asked about the electronic setup on her third full-length, Fortino answers, “I think it was mostly because I couldn’t be loud. I would come home late and would still want to play music. So I had a keyboard, I’d put on headphones, and I’d just play some notes and record them.”

Ba Da Bing!—the label that was arguably put on the map by Beirut’s 2006 debut Gulag Orkestar (with all due respect to the six albums released by the Dead C)—contacted Fortino and asked her if she had any music they could release. “Actually, I have some weird keyboard music music I’ve been working on,” is what she told me she replied, and that’s how the recordings she made in a tiny studio apartment (which also housed a sleeping boyfriend during many of her preferred recording hours) turned into Tiny Vipers’ third and most experimental full-length. 

In 2018, Tiny Vipers played an excellent electronic set at the second (and sadly, final) Upstream Music Festival. As noted in my set review, none of the songs she played were actually from Laughter; it was an entirely new set of music. “I only played three sets ever with the electronic setup,” Fortino says. “It was definitely a different response from the singer/songwriter stuff. It’s not very intimate music.” 

Fortino speaks about how when she played intimate songs—let’s just use “Dreamer” as an example— people would come up to her after the show and talk to her about their lives, or a specific moment in their lives “Dreamer” reminds them of. She mentioned people were still sweet and grateful for her music after those few electronic sets, but the response wasn’t as intimate because the music wasn’t as intimate.

A woman singing while playing an acoustic guitar is probably as intimate as music can get, so that’s understandable.

“Somebody definitely smoked crack in here.”

Fortino is showing me around behind the main part of her house, in what is colloquially (and often) referred to as the “mother-in-law” unit. She’s telling me about her plans to turn it into a place where musicians can perform: a DIY venue, in other words. At the left of the room is a raised floor, perfect as a stage. Far to the right is a smaller room with an upper level built in. 

As soon as I stick my head into the ladder entry in the upper level’s floor, I see a lighter and a piece of burnt aluminum foil. Fortino says she was notified by her realtor that sometime between the sale on the house closing and her move-in date, someone had broken into the property and, apparently, got zooted in the mother-in-law unit. 

As gentrification continues to sweep through Tacoma—truly making it the Oakland to Seattle’s San Francisco—some things remain the same as they ever were.

Over the past number of years, Fortino has been working as a land surveyor—exploring the backwoods and unoccupied stretches of nature, just like when she was a little kid. She also secured the rights to all of Tiny Vipers’ music (she said Megan Jasper, CEO of Sub Pop, was a big help in her efforts to gain ownership). “I’m not gonna work with labels anymore, because it’s very distressing when something goes wrong,” she says, alluding to a long and protracted situation involving a German label she had signed the rights to Tiny Vipers’ catalog to in 2020. “To not know the fate of your own catalog is a feeling I don’t want to feel anymore.”

Fortino doesn’t need the money now that she has a career more lucrative than that of an esoteric musician, but she acknowledges that she needed it in the past, which led her to the decisions she made. The feeling of being a truly independent artist is a very clear source of relief for her, as she can make her own decisions, release her own music whenever she wants, and if she loses thousands of dollars on an album release, at least she won’t feel the guilt of letting down investors like Sub Pop.

“I’m super happy,” Fortino says. “I can let go of those metrics of success and just enjoy the process.”

After all these years, Fortino’s creative life continues to blossom. She will be playing the lead character in the film Crystal Ball, created by the same team as the Seattle cult classic Fantasy A Gets a Mattress. And on November 7, Tiny Vipers will drop its fourth album and first in eight years, Tormentor. 

Tormentor was recorded by Eric Paget at Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab in a series of live-to-tape recordings; just Fortino, her trusty acoustic guitar, and a bunch of mics. She talked about taking a long time to get the performances right, which included road-testing the songs at open mic nights all over the west side of the state. Places like West Seattle’s Skylark Cafe and The Black Dog in North Bend. She only played Conor Byrne’s famous open mic night in Ballard once because that one is always packed with musicians waiting to put their name on the list. 

“It’s a perfect way to prepare,” Fortino says. “Maybe even better than touring, because there’s no pressure. You don’t have to live up to anything. Most people at open mics are waiting to play and they’re nervous. They don’t know anything about you.” 

