Noise With a Heartbeat

Before there was a band, there was a bedroom.

A laptop screen. A half-busted mic. A teenager teaching herself how to make noise that meant something. Claire was 14 and swimming in trial and error, trying to figure out what it meant to have a voice when everything else felt uncertain.

Everything I did was super crude and super trial and error…but that never really stopped.

By the time COVID locked the world indoors, Claire was years deep into late-night experiments with Cakewalk and Logic. What started as messy demos became something more focused - songs that sat heavy in her chest until she let them out.

It wasn’t until COVID that I started to really make songs that (at the time) I felt were worth sharing…I still second-guess myself all the time, but that was the first time I had been sitting on some songs for a while and felt really confident about them.

And so, Pillowinde was born.

It didn’t come from a record label, a classroom, or some polished industry moment. It came from the moment where you decide, fuck it, I have something to say.

She released the first album herself. Fell into a niche Beach Boys fandom on Discord. Met musician David Ramos in a fan server and got pulled into the weird, wonderful orbit of New Jersey DIY. Ramos introduced her to basement shows, backyard jams, and the radical magic of building a band from scratch. Suddenly, Claire wasn’t just making songs alone, she was playing them in basements with the volume turned all the way up.

From there on out, being in the DIY scene kinda felt like being in a sort of sports league…your band is your team and coming into the scene as a new member, I got to really enjoy the community aspect of playing shows and meeting people with similar mindsets.

The scene gave her space to grow and people who believed in her voice before she always could. Then she just kept going.

It’s grown into something bigger than me because of my stupid persistence but also because others believe in me.

Now, Pillowinde is three albums deep, with a wild rotating cast of flutes, trumpets, field recordings, and feelings. It’s Claire’s “pride and life’s work.” Her way of saying: This is who I am. This is what I survived. And this is what it sounds like when I make it out the other side.

Flutes, Trumpets, and Frankenstein Joy: How Pillowinde Builds a Band and a Sound

Most bands start with guitar, drums, maybe a synth if someone’s got extra student loan money.

Pillowinde said: what if we added a flute? A trumpet? Some orchestral whimsy, cartoonish percussion, ad-libs, MIDI chaos and stitched it all together like sonic Frankenstein?

We love just adding more sounds and don’t think about the group as one genre…just making whatever music we feel like.

That ethos snapped into full color back in September 2023, when the band was prepping for an acoustic orchestral set at a recording studio called Big and Tall. Claire’s bandmate Chelsea (bassist, Rutgers student, chaos connector) roped in some friends from the music program. They showed up, played their guts out, and the band’s blueprint changed forever.

At that show we met the band Marty I’m Afraid...we became friends with them.

Two of those friends? They’re in Pillowinde now.

Julia brings flute, keys, vocals, and a touch of magic.

Harry brings trumpet, energy, and just enough brass to melt a shoegaze section into something operatic.

Julia joined in April of 2024…Harry joined in July. It’s been evolving ever since.

The band became bigger, weirder, louder. Not just in sound, but in soul. Behind it all is Claire, building songs like a mad scientist with Logic open and five browser tabs playing static in the background.

With the first three albums, I’d write and have a mostly completed song that people add to…music before lyrics. Sometimes even the melody is written in MIDI before I sing it.

These tracks aren’t written, they’re summoned.

A chorus gets stuck in her head for years? She lets it marinate.

A melody hits mid-cleaning? The Swiffer can wait.

Some songs are born fast. Others haunt the hard drive like little ghosts waiting for a body.

Songs can take a few hours or months. Enamored’s chorus was written in 2021, long before the plot of the song even happened.

There’s no fixed method. Just intuition, trial, error, and that lightning-bolt feeling when something clicks.

Honestly the one thing that always surprises me is how I keep getting that feeling. That zoomies joy when a song comes to life.

You can hear that electricity in the songs - glitched-out vocals, dreamy flute solos, shoegaze guitar, lo-fi trip-hop outros. These are experiments with heart. Built from scraps and sparkle and whatever made Claire feel something.

And a “monster” that’s very much alive.

pine!pine!pine!: Chaos, Yearning, and Laundry Detergent

Making an album like pine!pine!pine! wasn’t about playing it safe. It was about telling the truth loud and weird.

Pine is an album rooted in relationship issues, yearning, unreciprocated love, bad communication, bad timing…

This record sprints between genres. From surf rock to chiptune to mariachi, Pillowinde embraced what they call “post-genre.” Not as a gimmick, but as a commitment to making music that reflects everything they are: messy, brilliant, and beautifully undefinable.

With Pine, I felt a lot of freedom…my instinct was to veer back towards poppy, art-ier music I grew up listening to.

And underneath the chaos? Intimacy. The kind that hits in unexpected ways. Like the lyric that spills from the track Lustful:

I just snuck into the garage to smell the blanket that we slept in last night.

Claire doesn’t write lyrics to sound cool. She writes them because the memory won’t leave her bones. Because that detergent smell meant something. If music isn’t honest, what’s the point?

It may be a bit ‘cringey’ in a Weezer way, but to me it was a singular experience I felt strongly about.

It’s what makes pine!pine!pine! stick.

It’s vulnerable. Awkward. Tender. Loud. Entirely human.

Gender, Grief, and the Song That Knew First: “Courtney”

Some songs aren’t written for an audience. They’re written to survive and name a feeling you can’t quite say out loud.

That’s what “Courtney” was for Pillowinde.

I wrote ‘Courtney’ right around the time I was coming out as trans. The song is about Courtney Barnett. To me, she’s kind of iconic. She’s cool and laid back and a lesbian and a rocker… I love her look and her guitar and she’s just perfect.

