Did we mention that there's a pet lizard involved? I repeat, there is a pet lizard involved.
If you’ve been around our Brooklyn scene for a bit, you’ve probably seen Katie Ortiz. They wear a lot of hats - singer, songwriter, guitarist, saxophone player, avid reader, lizard owner, performer of Bloodhound Gang songs at Econo-karaoke - the list goes on. Ortiz’s brainchild musical project is Debbie Dopamine, a post punk/indie pop? (I’m bad with genres that don’t have “ska” in the title) band known for their unique songwriting, the members’ longstanding involvement in helping this community run, and most importantly for doing a System of a Down cover set at Econoween last year.
Last week, Debbie Dopamine released a new EP entitled Mandibles, named after jawbones and jawbone-like things (we get into it below). The 6-7 track release (depending on where you’re listening) took me by surprise. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve seen the band plenty of times, and I’ve always been impressed. But I really enjoyed this release. The songwriting, the dynamics, the tasteful bells and whistles sprinkled throughout - the performances and production do the songs justice.
Ortiz was kind enough to sit down with me and talk all about each track on Mandibles, as well as the band’s history, her upbringing, reading, DIY, and most importantly, her pet lizard Matilda.
The classic three-piece Debbie Dopamine lineup: Dylan LaPointe (left), Katie Ortiz (center), and Zach Rescigano (right).
Why do you go by Debbie Dopamine? Is it a character? A moniker? A band?
That's a really great question. (Score!) I had the name for years before we existed as a band. It was a twist on Debbie Downer, obviously, and I just really liked it. The first things I ever did under that name were demos on SoundCloud that I told no one about. I was in other projects, and was like, “I want this to be the name for all the stuff that doesn't have anywhere else to go.” I've been making music for so long that if you look up my name, you'll find a lot of other things I'm associated with. So it was fun to just have something that was completely anonymous for a while. Then in quarantine, I started getting serious about what I wanted this project to be. A lot of [my other] projects were louder or more aggressive, so at the time, it was very much about finding strength in rawness and vulnerability.
In the beginning, it was kind of an alter ego. I had a very specific aesthetic. Every time I performed, I was wearing all white, and I had hot pink hair at the time. It was this grungy, weird character. It was experimenting with how I want to present myself and what I want my artistry to be. Also, as someone who is pretty gender fluid, an important element was presenting in a very feminine way. For a while, I only performed as Debbie wearing a dress or a long white skirt. Then, over the years of playing and working more collaboratively with Dylan (LaPointe - bass) and Zach (Rescignano - drums), it didn't feel like something I was putting on anymore: It felt more like my voice with our collective vision. I'm definitely the guiding force and the main songwriter, but everyone's fingerprints are on everything. It’s very collaborative.
The reason I asked was, in “Worried,” the first song on your new EP, it felt like you were speaking as a different narrator to yourself. And that narration voice changes throughout the EP. [The songs] all felt like they’re from your head, but with points of view that belong to different narrators.
I think that's true. Something that has been really fun with this project is storytelling. When I think back to the first EP we put out, the song “Rhododendrons,” did that the best. That was me really trying to take a moment or a place and create a song that captured it. I definitely leaned into that more with this set of songs.
You mentioned that you are the principal songwriter, but that it’s collaborative. What's the writing process for Debbie like right now?
It depends. Sometimes I'll bring in a song that's like 60-70% done. But I know that it needs more, and I want someone else to help me get there. So we work together to make the peaks and valleys more exaggerated and impactful. The big outlier on this record is “Negative Space,” which was not part of the batch of songs that was originally going to be on this EP. Dylan came up with the main bass riff, and he and Zach played around with it. I wrote my part last, which was really fun. We don't get to write a lot like that. But I think the result is really special. I think I'll always be writing songs alone in my bedroom - that's kind of Debbie at its core. But also, it wouldn't be what it is if there weren’t other brilliant, creative people that I was working with.
Debbie Dopamine has evolved so much from when you initially started using the name. Who is in the band at this point and how did this lineup come together?
