Graduating with ‘Pennies’: The Explosive Debut Album by TheFleok
This April, I sat down for a conversation with recent Columbia graduate Leo Jergovic, frontman of the collective band TheFleok. Fresh off the release of his debut album and opening Bacchanal 2025, Leo breaks down pennies track-by-track. A measure of growth since TheFleok’s first EP, pennies tells its stories through repetition and meditative interludes, tapping into the universality of difficult emotions. Listen to the full interview, complete with snippets from the album, and read the edited transcript below.
So we have to start by talking about Bacchanal, of course. You were the student opener— what did that mean to you to play Bacchanal in your senior year?
I think it was a really cool experience, probably the biggest stage we’ve played. Just to hear our music on speakers that big was pretty surreal. A lot of my family came out; our guitarist Gui’s family came out. We’re very grateful for the experience to play that show.
So you’ve just released Pennies. This is your first album: how is it different for you to approach working on an album versus an EP?
It’s honestly just been very long, and it gets pushed back when you wanna change things, or perfect things. Most of these songs were written or pretty much finished being written more than a year ago, so it’s just a very long process of getting in the studio, and getting takes that everyone likes, and fine tuning. So now to have the whole project coming out it’s almost like a sigh of relief, getting to tell the full story cohesively. I’m very excited to have it out. It’s been a long time coming.
Did you record everything on campus or did you outsource for any moments?
Everything was either at my home studio in California or on campus, but most of it was in CU Records. Everything instrumental that you hear was [recorded] on campus.
Well, I feel like we should dive into the album. It opens with “need your love.” I felt like this was such a celebration of music and live performance— I loved it as the intro. To me it felt like you’re walking into a garage band and there are people just jamming for their lives in there.
I think the whole point of that track was to emulate our live shows, so it’s really cool you observed that. I was really into this Dijon album Absolutely… There’s a crazy live album video where Mk.gee– his guitarist— is playing the same riff over and over again and it’s a slow churn building up, so I think I had that in the back of my mind. I got Gui (Matos) and Satchel (Moore), who are better guitarists than me, to come in and mess around with it and build the song around [that simple idea].
We try to start the shows with that song because I think that’s really where the sweet spot is for us; we get to have a lot of fun. We wrote a lot of the songs on this album to perform them, so we wanted to put people in that headspace right away.
There’s an improvisational quality to it. Your band has really great chemistry and that really comes through in the first track. Then it bleeds into the second track, “baby i need you,” in a really organic way— narratively it draws you in. What were your thoughts behind that extension of the first track?
We had been playing “need your love” at some shows. We were just kinda jamming at a rehearsal and “baby i need you” came out of the first song. Gui was playing the guitar riff, I start singing… it becomes a whole other song. What I like about that is crowds will start singing along: “baby I need you.” You get to that raw human emotion there. That one’s designed to feel kind of like a jam session.
Then by the time you get to that third track, you’re really sitting in the groove of the album and of the band. “I’ll be there to walk you home” was the first single. Why did you choose it?
That song was ready and we felt really good about it at that time. I think it had a nice energy, it was very simple, and it also kinda tells a very New York story. Walking someone home is this very distinct thematic component. It has a melancholy feel to it, but also that sort of loose band energy.
And then the fourth track is “do it again,” which I felt was very Strokes-esque. I know we talked in the fall about your inspirations musically, and I was wondering if those have evolved as you created this album.
100% Strokes— I’ve listened to The Strokes for a long time. A lot of indie rock and punk rock. I got really into Iggy Pop, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground. That raw-distorted feel really comes out in “fuck your show.” We wanted to capture distorted, imperfect vocals; it’s not about everything being super clean, but just the energy. That’s also why I think the music is live-coded because it’s less about everything falling into the right places but more about feel and responding to people. I think “do it again” is very much influenced by that.
That one really explodes in a different way. It’s all leading up to that climactic point in the album. Especially since then it goes into the “pennies in park trash can” interlude, and that really marks a thematic shift. I was wondering what your thought process was behind including that piano interlude.
I grew up doing some theatre, that’s kinda how I started singing when I was younger, and I think what I always remembered about doing musicals is the last song in the play will often happen in the first act in some kind of minimalistic form. In this case, I thought it would be cool to throw something like that in there. I was playing around with that little piano riff [when] I was in Austin over Thanksgiving of last year. I have a really old upright piano that I got on Craigslist for free (that’s a whole other story). It’s super out of tune, beat up, but you have the birds and the wind in the background, so I was like, oh, I’m just gonna take a voice memo of this. It fit in perfectly.
So is the track on the album the original voice memo?
Yeah, I think you can even hear me putting the phone down or something like that.
