Metagirl & the Earth Passengers are a wonderful new discovery of mine, hailing from Brooklyn in New York City. Their new single, Fire It Up, has something of a ska sound to it, with a beat that makes you want to shake your hips in time from the very first listen. Find out more about this amazing band below and check out their infectious new single at the end of this interview with frontwoman Erica Rowell.

By Jane Howkins

You have a brand new single titled Fire It Up coming out very soon. What can you tell us about the track?

Fire It Up weirdly came to me as I was waking up one morning a couple years ago. I was singing the melody in my head as I came to. I got up and started working on it. During the pandemic and even now, years after the worst of Covid is behind us, we’re still facing so many challenges – to decency, to democracy, to equality. And that’s all on top of the general malaise that seeps into us at times. The trick is to figure out how to keep going.

Music helps. The arts help. Love helps. Good friends, our family, our partners help. Fire it up, things will get better..

Your previous single, I Don’t Care, was released earlier this year. It’s a really upbeat indie-rock tune with more than a few punk influences thrown in for good measure. How was the reception to I Don’t Care and what can you tell us about the song?

The song came out at a tough time for the band, as I had just made some lineup changes, and this whole new digital release of music thing was fairly new to us. So for that reason, we were not as ready as we might have been with reaching out to editors and radio stations. We got a nice review from Foxfire Magazine and some radio play in London on Loud Women Radio, which was terrific. We love the show and their whole gestalt, and so we were stoked by that.

The song has done fairly well on the streaming numbers, but we still need to build our Spotify presence – we are doing especially well on YouTube and Apple Music though.

Fire It Up was produced by multiplatinum Grammy-winner Andros Rodriguez. How did the collaboration come about and how was it working with Andros?

I heard about Andros Rodriguez through his partner whom I met looking for an apartment. I reached out to him by email a few weeks later, and we jumped on a phone call to discuss the project and feel each other out. I had done a little bit of research on him and saw he had a really good résumé (he teaches music production at American University and has an impressive list of acts he has worked with. I hadn’t even seen anything about his Grammy winning until after we had started working together, and I finally asked him for the details over whiskey following the vocal overdub session. He is super chill and very effective at getting good performances in less-than-ideal recording circumstances – Andros was an absolute pleasure to work with. Couldn’t ask for more.

Do you have any more singles planned for release after Fire It Up?

We will be releasing two more singles this year – a kind of blues rock song celebrating the power of Mother Nature and art, and another punk-pop song about falling in love and trying to navigate whether the ‘it’s complicated’ nature of it will move it forward or stall it out..

You also have a four-track EP coming out soon, titled Trying to Chalk the Sun. When will the record be released and what can fans expect from the EP?

Our EP Trying to Chalk the Sun (a title lifted from an Emily Dickinson poem that also appears in our forthcoming song Rainy Day Mash-Up) will pull the four singles together into a single four-track release.

Are there any plans to release a full-length album in the near future? If so, what can you tell us about the record?

The band definitely plans to do more recordings at the end of the year. I’m foreseeing a seven-track release, but we only have four songs that are definite for that right now. So we’re still figuring out which others we would include.

You’re based in Brooklyn. What is the local scene like in the area and are there any local bands/venues you can recommend our readers check out?

Brooklyn’s indie identity is and has always been distinct from Manhattan’s – while Manhattan clubs (Bitter End, Mercury Lounge, Bowery Ballroom) trace back to a more legacy singer-songwriter/rock lineage, Brooklyn’s scene is younger, hungrier, hipper and scrappier. Brooklyn’s scene grew out of the 2000s–2010s DIY warehouse/loft circuit in Williamsburg and Bushwick – cheap rent, converted industrial spaces, a real ’40 or 50 bands all inspiring each other’ ecosystem (there’s actually a recent book on exactly this, Us V. Them, chronicling that era).

Plenty of those original spaces are gone now (Galapagos, Glasslands, 285 Kent), priced out by gentrification, but the spirit shifted rather than died – it’s now spread across venues like Baby’s All Right, Elsewhere, Market Hotel, and the Bushwick warehouse scene broadly. Live music really took a hit in NYC during the pandemic (as it did everywhere), and so many places have closed down now. Most recently Rockwood Music Hall and Bowery Electric. It’s so sad to see these places go the way of CBGB’s – iconic venues that are no more.

