On trampolines and treadmills with Annie DiRusso

On the second day, DiRusso woke up with no electricity because she forgot to call the provider when she moved in. She sleeps on a mattress on the floor and the WiFi isn’t being installed until later today, so she has a portable router perched beside her computer – she’d proceed to lose connection several times throughout our conversation.

For DiRusso, the moving process hasn’t been so bad. She bought a dresser made of shiny walnut-coloured wood from some guy’s van for $200. Her roommate hasn’t moved in yet, but she spent yesterday afternoon with a painter named Johnny. He came to touch-up the walls but made sure to bring DiRusso to the deli on the corner – he introduced her to the owner and he promised to make DiRusso the best chopped cheese sandwiches for a discounted price.

These five days in Ridgewood have given DiRusso a feeling of immense relief. This is the first time since graduating from college that she hasn’t been jumping from place to place: a house of musicians in Nashville, tour buses and hotel beds, a sublet in Chinatown, and her parents’ house in Westchester County. In 2025, the 26-year-old musician released her debut album Super Pedestrian and learned to take a beat. On December 5th, she released the deluxe version with three new songs, one of which she recorded this summer.

DiRusso joins our call sitting close to the window, where the Internet connection works the best. She’s wearing a chartreuse knit cardigan with a striped green scarf to match. Her cheeks are rosy from the cold, and she is one of few I’ve ever known to pull off bleached brows. I find myself sitting as still and quietly as possible so as to not miss a single word DiRusso says. Her words are captivating, both in song lyrics and casual conversation.

When DiRusso tilts the computer screen to show me her new dresser, I notice stacks of books piled on either side. “For many years, all I could read were memoirs,” she says. “They were the only things that interested me.” When she started writing Super Pedestrian in 2023, though, DiRusso began exploring works of poetry and fiction. She read Louise Glück’s poetry and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, among other things. Zevin’s novel explores the creative relationship between two video game designers. DiRusso has never been a gamer (nor does she care to be), but she learned that the emotions and practices associated with building video games and writing records aren’t so different.

DiRusso wrote Super Pedestrian in Nashville last year after a stretch of back-to-back tours, including a headlining tour of her 2023 EP God, I Hate This Place. The EP was DiRusso’s first time releasing a collection of songs at once. It’s an honest and disturbingly relatable meditation on coming-of-age, sexuality, family, and love. In the chorus of lead single “Nauseous”, she admits: “I wanna be your pretty girl / I’ll never be your pretty girl.” She fixates on the shape of her body and flushes her anxiety pills down the toilet, because being a woman in her early twenties is absolutely terrifying.

In God, I Hate This Place, DiRusso is buzzing with energy and demanding to be heard. Two years later, she is much more sure of herself. With the same impassioned yet comforting vocals and a knack for storytelling, Super Pedestrian lets DiRusso take control. “I came up with the name for the album after I’d only written three songs in August 2023,” she says. “Superficially, it has to do with the fact that I don’t have a license. But, what it really meant to me was not being in the passenger seat of your own life. If you’re not going to have a license, you’re going to get yourself there, super pedestrian style.”

Like her earlier releases, Super Pedestrian dives into themes of relationships (familial, romantic, and platonic), creativity, and personhood. DiRusso lets herself feel authentically from start to finish. She can wallow in nostalgia and regret, explode with anger, and take quiet moments for gratitude and reassurance.

Super Pedestrian feels like a friend whispering her biggest secrets in your ear. DiRusso never planned to share some of these intimate thoughts, no matter how much they’ve been eating her up inside. She sings in second track “Back In Town”, “Swore I would take to my grave / The fact that I changed my flight / Out of Chicago / Just so I’d see you one more time.” A former partner of hers is sleeping around “somewhere in Idaho,” but DiRusso can’t help her curiosity. She’d be happy to indulge in awkward small talk over a cup of coffee when they return, regretfully.

Throughout her discography, DiRusso mentions her family often. She is the only musician in her family, but they have always backed her choice to pursue music as a full-time career. Her dad works as a facilities manager for hospitals in The Bronx (“just a guy in the office”), her mom is a domestic violence prosecutor, and her brother is a chef. “My music can be pretty explicit and probably hard to hear as a family member of mine, but they’ve only ever been supportive, and that’s beautiful,” DiRusso says.

Arguably, my favourite lyrics on Super Pedestrian appear in first track, “Ovid”. DiRusso sings over, “Girl born on a Tuesday / I hear my dad when I hear the train / C-section baby / My mom cut herself open for me.” The song feels loud and resonant, but her words are delicate and thoughtful. This concept of DiRusso’s mother cutting her body open “for her” is fascinating – a mother’s ultimate labor of love is giving life to a child.

In fourth track “Hungry”, DiRusso grapples with her experience of being sexually assaulted. “Today I called my mom / And told her what you did / After all of these years / I’m finally sure of it,” she sings in the outro. “I felt really dumb in a lot of ways because I grew up with a mom who was a domestic violence prosecutor, so I was super aware of that kind of thing,” DiRusso says. “That really made me realise that it could happen to anyone, and you never think it’s gonna happen to you until it does.”

