It’s nautical night at WKDU: Fish Food and Makeout Reef, back to back, and I promise I didn’t plan it that way. The Los Angeles four-piece, who blend reverb-drenched shoegaze haze with catchy 2000s NYC indie rock, squeezed into the studio straight off a support slot at Ukie Club, Philly’s beloved, occasionally-Ukrainian-social-hall DIY venue. “We heard it’s a pretty legendary Philly spot,” bassist Kyle said. Drummer Liam went further, comparing it to the anything-goes, all-the-lights-on shows Title Fight used to throw in random rooms around here. In Philly terms, that’s some high praise.
Makeout Reef is Kyle on bass, Josh on guitar and vocals, Adrian on guitar, Liam on drums. Twelve shows into a 28-stop summer tour, the band squeezed in time for little old ‘KDU! It also happened to be their first time on the East Coast. New York was the highlight up to that point, unsurprisingly, since they’d never actually played the city despite visiting plenty. Friends and family flew out for it. “It’s a big, big event,” Josh said, with the kind of understatement you get from a band that continues to be delighted by all of this.
Ten years into the band’s existence, and while Makeout Reef started in high school, a new generation of teenagers keep finding the band through the newer records. “It’s kind of becoming generational,” Josh said. Adrian, who grew up going to shoegaze-adjacent shows in Southern California as a teenager himself, called it full circle. They’re seeing the exact same type of crowd show up, just a different set of faces.
Makeout Reef’s new single, “Poison Tree,” came together almost accidentally. Josh wrote the demo, sent a voice memo to the rest of the band, and Kyle jumped in on lyrics. The title itself started as a placeholder and stuck once everyone latched onto the phrase. Lyrically, it circles around withdrawing from the world while depressed, and the accompanying music video, shot DIY over two days with the band’s friend Marcus Felix (who also plays in Sketches, 60 Juno, and Wayward, aka the band that connected them with Adrian in the first place), leaned hard on visuals borrowed from the video game OMORI, which covers similar emotional ground. The video’s since been submitted to a handful of film festivals and picked up as an official selection for the Chicano Hollywood Film Festival! (Though the band suspected the tour schedule would keep them from actually attending. Best Actor snub of the year.)
As for what’s shaping the next batch of songs, it’s dark. Darker than anything they’ve done, by their own account, and largely a byproduct of just sitting still. Josh credited a piece of advice from his producer: when the well runs dry, stop reaching for the phone or the TV and just sit in a room being bored until something surfaces. “It’s been working,” he said. The rest of the band had read back through the new lyrics and landed on the same deeply, almost comically self-loathing verdict. It’s more of that Poison Tree thread pulling through, which, as Josh pointed out, was sort of the point. Sad music tends to double as comfort, a way of naming a shared feeling out loud.
It tracked with the band’s whole trajectory. Liam described their catalog as a moving target. Existential was mostly surf rock, made while they were still in high school. Star Power leaned poppier. The new material pulled from both while sounding like neither, filtered through four very different backgrounds, Liam’s own punk-and-jazz upbringing included. “It’s a combination of four little brains in one little thing,” he said. Four little, according to Kyle, being the operative word. The whole band agreed they were roughly the same, unremarkable height. And a short king band, they are.
The tour keeps rolling from here, supporting shows with Rehash out west starting in Nevada, hometown shows in LA, and a stop at Levitation in Austin that the band has been treating as a pilgrimage, driving straight down after a show in Oklahoma just to catch as much of the festival as possible. They were bummed they’d missed American Football, whose Philly show came through about a month before this one. There’s always next time.
One request before they left the studio: if anyone in Philadelphia has a hacky sack lying around, Makeout Reef would like it back. They’d been searching the entire tour and couldn’t find one anywhere. Not at a skate shop, not at a novelty store, nowhere. Bring back hacky sacking, 2026.
Catch Makeout Reef at makeoutreef.com and on all socials at @makeout.reef. Continue to cast your reel… listen to their in-studio session here. Keep listening to college radio, so you may commit its warfare.
DJ Gabby Mack hosts Fish Food on WKDU Philadelphia 91.7 FM.