Alien Boy - You Wanna Fade? (2025)

Alien Boy’s 2021 album, Don’t Know What I Am, dealt in glimmering hooks and dialed-up distortion. The Portland alt-rock group’s next record, You Wanna Fade?, ups the stakes, turning their songs into towering anthems.

“I wanted to go as big as possible, and I really didn’t want to rush,” vocalist/guitarist Sonia Weber says. “When I first started the band, I was trying to keep the songs as short as possible, but I realized that’s not actually what I like. I was looking at the records that I turn to the most — Third Eye Blind’s self-titled and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream — and I really wanted to capture that kind of grandness, the kind of thing that has a lot of dimension and isn’t actually that concise.”

That vision comes alive in their latest song, “Changes,” which sounds as huge and unstoppable as its influences. The song includes an epic guitar solo from A.P. Fiedler and drum machine parts from Dazy while losing none of their anxiety. “Change is always hard for me, even when I know I need it,” Weber explains. “There’s more and more ghosts the older I get. This song’s for trying to acknowledge the ghosts and grieving an old life.”