On that phone call with her mom, DiRusso received a piece of advice she’ll remember for the rest of her life. “I expected my mom to be like, ‘What were you doing? How did you let this happen?’ But she didn’t say that. She said to me, ‘If you’re in a cave with a hungry bear, you’re gonna get eaten. It’s just about proximity to a person.’” At this moment, I look towards DiRusso with tears streaming down my face. Her eyes are glassy too. We then laugh for a second, and I change the subject.

DiRusso didn’t ever plan to release a deluxe version of Super Pedestrian. In fact, the record originally had 13 songs, and she cut it down to 11. “This is the most concise and direct version of the record,” she says. “And I think afterwards, there were songs that I still felt were part of the story.” She and Eden Joel, a friend and fellow musician, spent a few weeks this summer mid-tour building out Super Pedestrian (Deluxe) in Nashville.

The deluxe version began with DiRusso and Joel returning to 25 lost songs she recorded in 2023. The first obvious pick was “Hudson Line” – the last song written for the record. Two years ago, she felt that the song gave an unnecessary resolution to the album. Now, the semi-platonic love song is the perfect reprieve: “I love you in a way that I wanna feel forever / Wanna know you ‘til I lose my mind,” she sings sweetly over acoustic guitar. DiRusso takes a train from Grand Central, traveling homebound on the Hudson Line. The song does feel like a resolution – a natural and satisfying exhale.

“Rotting Ripe” is the only other old recording on Deluxe, which DiRusso and her band recorded with Adam McDaniel (Sophie Thatcher, Wednesday, Angel Olsen) at Drop of Sun in 2023. She was sick while recording, but the congested rasp in her vocal suited “Rotting Ripe” perfectly. “My voice is really reflective of how I felt at that time in my life, before crossing over into Super Pedestrian,” she says.

It was difficult for DiRusso to force herself back in the headspace of her 2023 self. “We were revisiting a bunch of older songs, and I just couldn’t,” she says. It was so uninspiring to me, and it was starting to upset me. I was so not in that space anymore, and it was hard to try and rehash it.” Instead of dwelling on the past, DiRusso chose to write and record a new song – two weeks ahead of its release as a single.

She wrote “Muck” with Joel and Hank Heaven over the summer. Joel and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia, Charly Bliss) produced. And her band began teasing the song at shows in October. “Muck” is sexy and exciting, and DiRusso is able to say the things we wish we could say but don’t. “I guess what’s wrong / Is when we’re kissing, we can’t talk / But when we’re talking, we can’t kiss,” she proclaims in the chorus. “Muck” has become DiRusso’s favourite song on the record, which could be a product of recency bias. She’s not quite sure.

DiRusso’s friends are of utmost importance to her, and she involves them in her creative processes whenever possible. Her childhood best friend Loretta Violante made the cover art for her earlier projects, and DiRusso worked with Luke Rogers, another long-time friend, to build the creative world of Super Pedestrian. “All of [Rogers’] stuff is so beautiful, and I always want things to be, like, really ugly,” she laughs.

Some initial album art ideas included several mini DiRussos dancing and DiRusso driving a Flintstone car. “And then it was like, ‘No, it’s gotta be me as a centaur,’” she says. DiRusso wanted an image of herself sitting on the back of herself as a centaur, but Rogers vetoed it. It would’ve been much too cartoonish, obviously. DiRusso and Rogers shot with a real horse and spent hours on his couch melding the two into an autonomous mythological creature.

DiRusso has also collaborated with friends she has met through making music: a stripped-down version of “Back In Town” with Samia for the deluxe record and a music video for “Good Ass Movie” with Eliza McLamb, Kelly Heyer, Caroline Calloway, and Caleb Hearon. “Meeting all these different cool people this year and the past years has been so special. Especially other musicians and comedians whose work I really love,” she says. “And getting to collaborate with people is the coolest thing ever. It’s like, ‘Yeah, okay I love your shit, and now we get to make stuff together.’”

Last year, DiRusso and Hearon co-headlined the Jamming Offline music comedy tour, which has been her favorite tour to date. Each night would feature a performance from DiRusso and Hearon, a guest comedian, a guest drag queen, and a dance party to “Since U Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson. “Every night would be the best night ever,” she says.

The Jamming Offline tour, too, helped DiRusso realise how she wanted her shows to feel. “When I went on the EP tour, I had this distinct feeling that I wanted people to leave and feel moved, like they got punched in the gut,” she says. DiRusso would feel disappointed when audiences would describe her shows as “fun.” Then, she learned that happiness and joy are equally big emotions to sadness and yearning. “We’re dancing, we’re on trampolines, we’re on treadmills,” she says. “I realised there is something so powerful about being about to create a fun evening for people.”

2025 has been a year of great change for Annie DiRusso. She released her first record (and her first deluxe record), made her late night debut on Jimmy Kimmel, and performed a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR Music. Additionally, DiRusso decided to permanently move back to New York City after a year of living out of suitcases in sublets and spare bedrooms. “As soon as I got to New York the first week, I was like, ‘Oh shit, I gotta stay here,’’ she says. “I just felt so engaged with life again.”

Moving forward, DiRusso is attacking life Super Pedestrian style. She is performing songs she loves, relying on her community when she needs them, and feeling more sure of herself than ever before. She’s looking forward to slurping bowls of warm soup, sneaking out of her apartment for solo midnight movies, and seeing as much of her new city as possible. Also, getting her WiFi router set up so she doesn’t have to take calls by the window.