Mila Culpa
The Philly DIY rocker stops by to talk movies, identity, her latest album, and what she listened to last week.
I’ve been listening to Philly DIY rocker Mila Culpa’s music for a few years now, ever since the release of her record Two Birds on tastemaker label True Panther back in 2022. Her songwriting has always stood out as having an abrupt closeness to it, drawing you in but also keeping it’s guard up. The production often mirrored the effect; raw, 4-piece band acoustics shrouded in tape fuzz and layered with electronic squiggles and whirs. But on Face Off, her excellent new record and first under her new name, these tricks of distance get dropped and, suddenly, we hear Mila clear as day. This is an album that treks in identity and death, a story of transition communicated across 9 catchy as hell tracks straddling grunge, emo and noise music. It’s my favorite record of hers to date and a highlight of 2025 for sure. I was super excited to sit down with Mila and ask her all about the album and what she’s been listening to lately.
Nick DeMasi: I want to start with your name change. I had to remind myself what mea culpa means, but I really like the identification with a state of grace. How did you decide on Mila Culpa and where did it come from?
Mila Culpa: It’s funny we’re talking about this because I was recently Googling “Mila Culpa” and saw a post on the Alex G subreddit of somebody linking to my old songs as Tobias and being like “Does anybody know who this is? It’s really not SEO friendly.” It reminded me of part of the reason I even did it in the first place. Just the lack of SEO. I was constantly getting my songs mixed up with the German DJ Tobias. with a period. Also writing about the things I write about and tying that to my literal government name felt really cursed. I don’t think I was meant to be that autobiographical of a musician, if that makes sense. Especially with the dead name. And on a spiritual level too. Tobias means “to love Yahweh” or something and I don’t necessarily know if I love Yahweh, you know.
I never knew that. That’s a very profound meaning for Tobias.
Yeah so that was going into it. Picking a name was really hard and frustrating but Mila Culpa flashed into my mind because, and I’m kind of blowing up my spot right now, I used to have a manager pseudonym and the first name was Mila. It was my fake manager and I got bookings that way. So I wanted to use something with that name and then Mila Culpa just kind of beamed into my brain. It felt jokey so I wasn’t gonna use it, but then I sent it to Luna from Total Wife and she was like, “That’s it.” And I was like, “All right, yeah, that’s it.”
When did you actually finalize the name? Because even earlier this year you released something under Tobias.
That must have been March and then I had a song, “God Keeps Track,” that I was ready to put out in May, and I wanted two weeks to upload it and make a new artist page for all the apps, so the name was finalized on the day I submitted the song.
I’m also interested in the time period you wrote Face Off over. In your press release you mentioned that “Thread” is a rewrite from your very first album, but when did you rewrite that? And how long were these other songs kicking around before you actually were like, “Okay, this is a new album.”
Oh, I actually, like, sat down and made the album in the month before release. It was kind of like a 30-day thing.
Oh really? Wow, that’s very unexpected. I feel like that’s not how people normally work.
“God Keeps Track” is what it started with, I wasn’t planning on making an album yet when I put that out. I made and finished that in the month of May and then took a break. Then, from I want to say the beginning of August until the release date, I wrote and produced “Sparrow,” “Ugly as Sin,” “Cruelty,” and “One Word Sentence.” “Sad Clown” I made a few days before the tracklist was finalized.
What about “Wanna Be You?”
There was a demo version of that on Bandcamp in 2019 or 2020. That was the first song I decided I wanted to be on this record. Like, when I was thinking about making an album, I was like, “Oh, I should bring ‘Wanna Be You’ back.”
That’s so interesting because I feel like the themes of that track are very representative of the album’s, especially with it being your first under a new name and first post-transition.
I feel like I was going in a really specific direction heading into 2020 and now my music is going back in that same direction. There’s just this four-year gap where it all got diverted in so many different ways, some progressive and some quite regressive. And in 2024, I finally got back on track.
Going back and listening to Thread and Electricity, I think you definitely see the reconnection going on. But I also think this album is the most direct of all your releases. Would you agree with that?
I was talking to my bandmate Violet about this because I sent her the record when it was done. She was like, “All your albums had this in them, but there was always a fog obscuring it.” And with this record, the fog finally lifted.
Were you conscious of that when you were writing?
Yeah. I’ve literally been trying to wade through that fog since I was a teenager. It really came down to the name and lifestyle change, and a lot of trial and error. Personal clarity, you know?
The first few tracks have some sound bites from movies and directors. You’ve got the Lynch one at the end of “Sparrow” and then that line from Face/Off, which I actually just watched this past week, to start “Cruelty.” Do you consider yourself a cinephile?
In my mind I am. There are times when I talk to people and bring up these movies and they’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” And then I meet a real cinema buff and I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I have a similar thing with music where I feel like I have some strange gems that no one really seems to know, but I generally lie in a realm that is more basic than I think it is. I definitely like films a lot and take a lot of inspiration from the way that they’re put together.
What compelled you to pull some of those lines and sound bites in? Were they just from things you had recently seen or did you know you wanted to use them specifically?
