Plastic Nancy perform at Sound Spectrum in Laguna Beach / Photo by Niyaz Pirani
A handful of lineup changes, a global pandemic, and a coast-to-coast move would be enough to break up a band with lesser bonds. Despite all of those obstacles occurring over the course of a decade, Richmond, Virginia’s Plastic Nancy is seemingly just getting started.
The psychedelic rock band—which conjures a classic, dreamy 60s sound with killer riffs and modern flourishes of pedal steel guitar, organ, and synth—calls Orange County home base these days after forming in the mid-2010s on the East Coast.
The core duo behind the project, singer-guitarists Sam Clemens and John DeGarmo, bonded in college over a shared love of the band Love and the local music scene. Four albums, an EP, and a handful of singles have been the result of consistent output amongst constant tumult. They solidified their current lineup in the last year.
Plastic Nancy’s latest release, June’s “Perpetual Now,” features 10 tracks that pair just as well with a breezy Santa Ana day as they do a night out kicking up dust in a local mosh pit. We spoke with the band about their journey from Virginia to O.C., the new album, signing with Slouch Records and more.
Niyaz Pirani: Who would be credited with founding Plastic Nancy? Or is it a collaboration? It's—
Sam Clemens: … It's a cult. I kinda started it. I was in a punk band in high school called Shirt/Pants—“Shirt slash Pants.” ’Cause someone said we played shoegaze music, and we were like, “Pfft, might as well be Shirt/Pants.” It was a dumb joke.
I played garage punk with that band. I wanted to branch out and do more psychedelic kinda stuff. I was starting to get into that really heavy my senior year of high school.
Long story short, the punk band fell apart. I went to college and met John. We started working on songs together, and it just sort of morphed into a new thing. Instead of changing any sort of name or aesthetic or anything, we just kept that and made it something brand new.
NP: You're from Virginia?
SC: I grew up in this place called Woodbridge, which is Northern Virginia. But then my whole family moved—right before I met him, we moved to Richmond, Virginia. So I say I'm from Richmond.
NP: You're also from Virginia?
John DeGarmo: Yes. I grew up 30 minutes from him, just outside D.C. Then we both went to college in Richmond. Didn't last long there.
SC: No, we didn't. It's funny because we grew up pretty close to each other, but we never crossed paths.
JD: There's photos of us, though, in the mosh pits of similar shows.
SC: We'd go see FIDLAR, Twin Peaks, The Orwells, all that garage rock stuff back in the day. We'd go to the same shows but just didn't know each other.
John DeGarmo and Sam Clemens / Courtesy of Plastic Nancy
NP: How did you end up meeting?
JD: He was a roommate of my good friend in college, and he told me that he—the second I met him—I found out that he had opened for Twin Peaks, which, that was one of my favorite bands. From then I was like, “This guy's cool.”
SC: I was immediately just like, “Oh, you play guitar?” I play guitar. I had those demos that I had recorded under the name Plastic Nancy, which is a Love—if you know the band Love from the ’60s—it was a reference to that. It was an inside joke with some friends at the time, and I didn't plan on keeping it at all as a name, but it just sort of stuck.
NP: How much of a Love fan are you versus how much of an inside joke is the name?
SC: Mega, mega Love fans. We all love Love. We all love Love very much. (The band is named after a Love lyric in the song “The Daily Planet.”)
An Early Version of the Band / Photo Courtesy of Plastic Nancy
NP: Two guitarists don't make a band, so where do you go from ‘We both play guitar?’
SC: We've been through a lot of different lineups over the years. The old drummer from my Shirt/Pants band was our drummer, and we played a few gigs with him, but he didn't drive, and we lived far away, and he wasn't very reliable, so we got another drummer. Then another one to fill in, and then another drummer. And then another one. We had a bass player. Just like …
Travis Garman: Eight drummers.
SC: Something like that at this point. We had this patch. You're just finding people through …
TG: The local music scene, basically.
SC: Richmond, Virginia. It's got a really—shit's going down—vibrant, happening music scene. It always has. GWAR is from there. Lamb of God is from there. A lot of punk bands too in the ’80s. The Hangmen in the ’60s. Even further than that, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (lived) there.
