In one of those Wolf of Wall Street “something just came across my desk, John”-style discoveries, My Wonderful Boyfriend first arrived in my inbox in late 2024 via “My New Shirt,” a part-Big Star, part-Pavement stroke of pop joy colored by scrappy, slacker hues. It’s got some emo in there too, but altogether it’s a fussy song detailing the brink of collapse, with riffs and keys tangling up into each other. You can’t look away, because “My New Shirt” is like a car crash with this old-school, top-40 alternative chart potential.
But good luck Googling the band. There’s not much to know about them online, save for a Bandcamp page with an EP of white-hot rippers and the “I’m Your Man” loosie available for purchase. A year ago I used phrases like “sun-dappled Jazzmasters, “chugging, choogling drum beat,” and “garage yawp” to describe “I’m Your Man,” for whatever reason, but I guess those adjectives left a big enough impression on guitarists P.J. McCormick, Griffin Jennings, and bassist Cena Loffredo. When their publicist hit me up about doing a piece on them, I said OK and then immediately thought, “What the fuck am I doing?” Because, like I said, My Wonderful Boyfriend is a band with a very faint digital footprint.
Thankfully, though, a morsel of information was granted by McCormick’s phone number. It’s got a South Dakota area code, which is odd, considering that he and his band are based in Brooklyn. So, in my most esteemed-journalist voice, I questioned McCormick on his supposed landlocked roots. “That was a mistake,” he says, frankly, via our ramshackle Zoom meeting. “I grew up in Minnesota and my family moved to New York when I was in 9th grade. When I walked in the AT&T store, there was a deal on the South Dakota area code. I wish it was a New York number.” Well, shit.
McCormick, Jennings, and Loffredo go way back, having met at Oberlin College in the late 2010s. They’re just pals being dudes, getting silly with it. House shows were a mainstay on campus, mostly just people setting up and sounding bad in somebody else’s living room. (Oh, how that makes me miss Ohio’s DIY community: a trail of people who really gave a fuck spanning from Cleveland to Columbus.) McCormick and Loffredo lived together at Oberlin for a year and both played in different bands. “We went on tour that next summer, and we were like, ‘Damn, we should make music together,’” Loffredo remembers. “I also always liked Griffin’s music projects. When P.J. and I started thinking we should make music together, I was like, ‘Griffin would be a killer guitarist to have in the band.’” McCormick chimes in with a tincture of honesty: “I wanted to be in Cena’s band so bad. It was so good. And, yeah, all credit to Cena for being like, ‘We gotta get this virtuoso guitarist that I know in this project.’”
The “virtuoso” in question was Jennings, who does indeed shred like the bed is burning. At Oberlin, he took a detour from the indie-rock stuff he’d grown up on, pivoting his focus to experimental electronic music. “I can’t speak for Cena,” McCormick cuts in, “but I will never take a detour from indie rock. That’s what I did through and through, a few days in college and now… What’s the band do now? Normal.” “Normal-style,” Jennings affirms.
Loffredo worked at Oberlin’s radio station, WOBC, which I mention to them by name. “You know it?” McCormick asks. “Not well enough,” I say. But there was this odd, almost telepathic connection between Northeast Ohio liberal arts schools. I didn’t know much about Oberlin or the people there but I tapped into the radio station now and again from my Hiram College dorm room about 45 minutes southeast. Loffredo’s band Julia Julian was a “slightly mathy, pretty melodic, poppy indie-rock band” that he and his friends started during orientation week freshman year. “Julia Julian fucking rocked,” McCormick exclaims. “They sounded like XTC, man. That was up my alley.”
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My Wonderful Boyfriend, whose roots drape like a curtain across the Midwest and East Coast, spout musical anecdotes about themselves like human jukeboxes. Jennings remembers watching his 11-year-old friend Damon play in a School of Rock show at CBGB, back when CBGB was on the long walk toward the Grim Reaper. “He played the David Bowie, ‘Aladdin Sane’ keyboard solo with his feet, and I thought that was the coolest shit.” Loffredo, who grew up in the city, recounts the high-school-age band scene that developed around him. It was less prodigious than the magicians Jennings was apparently galavanting around with, but Loffredo and his friends made due through now-ancient access. “There were all-ages venues that I’m not even sure exist anymore, like 72,” he says. “I had a band and our first show was at Rockwood Music Hall. Seeing people my age in bands, making music, moshing, getting their 40s taken away at the door… it was like, ‘Oh, this is something that I can do with my friends. This feels like a real focal point of my social world.’ I was so impressed by all my friends all the time, because people that are young can do a really good job at this.”
