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If Rocket weren’t daunted enough by the idea of opening for The Smashing Pumpkins across four massive outdoor UK shows last summer, then Alithea Tuttle was about to introduce her nerves to an industrial-grade shredder. 

‘This is the moment; just focus and do what you do,’ she told herself when stepping onstage at London’s Gunnersbury Park, for Rocket’s biggest-ever show, in support of her idols. 

“I turn around, and I immediately see Billy Corgan and James Iha watching us,” she recalls today with a laugh. ​“I was like, ​‘Oh… my… god… This is the worst thing that could happen.’”

He may be no fan of roller coasters, but Billy Corgan is very much into Rocket, and with good reason. The LA-based quartet – bass-playing vocalist Alithea, guitarists Baron Rinzler and Desi Scaglione, and drummer Cooper Ladomade, a collection of more fabulously-named people you will struggle to find – make the sort of ​’90s alt.rock-channelling racket that’s catnip in these vintage-obsessed times, albeit with one crucial twist. There’s a vibrancy, freshness and assured personality to Rocket that makes them anything but simply another exercise in retro imitation. 

“We didn’t want to make a period piece,” nods Desi of debut full-length R Is For Rocket, a record that first captivates your head with its punchy riffs and sumptuous tones, before Alithea’s dreamily cool vocals and breezy melodies go to town on your heart. ​“We write songs based off of our influences, whether that be the Pumpkins or The Beatles or Fugazi. It’s important that you push music forward.”

The blueprint for Rocket was born during the pandemic, when Desi suggested to his partner Alithea that she stifle lockdown boredom by playing around with lyrics and melodies to some new ideas he’d sketched out. Only problem was, Alithea had never done either such thing in her life. Instead, until just a few years prior, she’d obsessed over a whole different artform: dance and rhythmic gymnastics.

“I was sure it was going to be my life,” she says. Aged 16, however, a fractured spine said otherwise. The switch to music and replacement of one dream with another would take a few more years, but, looking back, it was almost an inevitability. The relationships that underpin Rocket, after all, were formed around the quartet’s shared high school music scene.

A longstanding friendship with Lydia Night of The Regrettes, for whom Alithea would haul merch on the road in their earliest days, meant she was already earning her touring stripes.

“I’ve been performing my whole life,” she nods. ​“Subconsciously, music is something I’ve always known I wanted to do. I think I had just told myself I could never do it, that it was too hard. I was too scared until Desi, Cooper and Baron gave me the push I needed.”

Rocket have been in the ascent ever since. And there’s a lesson in all this.

“I didn’t even start learning bass until I was 20,” Alithea admits, the instrument only picked up at all because the idea of simply standing and singing onstage was too daunting. ​“Now, a young girl will come up to me at a show and tell me that they’re 12 or 13, and that they sing and play bass. Hearing those words is the coolest moment in my life. I always tell them: ​‘Hear these words: you’re going to be amazing. Keep going. Start a band. Don’t give up.’”

And, presumably, also that if you ever find yourself sharing a stage with The Smashing Pumpkins, then don’t look over your shoulder.

R Is For Rocket is out now via Transgressive. This interview originally appeared in the spring 2026 print issue.

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• “I’m making decisions from a place that isn’t fear”: Why Lydia Night has gone solo
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