So, the core is me, Zach and Dylan. Zach and I are partners, and were really resistant to working together for so long. (laughs) Then, during [Covid-19] lockdown, we couldn't practice with our bands or play anything. We just started working together and were like, “this is actually really good.” So that was fun. Then I kind of cold called Dylan. Our previous bands had been on bills together, his band played my house back when I ran a house venue. He really stuck out to me as someone who has a really unique approach to playing bass.
It was the three of us for so long. Then, when we started working on this collection of recordings, we talked about adding in a trumpet. Dylan's old roommate, Tree Palmetto, was generous enough to lend his chops to our project. That was before we met Jason [Seavey - trumpet]. When he can make it, we have a really awesome person named Jason who comes in and plays those parts and has been collaborative with us.
Then, most recently, we added Scout [Watkins] on second guitar in the fall of 2024. Scout is someone that I knew from work. She has an incredible project called A Rose House. Similarly to Dylan, Scout is someone who has an unorthodox approach to their instrument. She plays in all of these funky tunings and does very textural [guitar parts]. She's a post-rock girlie - She is *not *afraid to experiment! She has such a unique approach. I feel really lucky to have this amazing team of collaborators and musicians working on these songs with me, because that totally changes the vibe.
Photo by Sydney Tate. *The current lineup of Debbie Dopamine, featuring the "core" three with Scout Watkins and Jason Seavey. *
What was your house venue called?
The Bronze, like the music venue from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was me and two friends throwing shows and having no idea what we were doing. DIY really shook me, like, “no, really, anyone can do this.” The scale of legitimacy is totally different.
Do you have a favorite band that played or a favorite show you threw?
Oh man.** **I wish I was at home right now because in my studio, I still have a bunch of the fliers hung up. In terms of favorite band, or band that had a big impact on me, definitely Haybaby. Did Haybaby perform at the Bronze? Now I'm doubting myself. But if they did it, it was definitely them.
In terms of a show, definitely Garbage Prom, which outlived The Bronze. We put on Garbage Prom a couple more times after we outgrew that space and became a booking collective.
The Bronze was where I got really into themed shows. To this day, I love a themed show. People, like, put together prom outfits out of garbage! We decorated for every show (which was so much work), but for that one, we took out everything in my recycling bin and hung it from the ceiling. We had bags of chips, aluminum foil, paper towel rolls, and random pieces of paper hanging everywhere. And it looked so crazy. I remember A Deer A Horse definitely played that show, and I think Angela [Phillips - previously of A Deer A Horse] wore a trash can lid like a hat and just looked so cool. (Laughs)
I've seen you play live several times, and some of your stage banter - and even your lyrics - made me wonder what growing up for you was like. Did performing and music influence your direction in life at a young age?
Music has always been a part of my life. I wasn't raised in a particularly artistic family, although my father, when he was going to college, [was] between being a professional pianist or a priest. He didn’t choose either - he went with reporter (laughs). But my dad had a deep love and appreciation for music. To this day, he will break out the guitar every once in a while and play for fun. It was never something that was taken seriously in my family, but I was lucky enough that I went to schools where there was choir, and I did marching band with my older sister.
Saxophone was my first instrument, but even before then, I was writing songs. I loved to sing, and it came very naturally to me, especially when I got my hands on a guitar. A friend of a friend lent us a three-quarters sized guitar that was, like, small enough that I could play. That really lit something up in me.* You can learn three chords on a guitar and write something?* [Before that] I'd written songs on the piano, and I'd written songs that I would sing to myself a cappella. I never knew where that came from, but I knew that writing [songs] felt really good. Especially as I entered my pre-teen and teenage years and experienced emotions that felt like, “oh, I'm the first person who's ever had a crush on someone who didn't like them back” or “I'm the first person to feel left out in a crowded room.” When you're 13, it really feels like you're the only person. Having music as a companion was such a powerful tool. My dad bought me a tape recorder from RadioShack that I still have, and has made appearances on some of our albums because we can run things through it and the gain is so gnarly! It had a little built-in mic, and I remember I could record the songs that I wrote and listen back to them.