But there’s also good things happening. The narrative going into 2026 is actually a genuine rock resurgence – Gen Z are gravitating toward real instruments and emotional directness over polish.

These are some of the local venues in Brooklyn:

• Baby’s All Right (Williamsburg) – a small but mighty, genuine indie institution since 2013 with a track
  record of hosting future headliners early (SZA, Charli XCX, Mac DeMarco) in an intimate 250-cap room.
• Elsewhere (Bushwick) – hosts a wide range of indie/alt bookings.
• Union Pool (Williamsburg) – an iconic small venue, and a long-running indie mainstay.
• Shrine – a great space in Harlem that serves delicious, affordable French-Mediterranean bistro fare alongside an eclectic mix of musicians.
• TV Eye – smaller, DIY/punk-leaning.
• The Sultan Room (Bushwick) – a solid mid-size room.
• Arlene’s Grocery (LES, Manhattan) – a classic small rock club.

For the bigger tier venues alongside Bell House/Mercury Lounge you also have Warsaw (Greenpoint) and Brooklyn Steel (Bushwick) – both great if you want true “huge following” scale for big-league Brooklyn acts:

In terms of musical acts from Brooklyn, Geese are the standout right now. They are math-rock precision meets punk energy and broke into the mainstream with 2025’s Getting Killed. You also have Big Thief (a personal favorite – such incredible songwriting), Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer and Model/Actriz – the latter are a current buzz act, making Brooklyn-based, industrial-tinged post-punk.

What/who would you say are your main musical influences?

We wear it pretty openly – our PR materials say: Buzzcocks meet The Specials, with touches of REM and Kim Deal thrown in. We include Buzzcocks because the lead singer of another regional band identified them in our sound, and I agreed.

Without trying to dodge the question, since it is a basic one when it comes to music, the idea behind it reminds me a bit of what the American author William Faulkner said about symbolism in Light in August. That as writers, we have a storeroom of experiences, recollections and influences that we use in our trade, but how we apply it is like a carpenter pulling planks from the storeroom to build.

So that reluctance aside, I’d say as a songwriter/composer, I’m probably very influenced by the ’70s and ’90s. It’s easier for me to tell you who I like: The Clash are one of my favorite bands – I love their music and lyrics and what Joe Strummer wrote about. I love Chrissie Hynde for her songwriting and attitude. Talking Heads, Radiohead. The English Beat was especially influential as are Big Star and Squeeze – I mean talk about great songwriting. I aspire to capture as a lyricist/composer Glen Tilbrook’s terrific music writing with Chris Difford’s narrative lyric-writing.

I was in a reggae cover band in my early 20s and while I had always loved reggae before then, I developed an especially keen fondness for the genre from being in that terribly named band (Noddaclu), which played on the South Shore just south of Boston. Even my mother, a classically trained pianist, watched a videotape of a TV show we did in Plymouth and remarked how incredibly repetitive the music could be.

And back to the ’70s influences – I’d say as a Gen Xer, ska, punk and power-pop are the backbone, but we’ve never wanted to sound like we’re doing a revival act – we want it to feel like it belongs right now.

Are there any plans for a UK tour anytime soon?

Sadly, no plans for a UK tour yet. But we are talking about a possible US tour. You know, start small…

What can your fans expect from one of your gigs?

High energy, tight musicianship and a room that ends up dancing whether it means to or not. We’ve built a reputation on the New York circuit for sets that don’t leave much room for standing still. And the energy is palpable after the show. Routinely, people who have never seen us make a point of coming over to say thank you, and often it’s our show-closer –- the just released Fire It Up – that they gush about.

Another thing about our gigs – we love to perform with other indie acts we’ve developed a rapport with, like the power trio Diplomat, the ska group Captain Stan’s Good Time Tavern, Michael Hilliard and the Working Class and Phil Robinson.

Any last words for the fans?

Thank you for listening, for showing up, for singing our lines back to us. We built a new lineup this spring and it clicks – real talent, real dedication.

There’s a Talking Heads line I think about a lot:
‘Never for money, always for love.’ That’s it exactly. It’s not that we don’t want to make money – we do, and I know it’s possible, I’ve made money making music since I was a teenager – but not enough to live on – yet! Being a musician is probably more of a crapshoot than people realise, which is why I still have a day job. The love is what keeps us playing.

We’ve got four songs out this year and more coming this fall, and we can’t wait to keep building this with you.

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