When Izzie Clark and E. Scarlett Levinson met at The Knockout in San Francisco, the two musicians immediately felt a creative synergy.
“We were hanging out in the photo booth, and we were just like, ‘We should start a band. I feel this vibe,” Clark, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said.
“I still have the photos from the photo booth,” bassist and vocalist Levinson adds.
Together as chokecherry, Clark and Levinson make soaring alternative rock that draws from grunge, surf punk and dream pop.
Case in point: “Goldmine” — the first single from chokecherry’s debut album Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls — begins with an entrancing Cocteau Twins-like riff from Clark.
That guitar lead, along with Levinson’s bassline, initially sprung from recording sessions for the band’s 2024 EP Messy Star.
“It ended up being this short little thing that we never really finished until January of this year,” Clark said, “So it became the first real track of the album.”
Inspired by King Krule, Frou Frou and Beach House (the song itself is mixed by Chris Coady, who worked on some of Beach House’s most beloved albums), “Goldmine” is a lush, moody exploration into a breakup with pop hooks that deliver wistfulness in all of its agonizing beauty.
A failed relationship isn’t the only form of loss chokecherry examines on Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls.
“We have a lot of songs about heartbreak that are interpersonal,” Levinson said. “Now, this album really expands on that. It is not just about interpersonal heartbreak, but heartbreak over the state of the world, over the loss of childhood, all sorts of different forms of time passing and grief.
“It is an album that helped us both process a lot of things in our lives that we were struggling with so much at the time that we were making it,” Levinson said.
chokecherry’s debut album Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls is out Nov. 14. The band is performing their record release show at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on Nov. 14.
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