“I’ve tried playing football, soccer, baseball, and tennis. I even tried trap shooting for a little bit,” Ryan Walchonski lists out. “But I could never find anything that I was really good at. I think through my experience with Feeble Little Horse, I was like, ‘okay, maybe music is something that I am good at.’ That was pretty empowering to feel.”

Walchonski is the founder of the band Aunt Katrina, first a solo project now a full band based in Baltimore, who recently shared their debut LP titled This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me. After many personal changes, moving from D.C. to Baltimore and parting ways with his previous band, Feeble Little Horse, Walchonski began to look inward, redefining his placement in his own practice and in the communities that he both came up in and inhabits now. Jumping right into the project, Aunt Katrina released an EP titled Hot back in 2023 via Crafted Sounds. Embedded into the oddities of surrounding noise, Walchonski’s style of glitchy electro-pop and lo-fi folk fixings linked arms to combat the very mundane that we so badly want to resist. Seven songs in, Hot was a taste test into Walchonski’s fluency in songwriting, leaning heavily into sound production and the personal victory of releasing something entirely of his own. 

But This Heat became a fixation to Walchonski as he worked to push the bounds of his own songwriting abilities, while continuing to explore the avenues of what he does best. At its core, the album sits amongst pop-song antiques, relishing in the delicate, yet damaged instrumental layers that are as unpredictable as they are inherent to the grace offered amongst the worn in melodies and personal stories that they are written from. But what cuts through on this album is a newfound presence that Walchonski now leads with. There are moments that brush past bits of our own internal dialogues – anxieties, doubts and memories that each take their turns in the queue. They don’t represent moments that just pass by, but rather the stories that he needed to tell and the healing that he needed to feel that soon became synonymous with a musical progression and identity built on embracing personal trial and error.

We recently got to ask Walchonski about the new record, self-releasing and finding his voice as a songwriter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With your debut LP now out, how is it sitting with you? How are you feeling?

Feels good. The EP was kind of a trial, I would say. I really wanted to have this album out so I could have things that I feel like were more in line with what I wanted our music to sound like. Mostly relief, I would say. It’s been a long time coming, releasing an album, especially when you’re just kind of doing it yourself. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. 

You did decide to go the self releasing route. What was that like for you? Does that practice reflect the way you want to view this project that you have?

I can be wary of the music industry and record labels. I’ve worked with a lot of good labels in the past, but I think I don’t like answering to other people. I think that a big part of it was just that I don’t want anyone to tell me or my band that we have to play shows, or that we’re not playing enough or do something that I don’t really want to do. I don’t know what the future will hold, because self-releasing an album can also be expensive. So maybe I’ll need someone else to help pay for it in the future. But, at least for this one, I wanted it to just be uncompromising. I didn’t want anyone else to really have a say in what we are doing and how I was releasing it.

This album has been a few years coming for you. You’ve since moved from DC to Baltimore and went through a lot of personal and creative shifts. Where did these songs fall in that timeline? How did this shift impact the way that you wanted to continue this project as you further defined it as this entity that is yours?

I would say these songs were finished about this time last year. It was really just about trying to stand on my own two feet, I guess. Prove to myself that I can write songs. I feel like every subsequent song I write feels like it is the last one, like, that was just a fluke. But I think Aunt Katrina, to me, is a continuous form of proving to myself that I am capable and that I can write songs. 

It does feel like a lot of playing with your own expectations. So as you try to progress yourself as a defined songwriter, what sort of things were you trusting that you were coming out of this process that made you feel like a songwriter? 

It’s tough, because I think I’ve always been pushing myself to try to be a songwriter. First and foremost, I started music by playing guitar, but I think where I really wanted to find myself was with songwriting. It’s a matter of trusting the process, as corny as that saying has become. I love writing music. I do it all the time. The trust is that it’s the only thing I’ve ever done in my life that makes me feel good. That’s hyperbolic, but as far as hobbies or jobs go, I feel like I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried sports. I’ve tried other artistic endeavors. Music is the only thing that I come back to that gets me up in the morning. It’s something I’m excited to do which I think can be really tough to find as a human.

