E
arly on in her touring career, people kept telling Annie DiRusso how much fun they were having at her live shows. It really pissed her off.
“I was like, ‘Oh great, thanks,’” she says sarcastically, calling on Zoom from her new apartment in Queens in a pink cardigan and freshly bleached eyebrows while simultaneously managing the arrival of a Verizon internet guy. Most of her furniture hasn’t been delivered yet, so she’s sitting on a mattress on the floor, trying to keep decent cellular reception. “I was so offended by that, because I really love a show that punches you in the gut, and makes you cry, and I wanted that to be the experience at mine.”
It didn’t help that DiRusso, a New York native, was living in Nashville, where women who don’t make country music are often siloed into one neat lane: plaintive singer-songwriter. DiRusso plays her electric guitar loud, sometimes brings a trampoline or walking pad on stage, sings about sex, and went viral on TikTok in 2021 for her song “Nine Months” that contains the lyric “you ruined my life for nine fucking months.” She was not exactly fitting into whatever mold was expected of her. “I guess that’s just not something the boys of East Nashville were ready to get behind,” she says.
She tried to be serious here and there. Or, rather, she did what she thought she had to do to be taken seriously, until she had an epiphany on tour with her friend, the comedian Caleb Heron. They’d have a dance party at the end of the night, bring on drag queens and make the whole thing into her own breed of rock & roll bacchanal. “It was just full of bits, and I thought, wait, it’s such a gift to be able to create an evening of joy and fun for people,” DiRusso says. “And I don’t even want those East Nashville boys at my shows. They just stand there.”
Listening to DiRusso’s debut album, Super Pedestrian, which was released this past March, it’s hard to imagine an artist that ever felt encumbered by expectations or resisted enjoying herself. Super Pedestrian is loose and fun in an untight world — pop-rock banger after banger about the messiness of life in your early twenties, navigating situationships, and combatting post-pandemic ennui. With a deluxe edition out earlier this month, including an appearance from Samia on “Back in Town,” Super Pedestrian does what DiRusso always wanted — punch you in the gut — but with a refreshing dose of self-awareness and humor while favoring scuzzy riffs over weepy acoustic strummers.
“I wanted every word to be a word I stand by for a long time,” DiRusso says. “I didn’t want to worry about the album being cool to anyone in East Nashville or Brooklyn or Silver Lake. I just wanted to make something I like.”
DiRusso grew up in New York, writing songs in her childhood bedroom, listening to Taylor Swift and convincing her parents to take her to local folk competitions upstate. At 13, she was cold-emailing venues and publicists to try and get gigs (it didn’t work, but A for effort). “All I wanted to do my entire life was tour,” she says. She moved to Nashville for college at Belmont University, and never got her driver’s license: Hence the title Super Pedestrian, as in someone who is really, really good at walking around, all while making a double entendre that hints on the banality of youthful existence.
Bored and antsy during Covid lockdown, DiRusso’s bandmate urged her to join TikTok. DiRusso was on the fence (“I was like, ‘That’s for children or something’”), but she posted anyway. Several clips went viral, including one that clipped her song “Coming Soon,” which perfectly articulates that sort of early adulthood, post-college identity crisis when you’re a little fish in a very big, very sleazy pond. “I used to be smart and I used to be nice/now I’m neither of those but I’m feeling alright,” DiRusso sang straight to camera, shaking her head to swirl her bleached-blonde bangs.
Another viral hit, “Nine Months Later,” tackled staying way too long in a relationship with a manipulative, abusive partner. DiRusso’s writing toys heavily with convention, often repeating the same words multiple times in a song but using tone and intention to change the meaning (here, “beautiful” manages to mean both “pretty,” and, somehow, “fuck you”), and always gives a hearty catharsis. Her mother was a domestic violence prosecutor, and she wanted to make sure that other victims knew that if it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. And not one bit of it is their fault.
“I felt really ashamed and ignorant that this could happen to me, especially since I was educated on it from a really young age,” she says. “That’s literally what my mom did for a profession. And the thing I learned, and why I wrote ‘Nine Months,’ is that you never think it’s going to be you. But my mom said something to me that I will always remember, which is that if you’re in a cave with a hungry bear, you are going to get eaten.” Soon, DiRusso had a devoted, captivated audience built almost entirely online who saw her music as a joyous and off-kilter mirror to their own lives.
When concerts resumed after lockdown, demand for DiRusso to hit the road was high. She toured incessantly for the next few years behind Samia, Haim, Peach Pitt, Ruston Kelly, and more, without a full-length album to her name. So, in July 2023, faced with the daunting proposition of actually having to write one, she gave herself a mandate to have a “Party July,” where the goal was less about songwriting and more about connecting with exactly who she was when not fronting a band (and having a lot of good, rebellious fun).
“I got pretty depressed after being on the road for so long,” DiRusso says. “You kind of lose everyday relationships, and a lot of stuff is out of whack. I realized, ‘I’m 23, and I have to just start living my life.’”
Super Pedestrian feels gloriously lived in. It’s a record that delivers the urgency and intimacy of a TikTok confession through tight, detailed songwriting that plunges you straight into the iffy decisions, iffier partners and even iffier sex lives of Gen Z with references (like Liz Phair) straight from their parents. DiRusso’s currency is being willing to admit to the sometimes embarrassing things she’s done for love or lust (“swore I would take to my grave that fact that I changed my flight out of Chicago/just so I could see you one more time,” she sings on “Back in Town”), and turn it all in to both a party and a survival mechanism for a tumultuous present and a rockier future. Which, for touring indie artists like DiRusso, is growing more and more unpredictable by the day.
“Even from when I started touring, everything is so much more expensive,” she says. “From the cost of renting a van, to paying for hotel rooms, to paying everyone a fair amount. Then there are merch cuts at venues, and fees that make tickets twice as expensive, but the artists don’t see any of it.” She’s still waiting for the day when she can tour and do better than just breaking even.
Still, 2025 feels like a success. She played NPR’s Tiny Desk series, made a surprise appearance at Jack Antonoff’s Ally Coalition Talent Show, alongside Hayley Williams, Florence Welch, Trey Anastasio and more, and opened for MJ Lenderman as part of Rolling Stone’s Gather No Moss concert tour. “It was so sick, and I love MJ,” DiRusso says, who finds some kinship with Lenderman in their conversational songwriting approaches. “But I was looking around being like, ‘Wow, I’ve never even been in a room with this many men before.’”
DiRusso sees the songs of the deluxe Super Pedestrian as a bridge to the next record, whatever that will be. She knows it’ll be a good time. “I just want to make stuff and play shows,” she says. “Sometimes people act like we’re doing something insane like brain surgery, but we’re really not. Like, I can’t believe I’m on a Zoom call talking about making a TikTok trend about situationships. That’s just so unserious.”
