Chatting With Trophy Wife on Being Pathetic, Getting Older, and Making It

“Can you get pathetic for me?” croons Trophy Wife’s songwriter and front woman McKenzie Iazzetta. The line is a firecracker start for the Brooklyn-based alt-rock band’s song “So Hard,” which is one of three singles released off their sophomore album, Pathetic, that dropped today. It follows their 2024 album, Get Ugly. 

Pathetic’s two other singles, “Paragraph” and “Kind of Girl I Am,” retain the same haunting yet arresting sound. Iazzetta’s concise lyricism yet vivid imagery are joined by Christian Pace on bass, Mena Lemos on guitar, and Michael Martelli on drums. Each song on Pathetic flows seamlessly into the next, keeping your heart aching from songs cheekily titled “Pervert Workaholic” to “Dirty Movie.” Sonically, they’re evocative of The Cranberries, but if you cranked up the grunge. It’s somehow nostalgic, like a song that you know you’ve heard before, but you just can’t remember where. 

The blend of current and past Berklee students first got their start in the Boston DIY scene with the release of their first EP, Bruiser (2021). Now, they’ve set their sights on making it in New York, and are quickly perfecting their signature sound for even bigger shows. Only recently, they’ve started feeling like, in McKenzie’s words, “a real band.” But that’s an understatement for the work they’ve produced thus far. 

Before Pathetic’s release, Staged Haze sat down to chat about the album with McKenzie from her New York City apartment. 

Staged Haze: What inspired the writing of the album? 

McKenzie lazzetta: I pull a lot from my life in general. A lot of the album is very introspective, and a lot about control and where you can kind of siphon that out of like your daily problems. 

SH: Can you talk more about the meaning of the [recently released] song “Paragraph,” and the music video? 

MI: Sometimes a large amount of pressure to be overly positive, and do the whole romanticizing of everything and healing. You know, to be girlier and be more romantic in general. It was kind of like poking fun at myself for all the ways that I wish that I was, that I don’t actually wish [to be].

SH: Was there any direction that you had in the making of the music video?

MI: I think that a lot of our music videos address fantasies, and I like them to be sort of voyeuristic. A large part of the idea in the first place we had for [“Paragraph”] was like the idea of a million one night stands, watching it all happen like a time lapse, and us kind of being the narrator in the front. 

SH: You bring up the idea of “voyeur” again, and that was the concept for [your third EP]. Is it like something that’s continued for you? 

MI: With that EP, it’s about the different ways you’re not supposed to feel, and the different uncomfortable emotions you feel when you’re getting older and trying to navigate your way through stupid shit and important shit. Especially as a woman, you’re not supposed to be anything but neutral, and I think that, a lot of the time, it feels like you’re being watched by yourself, trying to make sure you tamp down anything ugly that you’re feeling. We focus on things that feel ugly and look ugly, and not trying to make them palatable. 

SH: Are you 25 this year, still? 

MI: I’m 26 this year. 

SH: How’s it been?

MI: I feel like every year, you get “normaler.” I’ve been in New York since I was 22, and like I feel like you get smarter and you get stupider every year. 

SH: Are there examples that have shown up in your life? 

MI: Oh God, I mean, I’m starting to notice when my apartment is dirty faster for sure, and that I’m stupid in 1,000 ways.

SH: That’s that brain development. 

MI: Yeah, exactly.

SH: So for the release of Pathetic, like what are you most excited for? 

MI: I’m really excited for the show. We love playing and we definitely slowed down the amount of shows that we’ve played this year, to play bigger shows. We really love performing and so we’re just really excited to get back on stage and really show people the album, versus just letting them hear it. 

SH: Is there like, a discernible difference between those bigger shows and smaller shows? 

MI: Honestly, I’ve played some big shows and some small shows that have been equally awesome. It definitely can be more intimate when there’s less people. You’re able to see yourself a little harder, than when you’re on a stage and there’s like a lot of people. I tend to feel more like I’m by myself [in a big show] than when I’m in a small room and I can see everybody. 

SH: Yeah, and it definitely feeds into like the voyeur thing. You worked with the producer Charles Dahlke and Alex Deturk for this album. Have you worked with them before and what was it like this time around? 

MI: Yeah, we’ve worked with Charlie a bunch of times now. We worked with him on our last album, Get Ugly, and we worked with him on our first EP Bruiser. We just love working with him. At this point, we all know each other so well and we get to go to the farm to record. He has a studio on a farm, and we’re there for a week. We work for 12 hours a day and it’s so fun. It was awesome working with Alex for mastering as well. It’s our first time working with him, but he did such an awesome job. Charlie connected us to him as well. 

SH: I’ve seen in your previous interviews that you talk about the farm a lot. Can you paint a picture of the farm? 

MI: When we go, we wake up, we work from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. usually. We squeeze it in, versus doing it slowly. We like to pick 7 days and just be like, ‘This is the album.’ It’s all recorded and then once we leave, that’s when we mix and master it. 

SH: The focus track for this album is like “Alone,” were there any inspirations that you had when you were writing it? 

MI: That song almost didn’t end up on the album. I almost didn’t show it to the band because I couldn’t see the vision of it turning into a real song, but once I played it for them, they were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ It came together so easily, like it snapped right into place. It’s mostly [about] when you see someone and you’re confused as to why they’re there [alone]. We wanted it to feel crushing and hypnotic, and we’re really excited to get to play it live now, to see where it ends up as a living song, versus something that’s recorded. 

SH: Did you come around to it after everyone else was like, ‘Whoa, this is really good’? 

MI: Once we played as a band, I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But for some reason when it was just me and guitar, I couldn’t hear it as being something. I don’t really cut any songs. We don’t have any extra songs that exist outside of the songs we have released, so that was going to be the first cut song ever, but it wasn’t. 

SH: Do you have a favorite song off the new release? 

MI: I really love ‘So Hard,’ which was the first single off of [the album]. We all love playing that song, it’s so much fun. I also really love ‘Nesbit,’ which is the third to last track on the record. We got to do a lot of really cool percussion breathing stuff on it, which was very fun for us figuring out how to do it, and to not pass out.

SH: Where did you get the idea to do that? 

MI: I honestly really love the song “Precious Things” by Tori Amos. She has this really crazy percussive breathing at the beginning that I thought was so cool, it sounded like running. The drums just weren’t working at the beginning of Nesbit and we’re like, ‘What if we just try to do this freak shit?’ It was awesome.

SH: I also really enjoyed ‘So Hard.’ That was how I discovered you guys, and I think it’s been doing really well on TikTok too. Have you seen the reception of that? 

MI: Yeah, we were really excited when we released it. It’s always scary to release the first single, but we felt like people liked it really fast, before it even came out, because we [had] posted some clips online. I remember we played a show in Boston like a month or two before it came out. When we played that song, there were some girls in the front row that were singing along to the first verse, which was so funny because I had only posted the first verse. People latched on to that so quickly. It was cool. 

SH: That line is so powerful, like, ‘Can you get pathetic for me?’  

MI: Thank you!

SH: I also want to bring up your Audiotree performance. How did that feel? 

MI: That felt crazy. We’d all grown up watching Audiotrees of our favorite bands and in college, me and my roommates, every night, we’d watch an Audiotree. We would sit and watch a different band, or watch the same band over and over and over again. To be asked to do one definitely felt like a big milestone for us. We were like, ‘Oh, we feel like a real band.’ 

Trophy Wife’s new album Pathetic is out now.

Interview conducted and story written by Mendy Kong for Staged Haze