… It was either people that we had met through the brief time we were in college or knew just by going to shows, mainly house shows. House shows are a big thing in Richmond.
The first real bass player we got was this guy, Mikey Reyes, who used to come to my Shirt/Pants shows. … We all lived together for a period of time and hosted house shows. We'd get 300 kids in our backyard, and the floor caving in, just about. That happened.
Photo Courtesy of Plastic Nancy
NP: You guys are playing house shows, acquiring band members, and I know you had an album in 2017. What year is this when you guys are founded versus the first album?
JD: We actually have an album in 2016 that's not out. We dropped it on Bandcamp, and that's all. That's the only place you can find it. Now it's fallen into obscurity. It was a short little EP we recorded with two microphones, really DIY.
SC: Initially, that first album, not even the one John's talking about, but the one that's actually out, was pretty much just us playing everything on it. … Drums are very loose and that was just us kinda getting our bearings a little bit. So it wasn't until we found that bass player, Mikey—when we moved in together—we still didn't really have a drummer, and he was like, “Hey, my friend Brian just moved back from Spain and he needs a place to live. Could he just crash on our couch for a couple weeks?”
Next thing we knew he was there for two years. He was crashing illegally on the couch and we were like, “Okay, well, do you play drums?” He was like, “No, not really.”
“But do you want to?”
He became our first actual drummer. He became our drummer just to sleep on the couch. Gotta earn your way in, I guess. That was around the time we put out our next release—and kinda the first real band that we had together—which was the Fuzztime EP.
It was all recorded live. That was our first full band endeavor. That lineup lasted for a while and we did a couple tours with that. Then COVID hit and that was sort of the end of it all for a while.
Sam Clemens of Plastic Nancy / Photo Courtesy of Plastic Nancy
Fans Dance at a Plastic Nancy Show / Photo Courtesy of Plastic Nancy
It all fell apart. There were inside squabbles with different band members, and so we all moved out of the house we lived in. I moved back in with my folks. John moved back to Arlington for a while.
JD: It was very sudden. We had to relearn how to live normally a little bit. But we ended up still making music together over email. We'd have different parts and pieces. Sometimes he'd drive up; it's like a two-hour drive.
He'd drive up just for band practice from Richmond, drive two hours back, just to record maybe two parts of a song, and then maybe I'd send something to him, he'd send something to me, and it somehow turned into an album after four years of doing that.
For a Laugh / 2025
NP: What year was that album?
JD: That came out 2024? And that was—we released it actually when we moved to L.A.
NP: So what was the decision to move to L.A.? You had piece-worked an album together in COVID. Just you two came out?
SC: That old bassist Mikey, and then this new drummer, Pete Myers, who we brought in, who I'd known for a long time, just through the music scene in Maryland.
SC: If we're talking about why we're in California now, it's …
JD: It's not because we were trying to make it. It's ’cause I fell in love. Just on a whim, I had a van and I was like, “I could live in my van in California.” I'm not gonna do that in D.C. I moved out here, started dating a girl and basically made my roots here.
The girl that did our artwork for the last album we did before COVID, she showed me her artwork basically, and I fell in love with her art. Before I even knew who she was, what she looked like, who she was … or anything. We started talking and we're sharing music back and forth, and she always says she fell in love with my music taste.
John DeGarmo on Sam Clemens of Plastic Nancy: “We always refer to each other as non-biological brothers.”
NP: Then how did you get (Sam) out here?
TG: Before that, (John) and I were playing together.
SC: So we had patched that album together, “For A Laugh,” through emails, and this was while John had met his girlfriend. We didn't really know what to do with it, and then John moved out here and met Travis.
TG: I started playing at Sound Spectrum (the Laguna Beach record store). We were starting to rehearse, just a duo. Old garage rock tunes we were playing. It was called Magic Lurks.
JD: We came up with that (Plastic Nancy) song “Love Overdose” together in the Sound Spectrum.