The plunderphonics thing is something that I’ve always been drawn to, especially before I was writing lyrics, because it helped add a verbal tone in a way that I felt unable to do back in like, 2016. At this point I think they just helped add context to the record. I had seen Face/Off somewhat recently and I’m always consuming Twin Peaks shit. I had also just watched True Detective for the first time. Season one. Have you seen that?
Yeah, my dad and I watched it. That was like a father-son bonding experience back in the day.
There’s a lot of talk in that show about unmasking and taking off your face and stuff, and that was something I had already been thinking about quite a bit. It felt a little too on the nose though compared to Nic Cage saying “I want to take his face off.” Oh, and then the first pull is from Julien Donkey Boy. I haven’t seen that movie since I was 19, but it was formative for me. In the sound bite Julien is reciting a poem he wrote, that’s the whole “Midnight, chaos” thing. I’m trying to get more repetition into my music, like with lyrics and hooks and whatnot. I’m trying to worm it into people’s heads, but it’s also just like a broken record headspace that speaks to me. Being scrambled and fried and disorganized.
You allude a lot to death on this project. Is that connected to the process of transitioning and re-identification? Or did something else lead you to write about it?
I could really talk about this for hours and hours so I’ll try to keep it concise. One of my main personal goals has been to eradicate fear so that I can experience life more fully. While meditating on it, I continued to come back to the idea that the main thing you can be afraid of is death. This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot from like 2023 to now. Just meditating on death and wondering why I’m so afraid of it. And I guess the conclusion that I’ve come to is that the fear is coming from identity. When I moved to Texas ,I started to transition a little bit, and then I got so freaked out I completely 180’d back the other way. I started to get really neurotic about death around that time, I think because I was holding on to a complete false identity, an illusion. What I’ve come to realize is that all identity is an illusion, it’s not true selfhood, you know? Not to get too spiritual about it but the way that I see it, the true self is the observer of one’s experiences. To me the only thing that can die is something that can change, so the fear of death is truly about losing one’s identity, everything that individualizes you in the material realm.
It’s interesting because when you think about your identity you’re thinking about all the things that make you, you, but the thing compiling all of that is not a part of it, it’s a separate entity. So inevitably, whatever that process is, it’s a construction.
Yeah. I feel like transitioning was just a process of meditating on that and eliminating all of the falsehoods until I was just the observer of my experiences. And then realizing that all of these things were not necessarily things that I chose for myself. But once I got back to a baseline, I could kind of pick and cultivate what I wanted to be and make it more of an active choice. That is like the “face off,” the unmasking. And now there is a mask that I put on intentionally.
What Mila Culpa Listened To Last Week:
I.D Sus live set 🎤
Citrus - Pits are the Pits
I brought this record up specifically because of the use of the 909 drum machine with acoustic instruments, and the kind of noisier noise pop production. I definitely very directly ripped that off for “Sparrow” and I’m continuing to do so now. I heard their EP Wispy, No Mercy back in 2020 when Violet joined my band. She put me on to that pretty immediately. This record is a compilation of everything that they’ve made, which I’ve been listening to a lot in the past six months. I tend to listen to the same music for really long periods of time.
Rahn Rahn - “Autograph”
I had known of Rahn Rahn as Rahn Rahn $plash, I didn’t know he used to go by Rahn Rahn. He’s from Cincy. My friends in Chicago put me on to him back in 2016. I found “Autograph” like a week or two ago and I’ve been listening to that a shit ton. I love how melodic and heavy that whole time period was, like Chief Keef and old Adam Killa, it’s perfect serotonin music.
DJ Chap - “what i want”
DJ Chap was on Teklife and back in, like, 2018 he put out an edits album. I downloaded it on a since fried laptop, and then the album got deleted a week later. Whoever uploaded this track to YouTube saved my life, because it’s a banger. On tour in particular I was blasting this in the car to stay awake.
Footwork is an extremely formative genre of music for me. I actually went to Pitchfork Fest in 2014 where there was supposed to be a DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn set, but DJ Rashad had passed a couple months before. So it was just DJ Spinn playing a memorial set, and that was absolutely mind altering.
Total Wife - come back down
Total Wife is Luna and Ash. Ash played bass for me and Luna recorded drums on “Die,” “God Keeps Track” and “Thread.” Ash and I actually went to a music day camp when we were tweens, and then didn’t see each other for, like, six years after that. And Luna and I have been friends since we were 10, so we’ve bounced ideas off one another for a long time. She put me on to The Flaming Lips and Swirlies, and I put her on to Duster. We just always showed each other shit that we were working on or that we liked. We played a show together in like 2018 at a really shitty sports bar in Boston, and then they moved to Nashville and I didn’t really see them much until I played a show with them down there in like 2023.
I am very sentimentally tied to in/out, the record they put out before this one. There’s an attention to detail in that album that reminds me of older music. I feel like this new record still has that, but it also really fits into our current moment in a way that still stands out. Like it’s influencing the collective unconscious of music.