Jake Roche wants to make one thing perfectly clear: “Push Baby is not Rixton.”
Not the Rixton that gave us “Me and My Broken Heart,” not the Rixton that opened for Ariana Grande, and definitely not the Rixton that seemed destined for radio stardom before the algorithm got bored. That version of himself? He burned it down. On purpose.
“It was a total reinvention,” Roche says, half grinning, half exorcising. “I hated everything about what I was doing. I didn’t listen to music for four years. I hated music. I just needed to fall back in love with why I was doing it.”
So what does a recovering pop star do after fleeing major-label gloss? Apparently, he starts a new band with his best mate and names it after a slang term for an exploding penis.
“It just felt right,” Roche says of Push Baby. “It was weird and obnoxious and self-deprecating, which is kind of where I was at mentally. Like, what if we start something that’s not trying to be anything?”
The duo — Roche and drummer Charley Bagnall — started uploading surreal, deeply ironic music videos to YouTube, usually filmed in one location with a healthy amount of chaos and a few too many inside jokes. Somehow, it worked. The Woah EP arrived in 2021 as an actual sonic reset — like 2000s-era Beck if he was trapped in a TikTok filter.
“We weren’t trying to be weird for weird’s sake,” Roche insists. “But yeah, it was a bit manic. Like, ‘Here’s our trauma and also a pink wig.’”
By the time they got to Wow, Big Legend, Push Baby had fully arrived in their own aesthetic. The lyrics were sharp and slightly deranged. The visuals leaned into homemade absurdism. And Jake had finally stopped trying to write for anyone but himself.
“Pop music has always fascinated me,” he says. “Because it’s the most consumed form of art on the planet, but also the most disposable. So we wanted to make pop that doesn’t sit nicely in the feed. That annoys you a bit.”
That ethos shows up most clearly in songs like “Thor” — a three-minute fever dream about modern masculinity disguised as a love song. “It’s really just about how pathetic it is that men are taught to bottle up emotion, and how that turns us into versions of ourselves that are destructive.”
So… like the Marvel character?
“Exactly,” Roche laughs. “But also not. It’s like if Thor had to go to therapy.”
Not trying to be cool has, ironically, made them very cool — at least to a certain crowd that prefers their pop acts to come with existential dread and a suspicious amount of glitter.
Still, Roche knows there’s no going back.
“Rixton was a thing that happened,” he says, diplomatically. “I don’t hate it. But it wasn’t me. It was a version of me trying to survive an industry that didn’t care if I did.”
Push Baby, by contrast, is all about survival on their own terms — no expectations, no formula, no million-dollar producers whispering about virality.
“We don’t even look at the numbers anymore,” he shrugs. “If people find us, cool. If not, we’ll still make weird little albums and videos.”
And if that sounds like a pop star in denial, it isn’t. It’s a guy who walked into the machine, got chewed up, and came out the other side dressed like a clown with a guitar — finally free.
“Pop music is like a haunted house,” Roche says near the end of our chat. “You either run through it screaming, or you stop and start decorating it yourself.”
He grins.
“We bought furniture.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
