Originating in 2019 with founding members Truman Sinclair and Griffin Meehan, Frat Mouse is a Los Angeles-based band looking to combine emo and indie rock. After debut album Rat Pack won fans along the Pacific Coast and beyond, they welcomed drummer Ben Lopez and multi-instrumentalist/composer Chloe Elise Villamayor into the fold, allowing their sound to push in new directions and fuelling a prolific spell of releases that even COVID couldn’t halt.
Frat Mouse have now returned with flea house, a brand new full-length album which fully embraces the central tenets of the genre. Racing energy and impassioned vocals combine to offer soaring highs and melodramatic lows, forming both a picture of adolescent angst and the premature nostalgia for a time before it has even gone. We asked the band to walk us through the record track by track to get a better picture of what to expect.
In our fourth song named after our close friend Grant Wasserstein, (and the third time we spell his name right), we wanted to evoke the feelings people may have had when they listened to our first album all the way back in 2020. We’ve sung “I miss my friends, I miss my room” at least twice at every Frat Mouse show we’ve ever played, and we really just wanted to bring it all back in the context of our graduation from college, almost 5 years later. It’s really all just for the Day 1 frat rats out there, and for all the new listeners who can go back through the discography and see our progression over the past few years.
Frat Mouse is a band that relies heavily on its stage presence and live performance to sell. ‘Back 2’ (The Rhythm) is a perfect example of how we bring that energy to the forefront with every track we perform, live or studio recorded (There is no studio of course, every one of our albums and tracks were recorded within the walls of Truman’s bedroom within the titular Flea Home, which we feel brings a special energy to each of our songs that can’t be otherwise replicated.) The first time we played this song live at the DTLA underground punk haven, The Smell, we added a fake end onto it and we’ve kept it ever since, even for the recording, it wouldn’t be the same without it. Although, sometimes fake endings don’t have as much impact when everyone knows its coming and we do it every time.
‘Paint Pen’ was the first song we wrote for what would eventually become Flea House, and was probably written during the first true Flea sesh, tallboys and all. This is objectively the saddest song on the record, and the story is based on some real shit that happened while Truman and I were growing up in the San Fernando Valley. I guess this one is about our friends and our community and the ones who end up passing on, and remembering them even as we change. Definitely one of, if not my favorite song we’ve ever made.
‘Dirty Word’ was the emo banger necessary to rally our fans and supporters from our previous releases and to channel some of that unapologetic emo charm like that of some of our favorite bands in the scene. After Flea House came out, ‘Dirty Word’ quickly became a favorite track among some of our listeners who’ve been around since the very beginning, helping to drum up excitement for the new album among the True Frat Mouse OG’s (a very prestigious moniker of course).
‘Sharp As a Knife’ is one of our personal favorite tracks to play live, following the classic tried-and-tested Frat Mouse formula. I think our most memorable performance of this song came from our time spent at USC’s Welcome Back Festival as the student opening act for Spill Tab and Pi’erre Bourne. After the show, we got a ton of videos from the depths of the crowd; where waving lighters frame undoubtedly the largest crowd for a Frat Mouse show we’ve ever had. I went ahead and made that video our Spotify Canvas so that people can go back and relive that, me in particular.
‘Thank You’ hosts a feature from our close friend and prestigious emo-confidant, Liam Fagan. Truman and Liam were childhood best friends growing up in suburban Chicago, and his project Park National has blossomed in tandem with us into something we’ve grown to call our sister band. Liam’s influence on the song builds something different than we’ve ever really put into our music, and it represents a new era for us, moving beyond high-school emo or college garage rock into whatever the future might look like for FM’s identity. ‘Thank You’ is contemplative and emotional in a way that some of our other music sometimes treads around. Definitely a favorite for fans of Frat Mouse who’ve been around from the beginning, and a lovely tie-between of our creative vision with Liam’s incredible talent.
‘Closure’ is the second of the singles we dropped prior to Flea House’s complete release, and is far and away the most popular track we’ve written during this era of FM. Like most Frat Tracks, ‘Closure’ is about delinquency, recreational drugs and heartbreak. This is routinely our easiest way to start a mosh pit, especially for those who already love the song.
‘Burning’ is our climactic final track to bring Flea House to a succinct and respectable twenty-one minutes. I like to think that the best drives in LA are exactly around that time, and if I time it well when I go over the hill, I can have ‘Burning’ playing on my favorite strip of the 405 right before my house, perfect. This one’s about burning out and falling apart, and revelling a little in it. Of all our album closers its probably my favorite, though, ‘New Friends’ off our third album Plywood is also a favorite. Thank you so much for having us on Various Small Flames! So Cool! And thank you to everyone reading!
flea house is out now and available from the Frat Mouse Bandcamp page.
