photo by Aria Cabello
Sofia Zarzuela, the lead singer of NYC-based band, Veronica, jumps up and down in a Brooklyn park to stay warm as she chats with me over an afternoon phone call. It’s two days before 2025, and she’s fresh off another year of being a downtown It Girl in the music scene. Zarzuela is the main songwriter and ringleader of the band, churning out raw, emotional poetry that morphs into tracks as visceral as they are haunting. But this isn’t a solo project—this year, the band officially became a five-piece, consisting of guitarists Stavros Lari and Dylan Hamburger, drummer Billy Hay, and bassist Joe Kerwin, and began leaning into a collective energy that amplifies their moody, 90s-inspired sound. From Veronica’s annual party, The Great American Mud-Wrestling Show, to the release of their debut EP, Rottweiler, Zarzuela reflects on some moments that defined her 2024.
photo by Marcus Maddox
Aria: So, the most obvious thing is that the band name went from Sofia Zarzuela to Veronica this year. What inspired the change?
Sofia: I knew that I didn’t want the band to have my name for a long time because the music is really built out with the boys, and it felt weird to take all the credit for it. I wanted it to be “Veronica something” for years because it’s my favorite name ever. I love Veronica Mars, I love the movie Heathers (the main character is named Veronica), and I grew up on the Archie comics and one of the main characters is Veronica Lodge. It also was almost my mom’s name and it’s a biblical name. It’s just a super important name to me. I wanted to do something kind of like Mazzy Star but we couldn’t come up with a second word. Me, Stav and Billy would spitball names like “Veronica Blows”, “Veronica Forever”, “Veronica Worm”, but any second word we would try to add didn’t work and so my friend Phoebe was like, “Just have it be Veronica!”
Aria: I love it. It definitely sounds super rock ‘n’ roll somehow.
Sofia: I’m so glad to hear that!
Aria: What was your favorite show that the band played this year?
Sofia: I think our EP release show because it was just us playing and it was at Otto’s Shrunken Head which is this cool tiki bar in East Village. We packed it out with all of our friends and when we played “Pleasantville”, everyone was singing along and I just started sobbing on stage and I couldn’t stop crying. The idea that something so sad was transmuted and to hear people singing it back made me so emotional. I’ll remember it forever.
Aria: That’s really beautiful.
Sofia: Yeah, well there was that and then of course, mud wrestling.
Aria: Hell yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to be?
Sofia: Yeah, so we had the idea about two years ago because I was in a November Girl music video that Lola Daehler directed. I guess there’s a porn genre where girls get their cars stuck in mud. Anyway, I acted in it and then Willa (November Girl) and I really had a thing about mud, and we had the idea of doing a mud wrestling show. So, this was the second one and her friends really helped make it like a bigger thing. It was really fun but then the sediment clogged the drain at Trans Pecos so there was mud and water everywhere and we had to stop the wrestling like halfway through, which was kind of sad, but still really fun.
Aria: Haha, yeah, I remember I got there a little late and missed the wrestling, but the bands were killer so I was not disappointed! On another note, how do you feel like the band has changed in the past year?
Sofia: So, we’re a five piece now. My friend, Dylan joined on guitar, and I feel like we really established the sound and like leaned into what I’ve always wanted to do, which is grungier and kind of, I don’t want to say it’s nu metal-y but pulling a lot of Deftones inspiration and a heavier sound. I also think that coming up with the band name has allowed it to feel more like a collective project between the five of us. We’ve been cycling through a bunch of stuff that we don’t like, like doing lots of photo shoots, music videos and whatever else that doesn’t really work, and we’ve been figuring out what we actually want the band to be, which is really nice.
Aria: Totally. Sounds like a transitional kind of year.
Sofia: Yeah, definitely.
Aria: Is there a Veronica lyric that kind of sums up the year for you?
Sofia: I think in “Blue Ribbon”, the lyric “Do you know how long I’ve been thinking of you? Of course all is forgiven.” I think forgiveness has been heavy with the project and with my life. I feel like a lot of Rottweiler is about making amends with deeply traumatic things that have happened in my life. Most of it is reflecting back on all these friendships and relationships I had with women as a teenager. Now, being in my 20s, I’m sort of moving on from the craziness of that. So, I like the idea of forgiveness. It’s important to me and I think it comes up a lot in the music. I don’t know about guys. They don’t have problems like that.
Aria: Do you feel like the rest of the band is super receptive to your lyrics?
Sofia: They’re far more focused on the instrumentation, which is very alien to me.
Aria: That’s interesting, being a girl in a band with only guys.
Sofia: I think it’s good. It levels it out. I’m such a lyric-heavy writer and it’s always been how my process starts, with like three chords and a lot of words, but it’s nice to have people kind of rounding out on the other side because I know how I want things to sound and even though I’ve been playing guitar for a really long time, with the intricacies of a band I can really be like, “I want this to be more emotional. I want this to be sexier. I want this to be whatever,” and they can take that and build it out. It’s more of their language.
Aria: Yeah, that makes sense. Having talked to all-female bands, it seems like there can be some difficulty when everything is saturated in emotion.
Sofia: Yeah, I totally needed this process because I have enough emotions for the five of us.
photo by Alexis Kleshik
Aria: What can we expect from Veronica in 2025?
Sofia: Well, I’m going to New Orleans in five days to film a music video and I’m really excited about that. Then, we’re going to start working on our second EP. It’s like half-written and I have the titles in my mind for every song and all the themes are really there, but it’s kind of about getting the perfect songs. There’s a big world in my head and I have all these ideas for videos, and I’ve been training for the things that I want to do. So, just kind of executing that and hopefully putting out a song or two, if not the whole EP in 2025.
Aria: What do you mean by training? You don’t have to give it away, but I’m intrigued.
Sofia: I want it to be a surprise.
Aria: Keeping it mysterious, love that. Last question: what were your top artists or albums of the year?
Sofia: I feel like so much of my Spotify Wrapped was New York bands. I’ve been obsessed with the Sex Week EP and we’re always playing that really loud in the car and screaming along. The new Gun album, Le Bang single Pretty Sick’s EP have also been on repeat. On my own, I’ve been revisiting a lot of old Nicole Dollanganger and Deftones.
You can listen to Rottweiler below: