In 2010, stepsisters Kelli Mayo and Peyton Bighorse released Skating Polly’s debut, Taking Over the World, recorded on a 24-track TASCAM with help from their dad in their home outside Oklahoma City.
In 2023, Skating Polly, including brother Kurtis Mayo on drums and backing vocals, released Chaos County Line, recorded by producer Brad Wood (Liz Phair, Sunny Day Real Estate, Smashing Pumpkins) at his Seagrass Studio outside Los Angeles.
In 2025, Skating Polly is coming back through Oklahoma City to play at Factory Obscura, 25 NW Ninth St., on Thursday, March 13. And they’re back to recording themselves.
The plan is to self-record an EP, but they’re seeing what happens.
“Maybe it’ll all go terribly wrong and it’ll only be two singles, I don’t know,” Kelli Mayo said. “We’re working on it, and it’s really exciting. We’ve done ‘going to the studio’ so many times I wanted to kind of rewrite the formula, like, ‘Let’s see what happens if we completely produce ourselves. What can we make?’ … I just really wanna make something crunchy and weird.”
Whatever crunchy weirdness Skating Polly makes will be the followup to 2023’s Chaos County Line, an hour-plus double album that aggressively expands the territory covered by the band’s self-styled “ugly pop” sound, with lyrics that draw revealing, if somewhat surreal and impressionist, self-portraits and complex and catchy musical arrangements that feature at least as many clean-plucked arpeggios as distorted power chords and significantly more gorgeous blood harmonies than punk snarls.
What follows may be something else entirely.
“Maybe these won’t be as emotional of songs. I don’t really know yet,” Kelli Mayo said. “I almost want to lean into playful and noise and madness instead of pouring my heart out. … I was not drained after Chaos County Line, but more like, ‘What’s next?’ and I felt like the next thing to do was something completely different … just go for it and see what comes out.”
Friends and family
Also coming soon (hopefully) is a four-song folk EP that Kelli Mayo recorded with Exene Cervenka of X.
“I’ve lived with Exene for a bit now,” Kelli Mayo said. “I was the unofficial best man at her son’s wedding, I’m very, very close with her. She’s like a mother, a sister, a best friend, technically maybe old enough to be my grandma, but we’re like friends, too, so it’s interesting.”
Cervenka produced 2013’s Lost Wonderfuls and features on Skating Polly’s “Queen for a Day,” and Kelli Mayo plays a younger Cervenka in X’s video for “Alphabetland.” Since Kelli Mayo and Bighorse began writing and recording songs as children, they’ve converted several of their influences into collaborators. Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson produced 2014’s Fuzz Steilacoom and 2017 EP New Trick features Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt.
“People say don’t meet your heroes and stuff,” Bighorse said. “Usually, the musicians I meet where I had a bad experience with and I didn’t expect it, I didn’t go on to work with them. The people I work with are pretty darn cool.”
One of Chaos County Line’s most chaotic tracks, “Man Out There,” features Jesus Lizard’s David Yow convincingly playing just about the last man you’d want out there “trying to get in,” but he was surprisingly unsure of his performance in the studio.
“I’d known him as, like, this friend who’s been supportive to me that I’ve met a couple times, and when I asked him to be on ‘Man Out There,’ I was like, ‘I don’t even know if you like my music,’” Kelli Mayo said, “But no. He was stoked about it. It’s really funny seeing him perform, because on that song, he just came up with his part. He did, like, four takes or something and did completely random David Yow stuff. Then he would get nervous after the take, like, ‘Oh, do you like it? Am I stepping on the song too much?’ and I’m like, ‘What the heck?’”
Being treated like creative equals by more experienced musicians they respect may be the most valuable lesson Skating Polly has taken from these collaborations.
“The way that they mentor me is usually them saying, ‘Trust your gut and don’t listen to the suits,’” Kelli Mayo said. “We manage ourselves now, and … a big part of this chapter of Skating Polly is that I don’t want to look to someone else. I just want to shake up the recipe on our own.”
More guided attempts at mentorship have not been as helpful or welcome.
“The only people who ever go, ‘Oh this is how you should do it,’ to me and Peyton and Kurtis are people who have never created art,” Kelli Mayo said. “We’ve had our own struggles with management and stuff because of that. You have people telling you there’s a formula … and usually the formula doesn’t involve a lot of making art. The formula usually involves trying to get big on TikTok, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not actually trying and you’re wasting their time.”
After eight years of playing as a three-piece, Bighorse and the Mayos’ biggest influences at this point are probably each other, even if they spend the time between tours living apart and working day jobs.
“We don’t live with our parents anymore,” Kelli Mayo said. “It’s a different formula; we’re making minimum wage and just being a band from our own little corners.”
Bighorse and Kelli Mayo may live miles apart in Southern California, and Kurtis Mayo lives in Tacoma, Washington, where the band was recording when we spoke on the phone.
“We’ve just been working together, not just as a band, but growing up together, so it’s very easy to fall back into being creative together, even after being apart for some time,” Bighorse said. “In the past, maybe it wasn’t as easy, maybe we went into it a little less sure of ourselves, but at least now it’s all pretty smooth.”
Kelli Mayo agreed.
“We’re very close as siblings, so even if we don’t plug in as regularly as we used to, we’re comfortable,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m scared to try this in front of you.’ No. Me and Peyton have been doing this for over 15 years now, and Kurt’s been doing this since 2017. … We don’t really hold back, and one thing that’s exciting about spending time away from each other and then getting back together and being so close is that we all bring different tastes to the table and we all have different stories from our life to bring to the table.”
Skating Polly’s upcoming show at Factory Obscura will be its third at the venue since 2023.
“Factory Obscura is one of our favorite venues on Earth,” Kelli Mayo said. “It’s really hard to imagine us playing anywhere else when we come to Oklahoma because I love it so much. … It’s a total hidden gem, and I know a lot of people in Oklahoma know about it, but the whole country should know about this place because it’s kind of the best you can get with a venue. The sound is great, and the projections are so cool. Every photo and video from Factory Obscura always comes out excellent because they’ve got a great setup.”
The band shares the bill with co-headliners Gully Boys from Minneapolis.
“They’re a great band,” Kelli Mayo said. “From the just-getting-ready-to-tour contact we’ve had with each other, they’re really sweet. And I think it’s going to be a really cool melding of fanbases. It’s like the scene we want to be involved with — cool femme people making music, young people pouring their hearts out and going for it.”
Skating Polly and Gully Boys
7 p.m. Thursday, March 13
Factory Obscura
25 NW Ninth St.
factoryobscura.com
$17-20
This article appears in The OG Food Issue 2025.