It’s fitting that Pop Pistol, a long-beloved alt-rock band with a knack for atmospheres and angles, would mark its 20th year not with a greatest hits trip down memory lane but with a release party for a new album.
After all, the near-spiritually kinetic force behind the San Antonio band and its music has always been tied to its ability to both honor and shed each of its incarnations.
Pop Pistol, begun in 2005, is composed of Alex Scheel (lead vocals, guitar, electronics), George Garza (bass) and Jorge Gonzalez (drums). Garza and Scheel are cousins, and Gonzalez joined the band when they were still teens.
Since then, the trio has dropped three albums, one remix collection and, over the past nine months, four bold new singles. Along the way, it’s attracted a devoted following by gigging locally in small clubs and on big festival stages.
The group has also toured regionally and nationally, felt successful and felt frustrated, enjoyed periods of great intensity and weathered unplanned hiatuses and side-projects too.
All the while, Pop Pistol has operated on its own creative plane, and at its own organic pace — expanding on the artful foundation and deep friendships upon which it’s built.
The band’s new work, an eight-song cassette called Surreality Growing, will be first available at a Sunday, Dec. 21, release show at Lonesome Rose.
13-year gap
The new stuff, which comes 13 years after Pop Pistol’s prior release, 2012’s Animal Prisms, finds the band at its most nimble and wise. Clearly, its members are as curious and searching as ever but with new focus and an even wider sonic palette — one that embraces the sharper, harder, more electronic elements of their sound.
The Current caught up with the band members for a bit of reflection on the journey so far and what might still be left.
“In a way, we have sort of all grown up inside of this world that Alex has created,” Garza said of Scheel, the band’s songwriter, visual designer and spiritual guide.
Garza likened it to kids feeling that childhood will somehow go on forever.
“The band, for me, is like a really cool time warp or time capsule to live inside of in some ways,” he said. “So, there’s a challenge with it, like, not to be looking backwards as much as looking forwards, for sure.”
For Gonzalez’s part, there’s nothing wrong with memorializing, but he’s more interested in keeping the creative entity going.
“Because, I think what’s brought us to this point is consistency: consistency as friends, as musical allies, as collaborators,” he said.
Not dwelling on milestones
Dwelling too much on a 20-year milestone could easily cause Gonzalez to become too self-conscious and lose the joy and momentum that the project has always brought to his life, he added.
Regarding the decision to mark the anniversary with new music, Scheel said “it feels like staying true to not all your former selves, but a bunch of your former selves and, like, being honest with them.”
He added that his deepest ambition is to make each song come alive. So, failing to deliver on that would feel heartbreaking.
“Being able to make this batch of songs come to life feels like you’re being loving to yourself,” he said.
So, does working with former selves and earlier iterations of the band ever become taxing or stifling?
“No, there’s enough former selves where it doesn’t feel stifling,” Scheel said, “because there’s enough moments that you draw on where you had a little vision or you had a little awakening and you remember that feeling and that hunger.”
Maintaining unrealistic and decidedly creative expectations is a key component of enduring in a project such as Pop Pistol, Scheel said, adding “embracing your … younger, more innocent self helps you maintain those positive unrealistic expectations.”
As he looks back on 20 years of collaborating with his best friends, he sees the “constant reaffirming of collective dreams” while “keeping the vision new and the connection new.”
“So, it’s about realizing that throughout the time, when the first perfect vision didn’t work out and then the second one didn’t work out and the third one didn’t work out, you’ve got to know that, OK, these perfect visions ain’t gonna work out, but this relationship is.”
Art as life, life as art
Indeed, the relationships Pop Pistol’s members have to the band seem entwined with their lives in profound ways.
“It just adds purpose and freedom and this sense of expression and the confidence that goes with it,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s lifelong commitment to music has also been a strong and beneficial structuring force in experiences outside of the band, he added. It’s enabled him to see life as a creative endeavor to be arranged to his taste and not a checklist to be completed as directed.
Garza said the biggest thing Pop Pistol brings to his life is joy. No longer as focused on traditional or measurable notions of success as he once was — he’s long been the band’s de facto business manager — he considers the collaboration to have added more value to his life than he ever anticipated.
Also, as a relatively new father, Garza’s come to see his continued involvement in music as a powerful positive example. It suggests his kids “need to know that life is not just about work or bills, but that it is important to make space for your passions and for being creative in however that looks.”
For Scheel, the draw of a creative life is, perhaps, a bit more mystical.
“[Creating] is a tool that makes me feel like I can travel further. Not physically, but just like this thing through which I can inhabit something bigger,” he said.
“If I didn’t make music,” Scheel added, “I probably wouldn’t engage in as much reflection, or it would be a little more copycat-structured, namaste kind of stuff, where I would be focused just copying mantras and doing that kind of stuff.”
Through music and the creative life, Scheel sees a path to an “unstructured” kind of spiritual self-exploration.
“It’s like this little magic that becomes impossible to quit, because it tells you so much. It tells you who you are. It tells you who you were.”
Free, 6 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 21, Lonesome Rose, 2114 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 455-0233, thelonesomerose.com.
This article appears in Dec. 10-23, 2025.