Panic Is Perfect

San Francisco based, Panic Is Perfect, came to be in a very roundabout way. Founders, Jeremy Belzer and Mike Hoffman actually formed the project in Southern India by way of travel throughout their relative lives from Kansas City, Portland, Los Angeles, Ghana, Thailand, Korea, China, India eventually settling in the Bay Area and completing the 5-piece live band with the addition of Ty Parker on drums, Joey Hassid on synth and David Monzon on guitar.

Jeremy spent nights listening to records in the library and wound up majoring in Music Composition.  After college, he decided to take to the world with his laptop, guitar and microphone and wrote and recorded hundreds of songs while living in the jungles of Thailand, seeking higher consciousness in India, and sweating in tiny apartments in Korea and China.

Mike, a drummer since the age of 10, dropped out after his first year of music school to travel to West Africa and study with a Master tribal drummer in rural Ghana. Mike played heavily in the local African and Afro-pop scene upon returning home, later moving to LA to finish his education at CalArts. It was there that he was turned on to writing and producing music, making his first solo album on an 8-track tape recorder.

Music is the driver and underneath their syncopated, multi-layered rhythmic arrangements, Panic Is Perfect writes simple indie rock songs with meaningful lyrics and melodies that stay with you long after the songs end. Sharing vocals, Mike and Jeremy sway the listener in and out of catchy vocal and melodic hooks, danceable beats and textures that reflect their well-travelled global tastes and influences. As multi-instrumentalists, they both play most of the instruments on their recordings. They each sing lead vocals on the songs that they contribute as writers, adding more diversity to the overall sound.  Ultimately Panic is Perfect writes songs that, when stripped of all their elaborate production, are meaningful, memorable and undeniably unique and infectious.

Panic Is Perfect released their debut EP Behind Your Eyelids in 2015 with the first single “Go Go Go” charting on Commercial Alternative Radio, #12 on Hype Machine, hitting over 4 million plays on Spotify, landing placements on the European campaign for telecom giant Vodaphone and with over 8 million views the track is featured in the People Are Awesome (Summer Edition) video series. “Go Go Go is about that time just before you start fighting and you’re still new to each other, but things are about to change.”  The track will be featured on the new album.

February 2016, Panic Is Perfect releases their debut album, Cellspace on Strange Loop Records. 11 tracks that weave stories of finding light within the darkness as stated in the track “Turn Back Into Stars”“The world is falling apart and people are waking up to something deeper.” The band describes the first album single “You’re Alive” as follows: “It’s about finding an intense joyful fire within you that is not dependent on external circumstances. It’s finding a fire that burns bright enough that it can transcend your life. Joy that burns through sorrow.”  The selection of songs capture the epic highs and lows of the band’s live set that at times reaches out into the audience and pulls you into their world of progressive, electronic jams and indie rock, percussive dance beats that crash over your head like an exploding color bomb.