chokecherry

Music has become a bittersweet pleasure for some. For those who feel deeply, and all the time, the world can feel inescapable, and it may feel selfish to allow themselves to escape through music. It did for chokecherry for a little while: “We went on tour right after the ICE raids really started ramping up in LA and everyone was out protesting and I just remember being like, ‘What am I doing playing music?’ It felt like it just felt so self-indulgent,” co-vocalist Izzie Clark explains, to which her counterpart, E. Scarlett Levinson agrees, “There’s an insurmountable amount of grief right now in the world and in everybody’s experiences. Like, ‘what are we doing? Like, we’re going to go play music in the middle of all of this – what the fuck are we doing?’”

“But you realise once they take away your joy, you have nothing left. So, we really need it now, and we need it more than ever. I think it’s a big reason why the capitalist machine and our government consistently defunds the arts programmes, because they know how powerful it is, and they know how much art connects people to each other, and the way that music connects people to each other. It’s such a universal language that it creates brotherhoods and sisterhoods and it helps us resist the tyranny of fascism, or oppressive governments, oppressive police regimes,” Izzie explains. Beyond escapism, music has always offered a way to communicate, a way to feel, a way to process a world that grows more and more hectic by the day. And while at first, chokecherry may have felt it was a luxury to be able to write, record, and release their debut record, the duo felt compelled to approach their mentality a little bit differently, Scarlett agrees, “Joy is essential. Once tyrannical regimes strip away our ability to have joy and experience joy, and remove your ability to congregate and find like-minded people – once you lose that community space, and once you lose that world, that’s when they win. That’s what they want. So joy is an act of resistance in the face of absolute horror.”

Conscientious of that very mentality, chokecherry details the degradation of civilisation while battling intimate conflicts of their own, crafting a record that straddles the line between interpersonal relationships and an empathetic processing of the tragedies occurring in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, and so many other places. Yet they do so alongside the frustration and acknowledgment of their home country, the United States, and the role it has to play in worldwide instability – its recent attacks on trans rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s rights, and xenophobic mentalities the rise of far-right extremism that has seen worldwide repercussions – Ripe Fruit Rots And Falls, chokecherry’s debut LP compacts such societal issues, world-wide issues, and internal battles, “I feel like the album is all about different kinds of grief from romantic grief to grieving our world and these imagined futures that we had and the pain of change,” Scarlett explains.

Because much has changed since the band’s origins in late 2022 – back when the world was just starting to shake off the grip that COVID-19 had on lives, trying to get a grasp on reality again. The chokecherry duo was in its infancy as Izzie Clark and Scarlett Levinson began jamming, demos and live shows coming in early 2023, before they released their debut single, “Glass Jaw.” Life should have carried on for a band in such early days, as Scarlett spent her time not only as being an elementary school writing consultant but also with a project still known as Fauxes, and Izzie spread her time between the most soul-sucking job of her life as the audio and video supervisor for the Marriott Marquee in San Francisco and with another project, Thank You Come Again.

Yet, as Scarlett woke up for school shortly after the release of their debut single, she discovered hundreds of new followers on Instagram, a phenomena spurred on by “Glass Jaw” being uploaded and used in a TikTok for the first time – that for lack of a better word – went viral. Originally thinking to herself, “Oh, wow. Well, we have no mutuals. They must be bots,” Scarlett began investigating the accounts, still convinced of their bot-status until seeing that the TikTok had been uploaded to Instagram and chokecherry had been tagged, when she then realised what was happening: “I was like, “Izzie, Izzie, pick the fuck up, Izzie, holy shit.””

After convincing themselves the hundreds of new people following chokecherry were indeed not bots, chokecherry made a TikTok account of their own thereafter, broadcasting themselves to an audience far beyond their local fanbase in San Francisco that attended shows, bought merch and spread the good word of chokecherry amongst friend groups. The word of a sound so easy to indulge in as chokecherry and their ethereal amalgamation of indie and punk-infused, shoegaze-tinged post-rock glowed with gentle delivery and backed by intense melodies, enveloping listeners in sounds of angelic multiple-part harmonies and sparkling guitars. chokecherry embodies the feeling of the in-between of heaven and earth – that feeling of humanity being at the tips of your fingers, but heaven’s light tickles at your nose.

Ripe Fruit Rots And Falls takes the coalescence of those sounds paired with Scarlett and Izzie’s question of, “What do we do as artists in the face of all of this immense grief?” especially artists that “feel a lot all the time” and “very deeply,” and creates what feels like an “alchemy” of experiences and perspectives soundtracked by an effervescent glow of instrumentals that tease the lines of genre but never fully commit.

Pulling from essences of their childhoods exposed to rock’n’roll, adolescent years spent exploring 90s post-rock, pop, indie, alt-rock, hardcore, queer musicians, even metal, and their own young adulthood filled with small shows in the Bay Area from a plethora of artists and genres, chokecherry’s debut LP, produced by Chris Coady, Christopher Grant, and Zach Tuch, fearlessly pursues creating a snapshot in time, capturing the sonic culture of San Francisco, the political movements overflowing our senses in 2025, the social deterioration of empathy and humanity in the 21st century, and what it means to be human in a time where it feels like there are so few left; “The album isn’t about heartbreak over an individual – some of it is – but it’s from the state of the world. That’s what it is. It’s about heartbreak over the loss of childhood and the imagined future that you might have had when you were young, because that doesn’t exist. It’s actively been taken away from all of us and everything is being stripped before our very eyes, constantly, every single day,” Scarlett explains.

Within ten tracks, chokecherry pieces together the very essence of what it means to be a sentient being in this cruel world, with tracks like “Porcelain Warrior” that may be soft in appearance but rough at their core, a reflection of despite things being far from what they imagined as young kids, finding joy is essential, even if it’s found dancing amongst the flames humanity has so eagerly created in the race to develop AI, a replacement for the human mind. “February” is about “sticking it to the man,” Izzie states bluntly, with Scarlett adding, “a lot of the energies and themes of the song” about not being ‘too emotional’ and wishing it was possible to start it all over. “Secrets” offers more duality of the inside and outside when dissecting the reality of change, and the pain that comes with it, both interpersonally and externally, “I think getting older, we’re put through these trials and they ask so much of us and we really have to choose what to let go or who to let go and what places to let go,” Izzie explains, “On a grander scale, what’s happening with our world and our country, we’re being asked what parts of our comforts should we be sacrificing for the greater good of our community.” “Major Threat,” “Goldmine,” and “You Love It When” balance part of the record’s theme of looking outwards and Scarlett and Izzie’s reactions to the world happening around them as the three songs submerge themselves into the duo’s personal worlds, as they faced instability in both personal and romantic relationships that leads to a feeling of unease, unrest, scorn, even heartbreak. “Pretty Things” battles a different kind of heartache however, as the two write about the nostalgia of childhood, wondering why we no longer feel the way we did as kids. “Ripe Fruit Rots And Falls” follows a similar tone, featuring the powers of Ben Newman from DIIV on drums, and his bandmate Zachary Cole Smith on guitar, Scarlett highlighting the song as one that is “very emblematic of a lot of what this band is,” focusing on the processing of grief in all of its forms.

Ripe Fruit Rots And Falls is a dichotomy in its entirety; introspective and panoramic, tender and intense, personal and social, post-rock and shoegaze, but so is the duality of man. The duo’s debut, chokecherry encompasses all that is severely lacking – empathetic humanity.