INTERVIEW

PERCEPTICIDE IS A CONCEPT IN COLLAPSE AND RECONSTRUCTION — The title itself—a portmanteau of percipere (to perceive) and -cide (to kill)—sets the tone for Pixel Grip’s third full-length record: a complete dismantling of perception, and with it, the illusions that often sustain our realities. It’s a fierce and emotionally volatile album that blurs the line between personal catharsis and collective reckoning. In Percepticide: The Death of Reality, the Chicago electronic trio delivers their most urgent, unflinching work to date.

Merging the ferocity of darkwave with the ecstasy of club music and the introspection of avant-pop, the band—Rita Lukea (vocals), Jonathon Freund (synths) and Tyler Ommen (drums)—rip through the architecture of identity and experience, creating a body of work that is at once chaotic and lucid, fragmented and whole.

Across the 10 tracks, Percepticide is a visceral and often disorienting experience, one that mirrors the emotional chaos that birthed it. But within that chaos lies clarity.

Lukea’s lyricism feels like a personal manifesto—a raw, unfiltered look at trauma, transformation and rage. “Percepticide is a cognitive distortion and a symptom of trauma – beliefs you hold to be true are shattered – as you question everyone and everything around you,” Lukea says. “My dream is that expressing my rage can help someone else feel empowered and at the very least, less alone. You’re never stuck, and you’re never alone.”

Recorded between Chicago and Los Angeles and featuring collaborators like Joo Joo Ashworth (Automatic) and producer Andrew Lapin, the album also marks a new era in Pixel Grip’s creative process. Expanding their team allowed for more experimentation, while still maintaining the band’s core identity—ferocious, deeply emotional and impossible to ignore.

Percepticide pulses with a fierce intensity that fans have come to expect from Pixel Grip, but it’s also filled with daring experimentation and emotional honesty.

Pixel Grip will embark on their North American headline tour this fall, which will kick off in St. Louis on September 23. The 26-date Percepticide tour will see Pixel Grip trek across the US and Canada before it wraps with a hometown show at Metro in Chicago on November 14.

LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?

RITA: For me, it’s the audience itself. I think a lot about the room—about being there in that space—when I’m making music. The studio becomes a kind of creative palace, but in my mind, it's always a music venue. When I’m writing, I imagine an audience in front of me and think about how they might respond. Would they mosh? Would they bang their heads? I'm always aiming to incite a visceral body reaction.

LUNA: You guys are part of Chicago’s electronic and DIY scenes, and for any readers who aren’t familiar with Chicago’s music scene, how has the scene and its community inspired or impacted your sound?

JON: We definitely found our footing in the DIY scene—back in 2016 and 2017. Our first shows were in basements in neighborhoods like Logan Square and Pilsen. We worked so hard just to be part of the band scene that was happening at the time. It was a constant evolution—starting in the DIY world and gradually transitioning into the club scene, playing with DJs. Being immersed in those overlapping music cultures in Chicago really placed us at this unique intersection of band and club culture. That blend has become a huge part of our identity and something we’ve carried with us through our journey as musicians in Chicago.

LUNA: You are about to release your third album Percepticide: The Death of Reality and a huge congratulations is in order! Percepticide is such a gripping title. What does “Percepticide” mean to you, and how does it encapsulate the emotional and thematic core of the album?

RITA: Percepticide is a symptom of trauma. It's a cognitive distortion where your reality as you know it changes or dies completely, and you have to reevaluate everything that you knew before. I experienced this symptom, and I wrote a lot of songs while I was experiencing this symptom, so that's where the title comes into play for me.

LUNA: You’ve described the album as reflecting fragmentation, empowerment and rebirth. What was the biggest lesson or breakthrough you’ve had while bringing this album to fruition— whether it’s personally or artistically?