SC: I was running a nightclub in Washington, D.C. … It got a little seedy and a little weird. By the end it got really weird, and I was like, “I gotta get the fuck out of here and do something else.” We had that album that we made, and we were just sitting on it. John, just in our communication back and forth, was like, “Well, I've made a lot of friends here in California.”
SC: You'd lived here for …
JD: Two years at that point.
SC: He was like, “I've got this homie, Travis, who is a killer drummer. We're playing together. Like, what if we …”
TG: I fucked up my finger really bad. I cut it open when I was really drunk. I couldn't play drums for a long time. There was a two- or three-month period where I couldn't play drums, and that was right when Sam was coming out here for the first few times. Fantastic. So the first show they played out in California was without me. It was with two other guys. The second show, I was playing bass. The third show, I moved to drums.
TG: That's when it all …
Navv Malaviya: … clicked.
Navv Malavia of Plastic Nancy / Photo by Niyaz Pirani
TG: The first three shows of Plastic Nancy in California were completely different lineups.
NM: There was a bassist that they had before. … I had met Sam, I wanna say, three months after I moved out here. I'm originally from Ohio, and then I went to school in Boston, and then I moved here ’cause my parents moved here, and so it saved money, made sense.
I had a friend who lives up in L.A., and she was playing a Velvet Underground song at this John Cale covers night at Golddiggers. Sam was one of the first people who played. And I don't remember what song it was, but I was really enamored with you, already off the bat.
SC: I did “I'll Keep It With Mine.” It's a deep cut Nico song. I was trying to be really cool.
NM: It worked. It was great. I met him, and then he invited me out to a Plastic Nancy show, out in Costa Mesa at the Wayfarer ’cause I live out here. … It was early 2025. I'd been playing in a couple bands in L.A., but I didn't have a car yet. I didn't have my license. I have it now. It was just really hard to make the commute back and forth, so I dropped out of both those bands, and I was just stewing at home, bored as shit.
I post on my Instagram story. I'm like, “Hey, if any bands need a bassist or a guitarist, hit me up. I'm like looking to play shows again.”
JD: And we were in desperate need. We were doing a three-piece where Sam was on bass. Sam's a guitar player at heart.
NM: John hit me up. First rehearsal felt really good. And …
TG: This guy learned like 20 songs in a week.
NP: At that point, you guys have a record that you can put out, right?
TG: We recorded that record (“Perpetual Now”) before Navv came in. He's not on the cover. There's only three of us on the cover. It was like April or May (of 2025). We did the album very quickly ’cause we wanted to have it for an upcoming tour, and then we didn't have it. It got done really fast, but we sat on it for a little bit. Now we got vinyl pressed, everything's done, and it's finally coming out.
Perpetual Now / 2026
NP: When I was listening to the album, I understood the inspiration and the vision. From (Your) perspective … how does it feel as we talk about a decade’s worth of work?
SC: It feels great to know that the whole 10 years has been such a roller coaster and such an evolutionary journey. That's just life in general, right? It'll take you for a ride. Using music as an outlet to express or carve that out ourselves is really a powerful feeling. It's like chapters in a book. That last album was the last chapter, and now we're turning the page and we're in a new chapter.
That's a really good feeling. It makes you feel almost in control of your destiny, or something. But, also, we always try to keep things very natural. We love the music of the '60s, but also the music of the '70s, punk rock and all that stuff. Jam bands. We take in influence from everywhere.
TG: We all have very different backgrounds … we listen to a lot of—like Nav has a completely different music taste than I. John and Sam, same thing.
JD: … When I met Travis, he was playing in this band called Big Sur.
TG: Oh, this is hilarious.
JD: I met Travis after the show, and I was like, “This guy is cool as fuck.” He knows so much about music and everything, and I was like, “Damn, I wish, like …” He wasn't in a band, but I also was like, “I don't think he would work in Plastic Nancy ’cause it was very soft music and low.”
TG: The music of this band, The Big Sur, was very, very soft. Soft. It was almost like Crosby, Stills, Nash, harmony-driven rock.
JD: I think I called Sam, and I was like—yeah, I remember this call—I was like, “I found this guy, Travis. He plays drums. He'd be perfect for the band. He just doesn't hit hard enough on the drums.”
