Andrea de Varona (she/her) and Josh Ford (he/him) aka Fake Dad are a Los Angeles based, NYC bred indie rock meets dream pop duo. In their upcoming EP, Holly Wholesome and the Slut Machine, Fake Dad have created characters that live in their made up world of angry, burger-flipping clowns, star-crossed knights, and masked sleep paralysis demons. Throughout the process, Andrea and Josh realized that they were using the fiction to unpack very real aspects of their lived experiences—including their identities and sexualities as romantic partners in a straight-passing relationship.

The latest offering off the project, ‘ON/OFF’ is a grunge classic full of bottled-up rage and sexual frustration. De Varona chronicles the moment-by-moment experience of being emotionally overwhelmed and overstimulated—bedrotting, serotonin burnout, doomscrolling, time bleeding together, laying on the bathroom floor trying to figure out if she’s feeling too much, or not enough. De Varona’s airy, haunting tone and sparse melody really immerse the listener in the dissociative, stomach-dropping feeling of time bleeding together in verses that will sound familiar to anyone who has struggled with depression and burnout. Then, when it feels as though neither of you can take it anymore, the song explodes with rage, begging to be left alone by the glowing screens, push notifications, and panic-stricken headlines of the outside world, just for a moment. de Varona begs “can you turn it all off/so you can turn me back on?/can you ask me where it hurts/need you here, you know I get nervous.”

De Varona says about the song, “This was written when I couldn’t get out of bed or leave my apartment. Time really bleeds together. When you ignore feelings for long enough you become overwhelmed by and disconnected from them—both numb and overactivated. This song compares that numbness to its direct companion, doomscrolling serotonin burnout. The modern world wants us to be overstimulated and ‘turned off,’ this song is me pleading to be turned back on.“