Puscifer have never operated like a traditional rock band. They’re closer to a small production house that happens to write bangers, an ecosystem where characters, visuals, studio tricks, and songwriting all feed the same weird brain. And on their new album, Normal Isn’t, that brain feels sharper than it has in years: guitar-forward, post-punk-leaning, and built with the kind of precision that’s satisfying because you can hear the seams.
We’ve already has already covered the basics here on Skratch N Sniff; the album drop, the world-building, the tour machine revving up. For our final look at Normal Isn’t before the tour kicks off, here’s the piece that pulls everything together: a “meet the members” deep dive into the core trio and collaborators on the album.
To understand what makes Normal Isn’t distinct, you have to zoom out. Maynard James Keenan is one of the rare modern rock vocalists whose identity is inseparable from multiple, radically different projects. He is the voice of Tool, the co-founder of A Perfect Circle, and the creative engine behind Puscifer. Each band occupies a different lane, and his role shifts accordingly.
With Tool, Keenan operates inside a machine built on rhythmic complexity and long-form architecture. Tool’s catalog, from Undertow through Fear Inoculum, is defined by odd meters, extended arrangements, and the interplay between Danny Carey’s polyrhythmic drumming, Adam Jones’ textural guitar, and Justin Chancellor’s elastic bass lines. In that environment, Maynard often functions as a counterweight. His melodies float above or cut diagonally through the instrumentation rather than locking into it. The writing process in Tool has historically been band-driven instrumentally, with Keenan stepping in after extensive musical frameworks are developed. He has spoken publicly about receiving largely completed instrumental pieces and building vocal parts in response, treating the music as terrain to navigate rather than something he constructs from the ground up.
With A Perfect Circle, founded alongside Billy Howerdel in 1999, the palette shifts. The songwriting is more overtly melodic, more concise, and often more emotionally direct. Albums like Mer de Noms and Thirteenth Step lean into atmosphere and dynamic build, but within tighter structures than Tool’s sprawling epics. Keenan’s role there is both interpreter and editor. Howerdel brings skeletal songs and tonal worlds; Maynard refines the melodic arcs and lyrical themes, frequently turning personal narratives into broader emotional statements. The tension is less about rhythmic labyrinths and more about mood, tension, and release.
Maynard’s approach to writing is famously unromantic. In his longform interview with Rick Beato, he describes a discipline that begins early in the day and hinges on an almost stubborn act of self-denial: coffee placed just out of reach until something foundational exists. Tempo chosen. Time signature set. Drum kit selected. A rhythmic spine established. Only then does he allow himself caffeine. It is less “waiting for inspiration” and more “forcing structure to appear.”
Puscifer, by contrast, is the sandbox he controls. Launched initially as a looser, almost satirical side project, it evolved into a fully realized band with Mat Mitchell and Carina Round as core collaborators. Here, Keenan is not just a vocalist reacting to finished music. He is a co-architect of the entire structure: sonic, visual, conceptual. Puscifer albums are built as ecosystems, complete with characters, recurring motifs, and multimedia extensions. The difference is not subtle. Tool is ritualistic and muscular. A Perfect Circle is sculpted and emotional. Puscifer is theatrical, studio-native, and deliberately self-aware.
That difference is crucial to understanding his creative process on Normal Isn’t.
If Maynard is the architect and narrator, Mat Mitchell is the person making the building move. He’s not just “guitarist/producer,” he’s the internal editor, the sound designer, the arranger, and (often) the director of the visual layer that makes Puscifer feel like a whole universe instead of an album cycle.
Press materials around Normal Isn’t frame Mitchell as co-producer and highlight a deliberate decision to bring more edge and aggression into the music via guitar, pulling away some of the guardrails that can make electronic-forward rock feel overly polished.
And if you want a quick snapshot of the album’s DNA, Mitchell basically handed out a cheat sheet. In a “what we were listening to” list shared publicly via Puscifer channels, his reference picks read like a mission statement: art-punk tension (Magazine), classic UK punk bite (Buzzcocks), industrial provocation (Throbbing Gristle), club DNA (Technotronic), and post-punk austerity (Public Image Ltd., New Order).
- Magazine – “The Light Pours Out of Me,” “A Song From Under the Floorboards”
- Buzzcocks – “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)”
- Throbbing Gristle – “Hot on the Heels of Love”
- New Order – “Confused (Instrumental)”
- Public Image Ltd. – “The Order of Death”
- Technotronic – “Pump Up the Jam”
- Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg – “Bonnie and Clyde”
- Bomb the Bass feat. Jon Spencer – “Fuzzbox”
- Underworld – “Moon in Water”
That list explains why Normal Isn’t feels like goth and post-punk influence filtered through modern studio muscle: it’s not cosplay. It’s taste memory, rebuilt with today’s tools.
Carina Round is the difference between Puscifer sounding like a concept and Puscifer sounding like a living, breathing scene. Her voice doesn’t just add harmony, it adds character. It gives the music depth perception. A second narrator. A shadow moving behind the main light.
That’s not marketing copy, Round’s role is explicitly centered in official album materials and the project’s public identity as a trio built on creative chemistry rather than “frontman + backing band.”
Her own “what we were listening to” map is even more revealing because it swings between intimacy and menace, art-pop and trip-hop gravity, modern minimalism and cinematic mood. It’s basically a playlist built for writing songs that feel like they’re happening inside a dimly lit room with a screen flickering somewhere off to the side.
- FKA twigs – “Keep It, Hold It,” “Striptease”
- Cocteau Twins – “Wax and Wane”
- Portishead – “We Carry On”
- Fever Ray – “What They Call Us”
- Tears for Fears – “Ideas as Opiates”
- The KLF – “3AM Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)”
- Aldous Harding – “Treasure”
- Astrid S – “Give My All”
- The Smile – “The Smoke”
- The Cure – “The Kiss”
- Kendrick Lamar (feat. Lefty Gunplay) – “TV Off”
- Bon Iver – “Speyside”
- Frank Ocean – “Pink + White”
- Ennio Morricone – “The Sundown”
Put that next to Mitchell’s punk, industrial, club pull and you can hear the album’s core tension: rigid, propulsive structures with a human voice that keeps trying to haunt the edges of the grid.
Even when Puscifer is framed as a trio, Normal Isn’t is built like a bigger room. Official album info highlights key contributors who help widen the sound without sanding down the weirdness: Greg Edwards (Failure) on bass across the record, plus drummers Sarah Jones and Gunnar Olsen contributing to specific tracks.
The closer “Seven One” is especially stacked, with guest contributions from Tony Levin on bass and Danny Carey on drums, and narration from Ian Ross, an end-of-album swing that feels like Puscifer briefly opening a portal to a different scale of band chemistry.
And that’s where the studio vs live point becomes part of the album’s identity: this record doesn’t pretend it’s a document of three people in a room. It’s a constructed world, built across Puscifer Studio in Los Angeles and the Bunker in Jerome, Arizona, with material developed in motion during the Sessanta tour.
WHAT THE BAND LISTENED TO WHILE MAKING THE ALBUM:
Watch the Rick Beato Interview
Stream the album: Puscifer.lnk.to/NormalIsnt | Official band site: Puscifer.com