As Fortino prepares for the release of Tormentor and a slate of live shows (including this year’s Basilica Soundscape, happening next week on September 19th), she is intentional about doing what feels good to her as an artist. She admits to getting in her own way sometimes over the course of her career, and now she wants to let go of the pressure of being an artist and just have fun doing the work.

“That’s my plan,” she says. “To try to enjoy all the little steps.”

Fortino is now 20 years removed from her debut album and over three decades into her artistic life. The legacy of Tiny Vipers is clearly on her mind. “I just want it to be a body of work that doesn’t really get placed in time,” she says. “There are a lot of temptations to add some production that will make it sound more appealing in the present. But for me, the question I ask myself is, ‘Is it still gonna sound just as new when you hear it when you’re 60 or 70?’ When I think about Tiny Vipers as a whole, I would like it to just be a self-contained ecosystem of sounds and concepts. I hope to have this whole series of Illusionz that shows everything from every era. Hopefully when you hear it, it starts with me mimicking stuff and ends with, ‘What is this? What the heck am I listening to right now?’”

Throwaway Style’s Pacific Northwest Albums Roundup

AJ Suede - Grateful Dread

Like many deep cut music heads, I have a pretty significant number of friends who are Grateful Dead fans. I’ve never actually talked to AJ Suede—at the forefront of Seattle’s underground rap scene for the past number of years, just in case this is your first go-round with this column—personally about whether or not he’s a Deadhead. But the artwork for his third album of 2025 (following June’s Throne Away and January’s surefire Album of the Year contender, The Duke of Downtempo) certainly has the iconography down pat (courtesy of the artist Trippyvizion). 

Musically, you’re not going to find extended jams on Grateful Dread; the songs are standard length for Suede (more or less bite-sized). What makes Grateful Dread worth listening to, even if you’re not a Suede completist like yours truly, is that after two self-produced albums this year, the bicoastal, self-proclaimed “young GOAT undiscovered” enlists a coterie of underground beatmakers to handle the musical end. 

He rekindles flames with past collaborators, like the great Small Professor (who produced the entirety of Hundred Year Darkness), Seattle’s Khrist Koopa (who has been working with Suede for the better part of a decade), and Fines Double (from the overlooked Suede remix album Re:Vada Kedavra). Every Suede album has at least a couple highlights to save for the Suede Master Playlist, and the one I keep coming back to is the Ybor Ripper-produced “Human Furniture” (which may or may not be a reference to the monumental HBO series Succession).

Lori Goldston - Open Space

Most of what we hear about Seattle music legend Lori Goldston is that she’s “your favorite rock band’s favorite cellist,” having most famously worked with Nirvana—but also an array of artists including David Byrne, Protomartyr, and Black Ends. But put some respect on her name before you start labeling her merely a session musician, because she has created a number of excellent solo albums, including 2022’s High and Low. Open Space was recorded in one continuous take with an amplified cello hooked to a distortion pedal. The result is a magnificent drone piece, rife with glacial beauty—and an edge that a weirdo punk rocker like me can appreciate. 

Fan Club - Stimulation

If you’ve been listening to Seattle garage punks Fan Club—in my opinion, the closest a young band has ever come to being the next Mudhoney—and occasionally pine for Lysol, the previous group of most of its members, I’ve got just the thing for you! Stimulation is a five-song EP much in the tradition of Fan Club’s cease-and-desist-courting past life: A five-minute runtime with two songs that don’t even last a minute, blaring guitars, and perfectly sneering hardcore vocals. Consider me stimulated!

Ok Bucko - Ok Bucko

When I first started working for KEXP a long time ago, singer/guitarist Miranda Hardy was in a great band called Hardly Boys. After all that time, she has reemerged with a new group, Ok Bucko, whose four song EP recalls the 2010s glory days of Seattle indie: full of charisma, humor and a sound that belies the snooze-inducing dream-pop of the day. This self-titled set contains a promising collection of songs, spotlighting a band you should definitely keep an eye out for. It’s also being released by the ever-reliable Youth Riot Records, a treasure trove of Washington State indie rock.