I was raised in a household where being creative was definitely encouraged, but it was very much a “you can play guitar once you finish your homework” kind of vibe. School came first, and if you weren't doing well in school, it was because you didn't work hard enough. You didn't spend enough hours studying. That carried into college. I studied ethnomusicology, which was awesome. I have a lot of fun nerding out about it. But ultimately, there was a fairly long stretch when I felt like I wasn't giving myself permission to really prioritize music.
I was in a couple bands in high school, and in New Jersey there was this really awesome garage scene, but it took me a really long time to find that in New York. It wasn't until I found the local scene in Brooklyn a couple of years after college that something really clicked and I was like, “oh, these are my people.” I felt so inspired by people just making things happen. Before, it always seemed that I needed someone else's permission. The idea that you can just build something from scratch and put it up in a scrappy DIY space was so inspiring to me and changed the way that I approached music and the importance that I allowed music to have in my life. Being surrounded by people making art because they have to and they want to share it with people? That is my favorite thing in the world.
Not to call you out, but Patrick Porter from [A Very Special Episode**](https://bandnada.com/b/avse) told me that you are the reason he has retroactively gotten into nu metal - because of your System of a Down cover set [at Econoween 2024]. What do you have to say for yourself?**
(Laughs) Over the past couple years I’ve kind of gotten into nu metal. Mostly Poppy. She came out with a couple records that just blew my little mind. A big influence on the System of a Down set is Dylan. Dylan is a prog metal baby at heart and loves to write really nasty riffs. He gets down with some real freaky stuff - it's beautiful!
Why did you choose the name *Mandibles *for your new EP?
A big theme in all of my songwriting is being consumed - very intense sensory [lyrics] about eating and dirt, chewing and being chewed, food, and, like, mouth-feel-words and textures. I love teeth, and also digging in the ground. The idea of one day being returned to the Earth and being recycled through little insects and bugs? It feels very animalistic: The chewing and being chewed, consuming and being consumed. But also, mandibles have another [working] definition: crushing objects. And I think that's also very representative of what these songs are doing. Crushing and being crushed, sonically, emotionally… depending on the song and where we are in a given moment.
Do you want to really quickly explain what a mandible is for anyone who may not be up to date on their biology (like me)?
A mandible is like a jawbone, basically, had by most humans and animals. But also, think of a bug that has gigantic pinchers. Any kind of biological thing that’s used for crushing is usually used for consumption. We're crushing things to consume them and cannibalize them. So it could be any number of things. But usually, “mandible” has to do with your jaw and your teeth - the way that you rip things apart, then put them into your body.
“Worried” is the first song on Mandibles. It kind of reminded me of Illuminati Hotties. Who is the narrator of this song and who are they speaking to?
That's a huge compliment! The narrator is definitely the version of myself that gets really cynical in a depressive episode. As someone who struggles with mental health (it's 2025 - all of us do), there's definitely, like, a dark veil that goes over everything. There's this voice in my head that's telling me I'm worthless and an imposter. And there's this urge to give into that - to accept that as the truth. “Worried” is kind of playing with that idea. “You're wasting your time. Everything you do is underwhelmingly fine. You're losing your edge.” Then you get that kind of like, angry, erratic [musical] breakdown at the end. Something that I've been exploring is this concept in psychology that depression is anger turned inward.
Track 2 is “Marzipan.”
“Marzipan” is an attempt to capture the fumbling nervousness of the first crush I ever had on another girl, which was at summer camp. That utmost tender, teenage sapphic longing is a tale as old as time. Not even being fully aware of what you're wanting and what's going on… Not having words to express it.
Since the dawn of time, people have been drawn towards each other - teenage girls especially. “Inclined in the backseat of my mind” is kind of a reference to that. I'm always kind of thinking about you, you know?
Photo by Sydney Tate.
“Credit card” is great storytelling. This is the one where you talk about the cardboard in the backyard, right?