I like My Wonderful Boyfriend, because three goofballs sojourning at alt-rock’s fringiest pageant of idiosyncrasy sounds like a good-enough party to stumble in on. Their tunes really are out of this world, and their name’s pretty neat, too. I tell the guys exactly that. “Thank you so much, Matt, that’s really a weight off my shoulders,” McCormick replies. “We’ve gotten reactions all across the board on the name.” In high school, he was in a group called Hollywood Royalty that “was fine, what are you gonna do?” At Oberlin, his band was called Blankat, “named after Michael Jackson’s daughter,” even though I don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s actually spelled Blanket Jackson and he’s Michael’s son. “It was fine,” McCormick says again, even less sure. “I hate to denigrate it. It’s shoegaze and, man, that’s just not super-duper my thing. Guitar tone… dialing that in is not where my talents lie.” Loffredo is quick to sing the praises of Blankat, because it was what introduced him to McCormick’s music almost a decade ago. “I was like, ‘Damn, this guy’s songs are crazy,’” he says. “I always was a fan.”
“P.J.,” I say, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but shoegaze is in now.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, slightly defeated but mostly okay with it. “This was seven years ago. That was before shoegaze was back. I gotta reiterate: I own two pedals.”
Last December, Paste named “I’m Your Man” one of the best songs of the year, on account of those dual, darting guitar riffs, McCormick’s sun-dappled rasp, and lyrics that came straight out of his throat. Honestly, I wish I could go back and give “It’s Like You Said” a bigger shout, because those streaks of country guitar melt my insides and that “everyone around me is a cop” line sounds like McCormick’s wearing Stephen Malkmus’ skin. It’s a Jeff Tweedy sort of lick, even though My Wonderful Boyfriend cites Uncle Tupelo’s “Drown” as the song’s main influence, which was actually a Son Volt effort. Jennings sent “Dawn” to McCormick and said, “We need more cowbell on this jawn.” Over a year later and he’s still doubling down on that, declaring My Wonderful Boyfriend to be a “pro-cowbell” band.
“Um, isn’t alt-country back as much, or more, than shoegaze?” McCormick asks the room.
“I’d argue that alt-country never leaves,” I say.
“Wowwww. Tell that to, like, 2005.”
My Wonderful Boyfriend’s get-up is more 2009 than 2005, to be fair. They cite Deerhunter as a big influence on their song structure, and their spacey, harmonic “40 Million Dollars” immediately springs to mind, despite that track’s melody having more of a punk snarl than a Bradford Cox je ne sais quoi, if you catch my drift. And, look, I don’t want to speak too out of turn here, but it seems like the time is coming for a big Deerhunter resurgence. The golden era of indie-rock is spinning back around. C’est la vie to those Strokes wannabes in Williamsburg; we’re blasting Monomania through the speakers. Maybe I’m just hoping Bradford gets the band back together soon, or maybe My Wonderful Boyfriend is just doing a nifty, albeit distant tribute to the best rock group of the last 25 years. I think the guitar-toting gospel of “Here Comes Your Man” (not a Pixies cover) would have slotted in alright on Microcastle.
But Jennings, tending to his Ohio roots, calls out his greatest hero: Oberlin native Jason Molina. “I’m always trying to rip him off.” McCormick agrees that “he’s really goated” and lists off some other twang tapes he and his boys dig on. “We all love Neil Young. I was a big fan of the Whiskeytown records, because that was what my dad had on in the car a lot.”
“That one’s a little less in vogue now, though.”
“Hey, I don’t vouch for the guy, but he had some bangers.”
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Right now, the guys are making a real go of it in New York City. And, hey, it’s awful out there, trying to start a band in this economy. McCormick says you need “a couple dollars on hand” just to get anywhere. And “lots of rehearsals and scheduling,” the usual inner-workings of bandom that Big Indie doesn’t want me to mention. But Jennings also has his own studio, which helps, because My Wonderful Boyfriend can practice and record there all the time. “That’s been absolutely crucial,” Loffredo says. “If we had to be paying for practice spaces every time we got together… I don’t even know.” McCormick sets the record straight: “We were doing that before Griffin was fully on board. I had to convince him.”
McCormick makes the band’s post-Oberlin adventure sound like a dramatic will they/won’t they on Zoom, but in the three-or-so years between leaving college and starting My Wonderful Boyfriend, the thought of the trio finally playing music together was really just that—a thought, one that lingered in group chats and little else—until they booked a real-deal show at Pianos on the Lower East Side in November 2023. By then, Jennings couldn’t ignore what was happening between the trio. “The day after that show, I get a text from him that’s like, ‘All right, when are we hanging out again?’” McCormick remembers, and Jennings immediately concurs: “God, that felt so good. I was sooo pumped.” These My Wonderful Boyfriend songs sound huge on stage. They’ve got hooks for days.
Jennings’ studio is where he and McCormick are currently, while Loffredo is reporting from behind a pitch-black screen. “We’re in the basement,” McCormick explains. “We’re doing basement tapes down here.” He’s borrowing the phrase from Jennings’ grandpa, who said exactly that: the band was “making basement tapes down there.” It sounds so right, in fact, that Jennings is considering changing the studio’s name from Heavy Meadow (because it used to be on Meadow Street) to Basement Tapes. “Maybe that’s better,” McCormick wonders, before shaping back up. “Me and the boy are painting our masterpiece down here.” He’s talking about LP1, My Wonderful Boyfriend’s long-awaited debut record.
