San Jose, CA · alternative

Star 99

1 upcoming festival

Bay Area duo threading giddy, lopsided indie rock through fuzz and abrupt tempo turns — short songs that end before they outstay the hook.

Star 99 is a Bay Area band whose songs run on fuzzed-out guitars, two voices trading and overlapping lines, and structures that switch tempo or drop out entirely rather than settling into a groove. Most tracks are brief, closer to the sub-two-minute mark than to conventional verse-chorus lengths.

The group's reference points sit in 1990s indie rock and pop-punk, but the writing is looser and more abrupt than either, with sudden stops, off-kilter harmonies and lyrics that veer between the deadpan and the anxious. Star 99 emerged from the Bay Area DIY circuit and has kept to that scale of room and audience.

alternative