So as you start to find your footing, proving to yourself that you are a songwriter, how did you rein in the experimentation that the first EP represented into what you would wanted this album to be?

The EP was kind of my experiment with writing songs outside of the context of Feeble Little Horse, but with the skills and tools that I had developed being a part of that band. It was really like, ‘Okay, I see that I can write songs collaboratively with this band. I want to explore that personally with myself. Let’s see if I can write 5 or 6 songs that are just me and see if I could do that period and then take those songs and turn it into a band.’ Because what I missed was playing in a local band. I think it’s a really rewarding experience. Everyone wants to get to the next level, but being in a local band is cool. You can hang out with your friends for like four hours on a Tuesday night and drink beer, play a show, make no money, and then go home. And you’re like, ‘that was the best time that I’ve ever had’.

So, with the album, I had this initial proof of concept with the EP. Those songs are cool. But I really want to write the best songs that I can and continue to apply the skills that I’m learning and grow my strengths as a songwriter. This album, to me, is much more personal than the EP. I wanted to write a full-length album. I wanted to write better songs. I think there’s a bit of a less reliance on digital flourishes. The EP also came around the time when I was really experimenting in Ableton. It felt almost like playing another instrument. Learning how to use the software that you record is not necessarily conducive to writing good songs, though it’s just like an instrument that you can apply to your sound.

Because this was a strikingly personal record for you, a lot of these songs get lost in all this disillusionment from all these personal shifts. As you were starting to get your footing as a songwriter, do you think that allowed you to get more personal in the stories you told? Do you feel like there was more of a foundation that would back you up?

I think I felt more empowered to think, ‘how can I write a song that really expresses how I feel?’ I already did the first thing; I put something out. That’s great. But how can I write an album that really feels personal to me? I think I felt empowered to write about more personal, oftentimes negative feelings that I was having, because I felt more confident in myself as a songwriter.

Did it become an escape from this disillusionment that you were feeling, or more of a way to sit in it and grant yourself the time to understand these feelings?

I’ve always leaned into songs that I feel can put words or sounds to the way that I’m feeling. I latch on to very specific lines in songs that I have stuck in my head. I wasn’t writing it to be like, ‘Oh, man, I feel bad. I have these negative emotions. Let me try to write a song about it.’ I can talk about when I feel happy or excited about something, but it’s harder to talk about something that I’m struggling with. And the songs were, in a way, more like diary entries than a purposeful, ‘I’m going to write a song about what it feels like to me to have anxiety and suffer with that’. It was more so, ‘I feel like shit. I’m going to write a song. And somewhere within the subconscious of my lyric writing process I’ll express these negative emotions without necessarily trying to do it’.

These songs do play with a lot of sonic tensions and inherited emotions. What is it about that blend of feelings and styles that felt right in this writing process?

It definitely does. I think part of it is that I write the music in ways that I like music to sound. So usually, that’s stuff that is catchy or rhythmically interesting, or just fun to listen to for your ears. And then the lyrics, it’s almost like I can’t help myself in writing – I don’t know, it’s almost like some emo music where the instrumentation is not necessarily depressing but the lyrics are. I wasn’t inspired by emo, but I think there’s some through lines. 

That point of making music that sounds fun, I feel like that really falls into the way that you’ve approach cherishing the community around you, because it’s fun. Where do you remind yourself that this is supposed to be fun, especially when you feel like shit or are doubting yourself?

Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of what life is. We’re kind of cycling between feeling like shit, and also like having fun, right? That’s also what’s so beautiful about music to me. It can be so fun, but it can also be so personal and challenging. That’s why I like being in a band. That’s why I like making music. It’s something that is so personally fulfilling to me, it’s just a reflection on life and how that makes us feel.

You can listen to This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me out everywhere now as well as order a vinyl or CD made with the help of Crafted Sounds.

Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo by Julia Hernandez⁠