Album Review
June 17, 2025
Petite League photographed by Cullen Blanchfield
All of our favorite things, curated throughout our lifetimes, come together to form the mosaics of our hearts, constellations strung together by the one common thread of being loved by us.
When I listen to Twenty One Pilots, I am transported back in time: I’m thirteen, sitting in a pink hammock chair in a bedroom my mother helped me paint. Watching Little Women, I’m seventeen, in a movie theater in Phoenix, Arizona with friends I will always hold dear but don’t speak to anymore. Seeing a George Harrison vinyl in a record shop, I’m twenty and weeping in a lonely apartment.
Every item is a snapshot in time, and every mention or acknowledgement of them puts me right back in the moment when I loved them the most: how old I was, where I lived, how I felt about myself and the world. These are all puzzle pieces, all stars in the crafted constellation that make up my heart and soul. Even the things that bring me pain, that I don’t care for anymore, are crucial to this constellation. I would not be complete without every piece.
After spending over a decade in New York, four-piece indie rock band Petite League know better than anyone that while nothing can last forever, everything leaves its mark. Every experience, person you meet and city block explored is another “pin in the map” of one’s life.
This is the idea that inspired Petite League’s seventh and latest album, Dead Star City Tours, released May 30th. The band announced the album alongside its first single, “Paradise Park” on February 7th this year.
Choosing “Paradise Park” as the lead single for this album was an excellent choice, introducing a new era with the lyrics, “Like fire breathing, restless legs / Let me on the dance floor, show you what I’ve been learning.”
These opening lines are nothing short of a direct invitation into a whole new world. As if predicting the album’s future success, “Paradise Park” had the best first week of any Petite League release, an overdue and well-deserved achievement after being in the game for so long.
Petite League frontman, Lorenzo Gillis-Cook, has been in the city for nine years. With the help of his friend Henry Schoonmaker, Petite League was born in 2015. It started as a bedroom project – two boys, freshly turned men, making music in their free time and performing in the living room of their Syracuse home, lovingly named the Scarier Dome (depicted on the cover art for their 2018 single “Raspberry Vines”).
Petite League has been consistently growing since the Scarier Dome days, but this latest album cycle indicates the biggest evolution of them all. Since my initial discovery of the group in 2017, their sound has shifted from an exploratory project to something more ambitious, honed in and bolder.
The day Dead Star City Tours was released, Petite League made a post about the creation of the album. Lorenzo wrote: “This band has been my life for over a decade but it was time to actually share with my friends who have dedicated so much energy into making this an actual band and not some bedroom project that lived on the internet.”
Petite League’s time in New York City – with friends and relationships that have come and gone, bars and restaurants that used to be a regular meeting spot turned to an empty lot – molded the band and its art into what it is today, “moving upwards from the DIY grounds” they resided in previously.
The album Dead Star City Tours is meant to represent the life of Petite League and all the things that allowed it to become what it is now. On March 21, with the release of the second single, “Ghosts”, I realized that this album would be different from anything they had ever done before.
“Ghosts” is arguably the most critical track on the record, the song that decided the soul and direction for Dead Star City Tours. Lorenzo wrote in a post for the single: “Each song on the record represents a hyper-specific place, time, moment in our personal and collective experience here. Each of these, like dying stars, is part of the city you build for yourself within New York.”
Lorenzo’s ghosts are places like the Linden Hill Cemetery in Ridgewood, a place he could escape to during the early COVID-19 months. It was a place of refuge, and though that time has long since passed, he still stops in every time he passes by, each visit putting him right back in time. The association between that place and the time period is the ghost, and he knows he’ll “always be living with ghosts of the heart.” It’s a dead star, but it used to burn brighter than anything else.
A few weeks ahead of the album, Petite League dropped the final single, “Heavy Weights” on May 2nd. I’ve experienced five Petite League album release days, but never have the group done so much promotional work beforehand. This is the first album cycle in which every single has an accompanying music video, the quality of their content improving alongside the music itself.
On May 30th at 11 p.m., I sat on my back porch and listened all the way through without pause.
The album opens with a song called “Rapture” and a radio clip saying “it’s that magical time of summer again,” providing the perfect opening to the soundtrack of my life for the next few months. In ten years, I will revisit this song and remember exactly what I was feeling as I sat on my mother’s back porch.
The tenth track is titled “Rain Dogs,” a call back to old songs like “Moon Dogs” (2020) and “Sun Dogs” (2017). “Sun Dogs” was the first Petite League song I ever encountered, on a personalized Spotify radio station. Listening to their new song, “Rain Dogs,” forced me to recall being fourteen, navigating my first year of high school, and eighteen trying to make it through my final semester. At the same time, I was developing new memories and associations with “Rain Dogs,” a song of dedication and loyalty.
Near the end of Dead Star City Tours, around midnight, I was still on my back porch, now accompanied by my ten-year-old great dane, Dottie. “Junkyard of Dreams” began to play, and I began to weep.
The introduction is gentle and melancholy, accompanied by the twang of a steel guitar reminiscent of their older, western-themed album Rattler. Beneath the twang is a dreamy piano that reminded me instantly of the song “Beverly” from the It: Chapter One soundtrack.
“Beverly” meant more than life to me at one point, drawing out an emotion in me I hadn’t previously been able to put a name to. “Junkyard of Dreams” gives me the same feeling, a feeling of anticipatory nostalgia. I realized, by the end of my first Dead Star City Tours listen, that I was entering a new stage of life, and that the back porch I sat on that evening wouldn’t be mine in just a few months' time.
Lawton, Oklahoma is on its way to becoming one of the dead stars in my city tour. Recognizing that has filled me with both grief and relief, something I didn’t think possible. Thanks to my dear friends in Petite League that have soundtracked my life for the last eight years, I’m able to recognize the feeling and tackle it appropriately, instead of letting it drown me.
Dead Star City Tours is an immediate hit in my book – poignant and bittersweet, but proud and content at the same time. It is easily the strongest project the band have ever put out. By mid-june, Petite League will be hitting the road again for a long-awaited series of shows across North America.
The first time I saw these boys was 2018. What a magical thing it is to get another opportunity to see them live, this time closer to home and as a whole new person.
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