TG: I’m just holding back.
JD: So hard. And I was like, “Yeah, I didn't know that this guy was a monster on the drums.” That was just him in that band.
TG: It was not my normal drumming style.
JD: The first time we jammed, it was like, “Holy shit.” The beast is …
SC: … unleashed.
Plastic Nancy with Tommy Newman of Slouch Records
NP: Tell me about the record deal and the company that you're working with now.
SC: Slouch. Slouch Records. They …
JD: Bunch of scammers. No, I'm kidding.
SC: Bunch of slouches. No, they’re …
JD: … the best.
SC: Tommy Newman, shout out … runs a record store. San Antonio. South Town Vinyl. He's from Texas originally, and his wife is in film school, so he moved out here. This was in the last two years, so it's a very new thing. (He) saw the music scene in Los Angeles in particular and thought, ‘This is cool.’
Through Permanent Records (in Los Angeles), he was a manager there and he got to meet a lot of different bands. He was booking bands. He just got an idea to try to curate and create this scene, which he's been doing a great job of doing, and he has. … It started with just him, but now he's got a team and it's a very official organization. They've got a great lineup of bands.
… We made friends with him. For a while it was this unspoken thing like, we're gonna work together eventually. … What it came down to is we started recording this album on our own. We recorded two songs, and we knew that it was going to be an album, but we were self-funding it and we had booked this big two-and-a-half-week-long tour back in January.
TG: All the way up the coast of Washington.
SC: Way up to right below the border of Canada. We set a deadline for ourselves to have the album done by then, and I think that's when we sort of reached back out. We kept pestering Tommy again. “It would be really cool to have records to sell on this tour.” He completely agreed.
He really stuck his neck out for us, man. He said, “I can set you up with my guy. You'll have two days in his studio, he will mix and master it, or I will get someone to master it,” and his guy was Tomas Dolas, who is the keyboard player for Thee Oh Sees. He also has a project, Mr. Elevator.
That was the deal. We had two days basically to record eight songs and knock them all out quick.
NP: What are the songs on this album about?
SC: It's a record of change and of …
JD: … new beginnings.
SC: That's the general sense.
JD: It's getting out of being stuck in a loop almost. I feel like there's always, throughout all of our records, there's always a hint of nostalgia in the lyrics, and of looking back on the past, but moving forward with it.
SC: A lot of it, too, is a reflection of Los Angeles. I was thinking about this the other day. The first song, “In The Breeze,” is inspired by the Santa Ana winds and how when I first got out here, that was the first song I wrote in California, and then fleshed it out with the group.
The first idea was getting here and how windy it was, and that was right when those fires were happening. So that is represented in that song. “Beware of the Dog” is the nightlife in Los Angeles, or really anywhere. That one honestly is more of a reflection of some of the scenes you might run into when you're going out shows all the time and dealing with crazy people.
NP: It feels ominous, like it has that kind of energy … The pacing to it.
TG: Half of the album's a reaction to crazy people.
SC: There's …
TG: … a lot of chaos in the album.
SC: Chaos is a good word. It's sort of, I guess the idea of making anything is to, make, to organize chaos. And we only try to do that to the degree that we can actually make something.
We wanna retain some of the chaos. That's pretty well reflected in this album. Even a song like “The Jukebox Heart,” which is kind of upbeat and country-ish, a happy-sounding song, it has this duality. There's a reason the album is black and white, because it's so, it's kinda …
TG: … Cheaper to print.
SC: Cheaper to print. There we go. But no, it's the yin-yang of life. The ups and downs, the changes, and how sometimes things stay the same even as other things change. That's a central element.
TG: More things change, the more they …
JD: … stay the same.
SC: As they say.
Upcoming Shows
Oct. 22 / The Echo / Los Angeles
Nov. 15 / The Wayfarer / Costa Mesa
Nov. 25 / Shhh … / It’s a Secret
Jan. 15 / Crepe Place / Santa Cruz
Jan. 30 / Permanent Records / Los Angeles
Feb. 20 / Whisky A Go-Go / Los Angeles (opening for Strawberry Alarm Clock)
