Rocket Are Ready to Launch Into the Stratosphere

Every band member cried when they got the news. Guitarist Desi Scaglione heard first and told lead singer and bassist Alithea Tuttle; their manager taunted drummer Cooper Ladomade with a few hints before finally spilling; guitarist Baron Rinzler was at a bar when the rest of the band filled him in. The word that made them all weep for joy: Rocket, an indie rock band from Los Angeles, will be opening for their alt-rock heroes, the Smashing Pumpkins, this summer. It’s only a handful of dates in August, but it’s quite the feat for a band that has yet to release their debut album. 

“They really are a huge band for us,” Scaglione, 25, tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “It’s obvious too, if you listen to our music.” Tuttle sits beside him in their shared apartment, shaking her head in disbelief at the accomplishment.

“It feels like that’s absolutely impossible,” Tuttle, 24, says. “We got shows with the Smashing Pumpkins before we put out a record… We have eight songs out. And they were like, ‘Sure.’ That doesn’t really compute in my head.”

That booking will make a lot more sense once the world hears their debut album, R Is for Rocket, out Oct. 3 via Transgressive Records. Recorded between 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, it’s an explosive introduction that justifies the hype that’s built around Rocket since their 2023 debut EP, Versions of You, and levels up their dynamic, Nineties-inspired rock sound.

This fall, Rocket will bring the soaring songs from R Is for Rocket on the road for their first official headlining tour, making stops in Nashville and New York, among other places. Even after their meteoric past couple of years, which included a buzzy SXSW appearance and an NME cover, they still can’t seem to wrap their heads around how quickly their non-stop touring has yielded success. “We get the ticket count every Tuesday,” Tuttle says. “We call it Ticket Count Tuesday, and that’s always the coolest thing in the world, that people are continuing to buy a ticket to our shows.” 

While they formed in 2021 and started playing live shows a year later, in a lot of ways, Rocket have been in the making for at least a decade. The four band members all connected in their freshman year of high school, but Tuttle and Ladomade go all the way back to preschool. “Growing up with Alithea and knowing her my entire life, the last thing I ever thought she would ask me is if I wanted to be a drummer in her band,” says Ladomade, 25. Before suffering a serious spinal injury in 2016, Tuttle was set on becoming a professional dancer.

Back in high school, Rocket frequented live shows at the Smell, an all-ages DIY venue in downtown L.A. for up and coming acts. “For each and every one of us, music is something that I think we’ll all play forever and to a certain extent already did,” says Scaglione, who credits his musician father for instilling his own musical passions —  and for teaching him to play guitar when he was seven years old. Similarly, Rinzler, 27,  got a guitar when he was just 10 years old, but only started learning for a crush. “She played guitar and I thought it was so cool,” he says.

Meanwhile, Ladomade and Tuttle joined jazz band in middle school, but Landomade soon discovered it wasn’t for her. “I’m 12 years old and they’re mad at me because I can’t read drum music. And it’s like, it’s not that serious,” she says. Though each member felt musically inclined by the time they all met in their teens, they didn’t think of forming a band back then. “None of us ever played music together up until six years of knowing each other,” Scaglione says. 

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Tuttle and Scaglione, who have been dating since high school, found themselves as unlikely collaborators, with Tuttle writing melodies to some of Scaglione’s working songs. Soon, the couple wanted to start a band, and turning to longtime friends Landomade and Rinzler was a no-brainer. Rocket came together quickly from there. (Despite their worship of Siamese Dream, the band name is not a nod to the Smashing Pumpkins song “Rocket.” Instead, it came to them when Tuttle began doodling a rocket ship on a whiteboard in the band’s rehearsal space.)

The quartet spent six months practicing together in Landomade’s parents’ backyard studio before their first show as openers for the indie rock outfit Milly. “We just all probably felt like if we were going to do something, it’s going to have to be the best it could be for any of us to be proud of it,” Rinzler says.

Rocket has continued to incorporate this philosophy into their work and grit. For R Is For Rocket, the band initially recorded about eight of the 10 tracks in early 2024, but after hitting the touring circuit with the demos, they decided they needed to go back into the studio. “It really gave us the opportunity to be like, ‘Let’s figure this out,’” Tuttle says. “Let’s figure out exactly what we want these songs to be and reimagine some of them.”

One of the songs they returned to was the new single “Wide Awake,” a track that’s exemplary of the band’s perfect balance of moody riffs and dreamy vocals. “That’s an interesting one because it’s a super old idea that we had been working on, and I had a completely different chorus and melody for it,” Tuttle says. “Now it’s one of all of our favorite songs.”

While the live audience feedback they’ve gotten shaped some of R Is for Rocket, the band isn’t relying on outside validation for the album to feel like a success. “Someone could listen to the record and be like, ‘I hate this,’ and I would almost still be grateful, because that means someone gave it a chance and was willing to let it make them feel something,” Tuttle says. 

While they’ve made a point of carefully considering every facet of their first LP — from Scaglione’s production on the project to the album title (a nod to Nineties post-hardcore band Radio Flyer’s song of the same name) — they say the album cover has been the most difficult to choose in some ways. Tuttle reveals she only finalized the art the day before our interview, after stumbling on a photo of her father skydiving. “I love when there’s someone on a record cover, and you just have no idea who it is, unless maybe you look it up,” she says. But it’s not just a cool shot: The R Is for Rocket  cover art honors Tuttle’s father, who died from brain cancer in May. “When my dad passed, it was very much, ‘OK, this album is so totally dedicated to him in every sense of the word.’”

Everyone in Rocket recognizes the stakes of this moment for the band. “You’ve been saying something, Desi, that I’ve never been able to get out of my head,” Tuttle says. “Which is: You can only release your first record one time. No matter what it is, you get one chance to do that.” As they prepare to share R Is For Rocket with the world, Rocket are set on making the most of that one chance.