RITA: We definitely had to come together as a band and reconcile after breaking up for a little bit, and that process wasn't quick and shit wasn't sweet, but through music, we found our way back to friendship and love with each other, and admiration and love for each other. My two bandmates are just so talented and sick, and I think reconciliation or reclamation can be sexy, wrathful, aggressive and punchy, but also tender and emotional, and I feel like all of that is reflected in the record too.

LUNA: The album was written over a three-year hiatus between Los Angeles and Chicago. Can you walk us through the creative process behind Percepticide? How did ideas come together between the three of you, and how did the songs evolve from the initial idea to its final version?

JON: I feel like Percepticide was an experiment in expanding our creative and sonic team. It was the first time we recorded songs in multiple locations—we re-recorded about half of them in Chicago and the other half in Los Angeles. We collaborated with new people, like Joo Joo Ashworth, whose work with the band Automatic I’ve always admired, and our friend Andrew Lapin, an inspiring producer and a genius behind the mixing board. We originally wrote the songs as demos, and as we worked with this larger team, we all came together to build on those demos—adding new parts while preserving the essence of what was already there.

It really felt like building blocks, piece by piece, coming together over the course of a few years—through a lot of turbulence and growth. That process became this album. And to me, it sounds like you can actually hear the lived experience of all of us in it. There's friction, there's release, there’s triumph and tragedy—all of it is right there on the surface.

LUNA: This album touches on deeply personal experiences like addiction and emotional fracture. How did you support one another as collaborators while processing such heavy material?

JON: I don't think we did for a while. We had to fall apart before we could learn to genuinely and sincerely, honor and support one another. Iit really disintegrated, but through creating the album, we learned how to create together and see each other as who we want to be seen and trust each other again. It's an amazing process to relearn to be friends while creating an album. Now that we're on the other side of that, not only did we repair our relationships with each other and ourselves, we also created something at the same time, and in retrospect, that feels crazy.

LUNA: Compared to Arena, Percepticide feels more sonically boundary-pushing. Did you take any creative risks or experiment with new approaches on Percepticide? What felt different this time around in how you expressed yourself?

RITA: Between this record and Arena is that the demos I honestly was writing more complete structured songs with more of a classic pop structure and doing really classic pop production on the vocals, but allowing the synth production and the drum production to completely let the freak flag fly in the instrumental production. I think Arena was really experimental and psycho and all over the place, but in a great way. I think Percepticide is super locked in core.

I think the main difference for me was lyrically, I really was obsessed and fascinated with punch lines in music. I really wanted there to be not literal humor, but I wanted to set up a lot of punch lines and jokes within the lyrics and have it feel like you know exactly what the song was about. I feel like that doesn’t really exist in Arena, and I was still learning how to reach that point. This has always been the kind of music that I've wanted to write.

LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Pixel Grip is right now?

RITA: I still really like “Bet You Do,” but my favorite song right now is “Reason to Stay.” I think it's really punchy and really packaged well. I love the screams in the vocal production.

JON: I feel the most connected to “Split” and “Gonna Be Faster.”

LUNA: What are you most excited for listeners to experience when they hear Percepticide in its entirety? RITA: I hope they feel empowered. I hope they feel like if one person out there feels like, ‘damn, I felt like this before,’ ‘I felt disenfranchised or disempowered and I relate to these lyrics,’ like, if one person thinks that, my mission will be complete. I hope it makes people feel understood. I hope that there's camaraderie. I hope it amps people up. I hope after they listen, there's a song on the record that just makes them fired up and pissed off and ready to work out, go on a run or channel that energy. I hope it helps people get in touch with their sacred rage and their power.

LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?

RITA: We're ready to dominate some stages. I think we really love performing live and stage production. Live music production is all of our special interests and all of our dreams. We just can't wait to keep touring our new show, the Percepticide set, and sweat with everybody and keep doing what we're doing.

JON: It feels like there's a lot of promise on the horizon, and we're in the early stages of working on new music too, and I can't wait to get the new live set ready to just play around the country.