“Credit Card” is a funny little dance of a bunch of different things. It's funny that it kind of ends up making a story, because it was a bunch of little [lyrical] fragments. The beginning felt like a very playful stream of consciousness. Again, being in not-a-great mental place where you’re like, “oh, things could really go bad. Things are unstable - but here we go!”
And again, you get the [negative] voice in your head - on the record, Allison Becker from Wetsuit played that role for us - whispering and actualizing the things that your inner cynic is telling you. It kind of explodes in that last verse. Like, well, this is it. Maybe this is morbid, but some days, being alive feels weird and itchy, you know what I mean? It just feels strange. On those days, it's nice to remember that it's all temporary: Eventually this will all end. Everything's chaotic and weird, and I am just embracing it.
I love that, yeah. I have a bandmate who calls it positive nihilism. He's always like, “remember, we're all going to die and none of this matters.”
Absolutely. My emotional state on any given day is either “nothing matters and nothing means anything,” or “it's terrible and nothing matters.” You get to decide what means anything, and that's beautiful and freeing!
“Negative Space,” to me, is the most “Zach” song on the record. Parts of it reminded me of The Royal They, who I know he loves. This song has me hypothesizing that you often play characters in your songs - but not in a way where I don’t believe you. Were you a theater kid growing up?
Kind of, but not really. I did high school theater, but also marching band, so I was never fully in the theater kid crowd. But the way I perform is very theatrical. It's not so much that I'm trying *to play a character, it's that I'm tapping into different parts of myself.* **There's a lot of variation in Debbie because there's a lot of variation in my emotional state and thinking patterns. Dylan very much drove the bus on “Negative Space.” Dylan and Zach together made it happen. Because of that, I was able to tap into something that I wouldn't have written otherwise. There’s a lot of anger there, but there's also a lot of… I don’t know, joy? I wrote it at a time when I was thinking really hard about my gender and my gender expression, and I really channeled a lot of that into the song. What resulted felt unlike anything that we've done before. It's one of my favorites to play live. I get to go out and writhe around on the floor, examining the spectatorship of “how are you viewing me? How am I playing into this? How are you perceiving me? What are you thinking about me? What am I thinking about you thinking about me?” At the core, it's kind of about being an alien in your body and just feeling like you're in this weird little meat sack. (Laughs)
Is the concept of negative space representing the concept of gender fluidity?
A little bit. It's a little tongue in cheek where there’s sexual innuendo. “Come on, baby, touch me in my negative space.” Like, that's definitely an innuendo to, like, genitalia, but also abstract in a way so it's *not *sexual. It’s kind of like, “isn't this fucking weird that *this *is how we relate to each other?” But then there's that line later, “haven't you ever been this close to a little black hole before?” Which is also innuendo, but also this feeling of absorbing everything and reflecting everything at the same time. So I don't know if it's just one thing. There's a lot going on there, but it's this idea of like, what is the experience of perception in the absence of a body and being perceived in the absence of gender? But that's also impossible, so what is it like *with *all of those things? And isn't that weird how those things bump up against each other?
Recording strings for the song "Limb."
Moving on to “Limbs,” you got a lot of strings here.
A lot of strings.** *We had Anthime Miller play cello on this record. You may have heard them on our last record, *Pets. They played on “Rhododendrons.” I'd always wanted to have cello on a record, and they brought it to life in a way that made that song so much more powerful. So I knew I wanted them again on this recording.
“Limbs” is about the death of a friendship. Friendship breakups are so much worse than regular breakups because we don't have the same social cues to navigate them. Watching the relationship turn toxic and unhealthy, watching yourself become needy or trying so hard to earn someone else's love and good treatment, knowing that you're behaving in ways that you shouldn't? It's just this big, heart swelling, aching moment. Cello does that like nothing else. It touches something in you that guitars and drums don't touch in the same way.
Are you a big reader? Because this song showcases a really good vocabulary.
I love to read! I love words. I work remotely a lot of the time, so I spend so much time at my local public library. I'm a huge fan of public libraries. I think they are everything that is good and redeeming about society.