The band’s taken three months to get eight, maybe nine songs done for it, and McCormick assures me that they’re “good songs,” headlined by “I’m Your Man,” a song they believe is so good they “wouldn’t want to put out the record without it.” McCormick went on a songwriting bender in late 2025 and, as Loffredo puts it, three new songs “just suddenly materialized.” But McCormick doesn’t play coy about why. “It helps, Matt, that I got fired in November and, boy, that gives you a lot of time to sit around and write songs. I’ve been productive as all get-out.” He chooses to not disclose his profession for this article, but let’s just say he got an English degree from Oberlin, so you do the math. That’s why he has a band, after all. But the last eight weeks have sent the My Wonderful Boyfriend stocks sky-high. “We’re all really rising to the occasion,” McCormick beams. “We’ve been hitting the bricks, recording-wise and writing-wise.”
I try playing inside baseball to get a preview of My Wonderful Boyfriend’s debut, and McCormick tells me that they’re “going freaky with it on occasion, and going normal with it on other occasions.” Loffredo metabolizes that into something more digestible. “What we make are songs that feel familiar, like they’re your favorite bands that made them, but they’re also something fresh,” he says. “We want it to feel classic in a way that you can really dig into, but also is something new and exciting.” Today’s new single “My Love, My Darling” might end up on the album, but nothing’s confirmed yet. No problem. I’m still expecting a big, sweeping soup of neurotic rock and roll that’ll really give us all a good kick in the pants. Have you listened to “Song for R. Carver” yet? Those guitar lines wiggle like cursive. Get these guys on a label already!
My Wonderful Boyfriend haven’t toured yet, but they have made a little fuss in the so-called “New York City bar-rock scene,” as was written in a one-sheet that McCormick cold-emailed to me a year ago. I bring it up and he busts up laughing. “Sometimes you write your own copy,” he reveals. The band plays one gig per month, give or take another here and there, at the city’s “finest venues,” like Elsewhere, Baby’s All Right, TV Eye, Union Pool, Mercury Lounge, and Cassette. “What’s really nice about playing regularly around New York is that we do a lot of shows with our buds,” McCormick says. “And when you do shows with your buds, you can drink beer with your buds at the show and after the show. This is h.u.g.e. That is a huge part of being in a normal-style indie-rock band: the beer you’re allowed to have during shows with your buds.” Loffredo reckons that a really good hang, both on-stage and off, is the true antidote to New York City’s live-show environment being a slog. “It’s a small scene where you get to know all the characters.” It pays to tear off a piece with your day-ones.
And My Wonderful Boyfriend are certainly surrounded by a litany of good bands, namely Ben Special, a Brooklyn-based crew that was once an Oberlin-based crew. If you haven’t listened to their record called BOOYA yet, you should stop reading this article and take care of that. Here, I’ll even link it for you. If you’ve gotten to this point and are still wondering when I was going to mention My Wonderful Boyfriend’s drummer, here’s the scoop: Ben Special producer/drummer Dan Howard will be pounding the kit on LP1’s “normal-style” blasts. “He’s what they’re calling a ‘double threat,’” McCormick boasts. In a rush of sincerity, he remembers a night during his sophomore year in college, when he was soused to the eyeballs, had a pretty girl by his side, and encountered Ben Special for the first time (a band that Loffredo happened to be playing in then). “I was standing in a drunken party haze thinking, like, ‘This is the best day of my life.’ I thought, ‘Man, I cannot wait to do this every weekend for all time.’” He and My Wonderful Boyfriend aren’t quite doing it on an every-weekend basis yet, but, hey, you wouldn’t want to spend those phenomenal melodies and great, sticky chords all at once, either.
My Wonderful Boyfriend has joined a fun little musical ecosystem with a lot of familiar faces, like Victoryland (come see them play our SXSW party next month), youbet (come back and read our Best of What’s Next feature on them in May), sister. (stream Two Birds), Katy Kirby (happy five-year anniversary to Cool Dry Place), and Allegra Krieger (obligatory feature plug here). “And then,” McCormick chimes in, “I’ve been listening to this guy named Cameron Winter. He’s up-and-coming in Brooklyn, [plays in] Geese.” This co-sign is going to blow that band up, I say back to him. “They could learn a thing or two from us,” Jennings quips.
There are moments when My Wonderful Boyfriend sounds like the Cars doing LCD Soundsystem, or maybe it’s the other way around, yet there are approximately zero moments where they sound like Playboi Carti. But the rapper was a primary inspiration for songs like “I’m Your Man” and “My New Shirt.” Well, sort of. McCormick seems to think so. “What do you say about Carti?” he asks his bandmates. “Carti makes me really excited to play and listen to music. They’re rad songs, they fucking rock.” Jennings chimes in to tell me that they’re all trying to do what Adrianne Lenker does on her song “Fool,” which is “little Playboi Carti-style ad-libs. The more of those we can have in our music, the better.”
“More bands need to take that initiative.”
“Adrianne’s leading the charge, as she is on many things. But we’ll take it from here.”
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Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