How does your collaboration with the rest of your band look, is it you coming to them with ideas, or do you record and write at the same time?
I think lyrically I often think of a lot of the ideas individually and at least what the initial musical components are. When I have music and lyrics and want to arrange it, that’s really when the band becomes involved. I start to hear different elements that I know these guys can play, or they’ll come up with something that’s even better than what I’m proposing. The songs really start to arrange and evolve around the band.
It’s awesome that it’s such a collaboration. Are you guys often all together in the same room when you’re recording or do you pull in people to do their parts?
I think [we’re all together] as much as we can be. When we can be, I think the songs are the best. It really works well. “I’m not invited,” with the exception of some parts we layered in later, is all on one day with everyone there, and it feels like everyone is playing together when I listen to it.
You can’t beat that chemistry sometimes of everyone being together. You mentioned “i’m not invited,” which is the next track that the album leads into. I feel like that’s a very emotionally poignant song and a very different tone than the beginning of the album. What marks that emotional shift in the album’s narrative for you?
I think the album is capturing different ways to process negative emotions or feelings of anxiety. In the case of “i’m not invited,” I definitely agree: that thematic shift is really when it becomes more insular. You’re not invited, and that feeling is very repetitive and very simple. The start of the album… is super big, there’s this energy. Then when you get to “i’m not invited,” it’s very much zoned in on yourself. We wanted to capture more shoegaze-y, reverb-heavy, thoughts echoing in your mind. I think repetition is effective– people can latch onto things. When you think about hard topics like these, they just repeat in your head.
And then “g-string” has this almost droning quality to it that we were just touching on. After these explosive tracks of “do it again” and “i’ll be there to walk you home” there’s this lull— you really sit in that emotional feeling for those two songs. The shift is really clear.
When you sent it to me you said “if you want to listen in order…” and I’m such a purist, I have to listen to an album in order the first time I listen to it. I think especially with this, out of order it tells a completely different story. I could tell that you were very intentional with [the order].
It changed a lot. It was definitely something I thought about a lot. It matters. With “g-string” it was very much like it had to melt into that a little bit more. If you’re listening in order you kind of melt into that state.
But then it goes right into “fuck your show,” which is a re-record from your first EP, so I was curious what your decision behind revisiting this track was. It definitely has a very different emotional charge than the original recording.
I’ve wanted to re-record that for a long time. It’s sort of like doing that track justice. I like the old recording, but I think this is really more what it feels like to play that song. There’s a song called “Heroine” [by Nico and The Velvet Underground] that has this really slow build up: the instruments are super erratic, lots of distortion— tension release, tension release. I always wondered what it was like to be in the room to see him singing, losing his mind. That’s kind of what I want that song to feel like— super cathartic.
I think that’s such a cool way to display how your sound has evolved in the two years since you put it out. It’s cool that music is such a living thing; a recording can be a snapshot, but you can always revisit it. You used the word “catharsis” and I wrote that down too. [This track] explodes, and I love the drums at the end and the different vocal approach you took from the original too.
But then the album concludes with “pennies,” which is a pretty different track from some of the rest of the album. You come in [with] a spoken quality but then the instruments slowly, over the course, drown you out, and it really explodes into this massive ending.
With that one, I wrote a poem in a book I was reading– I think Doestoyevsky or something super messed up.
Very Columbia.
Yeah, yeah exactly. But I wrote this poem and then I was just noodling on the guitar. I wanted to capture this poem in a very intense way where you’re sort of talking over the song. The influence for that is Nick Cave. He has a song, “(I’ll Love You) Till The End of The World,” where he’s talking over a song and telling a story.
“pennies” almost feels like an epilogue for this album. I think the messaging there that I wanted to capture. You’re putting pennies over someone’s eyes, and that’s sort of like retiring an idea; It’s sort of like casting away those messages and those ideas– the “im not invited”, “fuck your show,” — putting those ideas away and casting them to sea. The rest of the song is this very instrumental, yelling “I really love you” into the microphone; it’s a very childish celebration. At the end of the day [those negative emotions] are all there, but you love your parents, you love the people you make music with, you love the process of creating. It’s a celebration of getting this done, which is how I’m feeling now.
How has it been trying to balance your musical project with Columbia life?
It’s hard. With music it’s something you really have to make time for; it’s easy to lose track of. I’ve tried to put the same effort that I would into a class. We want to play shows, we want to play these songs in front of people. We’re proud of the music we make. I think it takes a lot of work to make it happen. But I’ve loved it. I don’t mind sleeping a little less, staying up late and doing concerts and having fun with that. It’s the best thing ever.
Stream pennies now, and check out TheFleok on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, and Instagram.