I also write from the place of how a word tastes in my mouth and how it feels to say it, instead of just the [definition]. So sometimes that means it gets a little nonsensical, but I really think there's a power in words that you like - they reverberate or click in your mouth when you say them. I'm very obsessed with, like, the oral experience - the *feel *of a word. Whenever there's a word that feels really good to say, it sticks with me and comes up in my writing for sure.
Photo by *Justin Buschardt. Featured photo for this article also by Justin Buschardt.*
“Coda” is a one minute, 20 second instrumental song. It ends the EP on Spotify - but “Honey,” the EP’s last track, is on bandNada and Bandcamp. It’s a beautiful song.
Thank you. I intended “Honey” to be a secret track only on Bandcamp.
I actually looked it up to see if it was a cover, because the lyrics felt like a classic 60s or 70s pop song to me.
Thank you. Yeah, “Honey” is a song. (Laughs) I remember writing it one very cold morning in January, sitting in my pajamas with my acoustic guitar, feeling very lonely and tapping into some old thoughts about it. It comes from a place of feeling totally dedicated to something - a person or a passion - [when] you don't know if they feel the same way about you (but you have this sneaking suspicion that they don't!). I wrote it a long time ago, and it's only seen the light of day a handful of times. There was one night on our last tour where we had a show that was kind of a wild card where we didn't know if anyone was going to show up. Impulsively, Scout and I put together an arrangement and played it. It was magical! Then, Dylan and Zach both joined in on stage, and it was just because we were being really loose that night. We didn’t know what we were getting into.
This song means so much to me. I was going back and forth about whether or not to release it with this batch of songs, because I was afraid of it being too much of an outlier. One day, I would like to create a full-band arrangement and experiment with some of the heart wrenching instruments - some trumpet, cello - maybe both! I didn't feel ready for that this time around, but I wanted to have it somewhere. Actually, a dear friend of ours who performs drag under the name Rachel the Deceiver had me send her a demo, and she performed a drag number to it! I cried the whole time. It's a very special song, and it felt really special to [give the song out as] this gift, you know? It's on Bandcamp for the real ones. (Laughs)
And bandNada (or Jon will fire me).
People who look for it on bandNada are also the real ones. The people who are in it for the real stuff. I feel like those are the people I can trust with this song right now. Maybe I'll put it up on Spotify eventually, I don't know. But I wanted to put it out in a special way. So right now, it's just a special gift for the people who know to look for it, and who are considerate and thoughtful about the music that they listen to.
Thanks for explaining that. I have one more question, regarding your bandNada byline: “music for lizards, by lizards”
Well, Zach and I have a bearded dragon that I'm obsessed with. Her name is Matilda - we call her Tilly for short. She's so funny. She just sits around all day and things happen to her. She gives you side eye and judges you and is apathetic to anything happening around her. You can pick her up and put her somewhere and she'll just sit there for a few hours. But then randomly, she'll try very hard to jump off of things to eat you. She's delightfully dumb - very little survival instinct. Totally unconcerned and unbothered with the world: a funny manifestation of how silly existence is. So everything I do, I do for her. We're ranked number one with lizards in my household, but also ranked last among lizards in my household.
Probably ranked number one SEO-wise for “music for lizards, by lizards,” probably.
We're really out here to conquer that market. We're starting with Bearded Dragons, but geckos? We’re coming for you. Blue tongued skinks, iguanas… One day we're going to have a room full of lizards. Metal lizards.
Writer’s note: Debbie Dopamine is not, in fact, ranked number one SEO-wise for this. Mandibles is out now, though, and you should [listen to it**](https://bandnada.com/p/67248-mandibles) because it’s really fuckin’ good. **
Additionally, Debbie Dopamine is playing the Wetsuit “Sweet Sixteen” single release party TONIGHT, June 26th, at Purgatory. Learn more [here**](https://link.dice.fm/ue56f03dd6eb?dice_id=ue56f03dd6eb).**
