Peter Negroponte knew things were getting real when the “big three” happened. “The NBA and SXSW got canceled and then they announced that Tom Hanks had COVID,” the Guerilla Toss drummer says as he thinks back on the moment when the global pandemic put the brakes on his band’s never-ending tour in March of 2020. “That night everyone started lining up at the grocery store. And then, the next day, Sub Pop signed us.”

As Negroponte reflects on those fateful few days, he’s sitting on a sofa at Relix’s New York studio with the rest of Guerilla Toss’ current lineup: singer Kassie Carlson, guitarist Arian Shafiee, keyboardist Sam Lisabeth and new bassist Zach Lewellyn. The group has just taped a session to promote their Sub Pop debut, this year’s Famously Alive–a record whose creation spanned the COVID era. 

“Before the pandemic, some people from Sub Pop came to our show when we played in Seattle,” Carlson says. “We went to their office. I was nervous and super awkward; my dog came and was making a scene.”

Newly signed to a dream label, Carlson and Negroponte hunkered down in their hometown of Livingston Manor, N.Y. to contemplate their next steps when the concert industry temporarily shuttered. Soon after, the New York-based Shafiee traveled upstate and the three musicians began crafting Famously Alive, in Carlson’s words, “funded by unemployment.” 

“We started from scratch,” Negroponte says. “We had some stuff we had been working on that we hadn’t played live, but then we threw it all out and made a record pandemic style–we demoed some ideas live, but we made it around a computer.”

The resulting synthetic set documents the ever-morphing art-pop act’s latest sonic shift. Guerilla Toss’ members first came together just over a decade ago, thanks to Boston’s DIY scene. Negroponte, who has long acted as their in-house producer, originally formed the project as an instrumental combo, but things really kicked into gear when they recruited Carlson after her hardcore band shared a bill with them at an Allston, Mass. basement venue. During the past 10 years, the group has grown to embrace elements of funk, dance-pop and psychedelic rock without shedding their hard-edged, No Wave roots. 

True products of the modern, genre-less world, the ensemble has also already trafficked in a number of scenes–in addition to their Sub Pop association, they have released music on both John Zorn’s Tzadik Records and James Murphy’s DFA label, opened for Pavement at the request of the band members themselves and played an official side-stage during Dead & Company and Phish’s shows in Bethel, N.Y. this past summer.

“Some of us are hardcore, some of us not so much,” Negroponte says of the group’s jamband influence. “I started taking Kassie to Phish shows.” 

“I didn’t like it at first—I was like, ‘This is weird,’” she says, noting that she came of age in the punk community but has always had a flair for performance art. “I liked the theatrical element of things. And then it grew on me, and now I have really nice memories of going to Phish shows in Vegas and at MSG. And we saw Dead 50. We got down to the front, somehow.”

However, the group has also weathered some dark times in recent years. In 2017, Carlson was forced to undergo open heart surgery to remove a blood clot caused by a severe opiate addiction. The experience and Carlson’s resulting anxiety have shaped her lyrical content and amplified her outfit’s already unbridled live energy.

“It’s fun to mix up the set and just to challenge ourselves,” Negroponte says when asked about Guerilla Toss’ jam-adjacent approach to touring. “Every show and city has a different energy.”