The lyrics aren’t dressed up in metaphor. There’s no hiding behind clever wordplay or genre armor. “Courtney” doesn’t mask the longing, it leans into it, honest and bare and beautifully uncool.

A lot of trans girls will see women they aspire to be like and idolize, and she happened to be the one for me.

For Claire, the frontperson of Pillowinde, this wasn’t just admiration. It was recognition. The kind that hits before language, when you know what you are by the ache of wanting to be. Courtney Barnett was a mirror.

The song’s directness is part of its enduring memorability, I think. It’s an identity crisis anthem.

That’s the quiet power of gender euphoria, it doesn’t always arrive with a name. Sometimes, it comes in power chords. In seeing someone and thinking, If I could just look like that…move like that…maybe I’d feel like myself. Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is write that longing down before you even fully understand it.

“Courtney” is that bravery. A timestamp on the moment identity stopped being hypothetical and started to feel real.

In a discography full of noise and wild genre play, “Courtney” is Pillowinde at their most stripped-down and soul-bared. A reminder that sometimes, the song that says the quiet part out loud is the one that echoes longest.

Kitty Craft, Frog Explosions, and the Beautiful Whiplash of Feeling Too Much

Ask Claire about their influences and you’ll hear familiar names: Beck. of Montreal. Some shoegaze ghosts humming from an old playlist.

But the real ones?

They creep in through headphone static. Old MP3 folders. Childhood soundtracks and the albums they didn’t mean to study, but couldn’t stop playing.

A lot of times artists mention who they like, not who actually influences them. Influences seep in subconsciously.

Take Kitty Craft. Claire wasn’t trying to channel her, but her girlfriend heard a new track and said it straight: “This sounds just like Kitty Craft.”

I’d been listening to her a lot, but I wasn’t considering her for my palette.

That’s how it happens sometimes: influence by osmosis. Not from mimicry, but from instinct. From the urge to make something that sounds like joy, or grief, or a frog with a fate too bizarre for Disney.

I want to embrace all the sounds I enjoy in a way that's almost like an alien looking down at Earth who goes back to their planet and makes music.

Pillowinde’s music doesn’t settle into one vibe. It ricochets. Lofi glitch-pop meets mariachi horns meets shoegaze feedback meets…Shrek’s doomed frog.

Yes, really.

The next album includes a mini rock opera about the frog that gets blown up like a balloon in Shrek. No, it’s not a bit. Yes, it’s art.

It’s gonna be a real BIG THINGS COMING moment…

And that’s the point. Pillowinde isn’t asking what’s cool. They’re asking: What feels honest? What feels electric? What makes you laugh through your tears and sob through the bangers?

Under the weirdness, beneath the brass and MIDI and genre-mashing chaos, is a core of aching, earnest emotion.

Naive is a hopeful song. So is Stupid Baby. These feelings are sprinkled in an album full of frustration.

Joy and pain aren’t opposites here. They’re co-conspirators. Claire doesn’t separate them. They stack them like chords - major, minor, absurd.

The next album leans harder into it all.

Goofier. Weirder. Slacker vibes, synthy breakdowns, emotional whiplash baked into every track.

Welcome to Pillowinde.

Hold on to your frog.

What to Play First, If You’ve Never Heard Them

So you’re Pillowinde-curious. Welcome.

Here’s the cheat code: start with a song that gives you whiplash. The fun kind.

Claire’s pick?

I think it would be Stabber! or Intensity/Melodrama because of how those two are pretty diverse and forward-thinking in terms of where Pillowinde’s heading.

Let’s break it down:

→ “Stabber!”

A burst of chaos-pop precision. Spiky, catchy, fast as hell.

It punches you in the teeth, but politely. A perfect example of Pillowinde’s “sugar rush meets existential crisis” energy.

→ “Intensity/Melodrama”

This one’s a whole damn thesis.

Starts like you’re trapped in a Nintendo 64 fever dream, then swerves into surfy baroque pop, then drops into saw synths, chuggy guitars, pitched vocals, and finally lands in a lofi beat outro like nothing even happened.

It starts off with a Nintendo 64 type instrumental…then a surfy baroque pop song…heavy saw synths…trip hoppy outro. I think it works. And I’m proud of that.

You press play, and suddenly you’re on Pillowinde’s wavelength where genre’s a joke, sincerity isn’t shameful, and the only rule is “don’t be boring.”

The Future Is Weird (On Purpose)

Call it absurd. Call it genius. Just don’t call it boring.

Claire knows exactly what they’re doing.

They’re not here to fit a mold. Not interested in chasing the same playlists or recycling the same indie formulas. They’re here to burn the whole genre map and build a sound you’ve never heard before.

We don’t want to be another indie band playing the same chords. The point is to be memorable.

Whether they’re playing a weekender through Montclair, looping MIDI lines at 3am, or plotting frog-based anthems that’ll melt your brain and heal your inner weirdo, one thing’s certain: Pillowinde isn’t chasing trends. They’re chasing truth.

In all its chaotic, genre-bending, heart-stretching, frog-operatic glory.

So what’s next?

Whatever the hell they want.

And if you’re lucky? You get to come along for the ride.

📍 Where to Find Pillowinde

If you’ve made it this far, you’re not just curious, you’re one of us now.

Get in the loop, scream along, and witness the genre meltdown in real time.

🎧 Listen to Pillowinde:

Bandcamp

Spotify

📱 Follow for updates:

Instagram: @pillowinde_

Photo sources: @lainaapple, @pillowinde_