If you’ve ever thrown on a mixtape made by a long-distance partner while gaming or traveling to see them, you’ll feel right at home with Moon Pup 2069. Released in late February, Moon Pup 2069 is a sidescroller shoot-’em-up developed by Jamie Barker, the artist behind the popular online comic series Fake Gamer Comics. Moon Pup 2069, Barker’s third game to date, acts as a casual bite-sized take on bullet hell shooters where you venture forth as the dog Lora in a spaceship to see your boyfriend (who happens to be a moon), while fighting off space pirates and dodging meteors that stand in your way.

But there’s more to Moon Pup than just the gameplay. Barker has also released a number of albums and tracks to Bandcamp over the years as a DIY acoustic/pop-punk musician, both in the band Ashby and the Oceanns and under her own name as a solo artist. Part of Barker’s music has included soundtracking their two previous games, but she takes a different approach to Moon Pup. For this game’s music, Barker collaborated with her friend and touring bandmate Remi Lavičkova, releasing music together under the name Patty Meltz. Together, the two provide the shoegaze bedroom pop soundtrack to Moon Pup 2069’s space shmup action: “a mixtape-style album of queer indie rock recorded over email in quarantine” that plays in-game and was released separately as an album to Bandcamp on the game’s release day.

To learn more about the album and the duo’s process for creating it, we spoke with Remi Lavičkova and Jamie Barker about their experience making Moon Pup 2069 over email.

How did the two of you first connect, and what made you want to collaborate with each other on an album?

REMI: We first met at a basement open mic that Jamie was running. I was in a folk punk band at the time and my bassist was telling me about how I had to check out Ashby and the Oceanns, that I’d really dig them. Hearing her play, I really dug how there was a mix of playfulness and sincerity in her lyrics. We connected in the way two quiet, shy people tend to — by orbiting around each other for a couple years, occasionally hanging out to see a movie, grab a meal, play video games, and talk music. Even though we weren’t hanging out a lot, there was always that sense of being great friends on my end. We also have the East Coast transplant thing in common. Eventually she invited me to tour the Midwest with her as a bassist for Ashby and the Oceanns. There’s a live album where you can hear me chugging away on bass during one of our sets. I always knew I wanted to a.) hang out with this cool girl I met at an open mic, b.) write an album together that neither of us would have come up with on our own. The rest was just timing.

JAMIE: Yeah, we collaborated mostly live early on, but Remi is a great guitarist AND I wanted to make a project that’s 50/50 creatively. We both write and perform pretty differently, so I think the album has a nice sound of a band that’s much more complex [than] if I were to do everything on my own.

Since making this album involved the two of you emailing each other your contributions, can you talk about how that affected the process of working on the album? How did you see that impacting the way the album was written or produced?

REMI: Sending files back and forth when compared to recording together, it’s the difference between talking on the phone and talking face-to-face. In-person you can read body language, often immediately locking into someone’s vibe. But with the added distance you have to do more work interpreting that vibe, something like, “I think this is where she’s taking it, let me push it further in that direction.” It takes a lot of trust in each other’s musical instincts to record this way, I think. And it’s a trust that we definitely have.

JAMIE: Yeah, it was overall pretty painless, I think. We had talked about music for the months leading up to recording and we had a few Spotify playlists going that inspired the album’s sound and themes. We had a bit of a unified vision and within a few songs, I think we both knew we could make it a full album. I wrote some of the songs on my own, and same with Remi, but some of the songs like “Space Station” and “The Engineer” were actually written around tiny loops of bass or guitar. It was an exciting way to work. We also added a lot to each other’s tracks, so I think we both shine in a good way on every song.

A lot of Jamie’s previous work hewed more towards acoustic or solo DIY pop punk, whereas this album has more of a shoegaze bedroom indie rock sound to it. How did the two of you decide on the sound of this album, and how did you want that to tie into the feel of the game?

REMI: We’ve spent a lot of time talking music before we ever played together, so we’ve had a sense of where the Venn diagrams of our tastes overlap for a while. I love the DIY pop punk sound, but I’m lousy at writing it. I’ve played more instrumental post-rock than anything else. But the key probably was us swapping playlists back and forth, spending time listening to them together. That’s what solidified the direction for this album. Those were the mixtapes behind the mixtape. As far as tying it into the game, it’s kind of naive, but I was one of those nerdy kids with a telescope and a subscription to Astronomy Magazine, so I felt cut out for space music.

JAMIE: I played a lot of house shows and really love acoustic/singer-songwriter music, but I’ve always wanted to make poppier, more dreamy, bigger songs… I’ve always listened to stuff like Weezer, Fall Out Boy, Death Cab, etc… I love 2000s indie music a lot. So this album is actually the closest an album has ever lined up with my intent.

Speaking of mixtapes, one of the descriptors for the album says that it’s a “mixtape-style album,” which I feel fits in with how the game randomizes the tracks when it loads up and continues playing them after a game over.  How did you want to evoke the feel of a mixtape on this album, and how did you want that to correspond to the game?

REMI: Making a good mixtape feels like some mystical art; the songs have to be good, it has to flow, and more than likely it is an earnest confession of feelings aimed at the recipient. Don’t get me wrong, I made a lot of embarrassing mixtapes for crushes in high school, but when you get a mixtape right, it just clicks in a similar way to how two people can just click.

JAMIE: I really wanted every song to be an attempt at a different style of indie rock music… I think it’s *maybeee* more evident in my voice on different tracks, as well as Remi’s. We tried to cover some ground and not have any repetitive songs. As far as how it combines with the game, I wanted the album to be able to stand alone, but it’s also the emotional core of the game and adds some unexpected (I think) sincerity to a shooter. The in-game story is that Moony (Lora’s boyfriend) gave Lora (a dog) a mixtape so she wouldn’t be bored when she travelled to visit him. Moony included only Patty Meltz songs, I guess… but some of them are supposed to inspire Lora, or maybe give some insight to how Moony is feeling, without it actually being narrative. It’s more… emotional context!

How did you develop the songs lyrically to tie into the game itself? Were the songs being written before the game’s development, or did they come after the game was already in the process of being developed/worked on?

REMI: Jamie showed me the game as she developed it, which was really cool to watch unfold. That said, I never felt like I had to reference the game specifically. I wanted the lyrics that I wrote to feel like they were written in an observatory by a lovesick astronomer, yearning for space, yearning for her person.

JAMIE: The music was written alongside the really quick development time.  At first, I wanted weird loop-driven guitar songs that were not going to be full songs, but experiments that I thought would be interesting to collab on. Then I wrote “Astound You” and thought it was a really good song and it kinda informed the music for the rest of the album (for me).

A good amount of this album has a laid-back vibe that kind of subverts typical sidescroller bullet hell soundtracks that are more fast-paced or frantic. What made you want to pair that relatively relaxed energy to this type of game?

JAMIE: Really, if I had tried to make a fast-paced video game song with beeps and boops, it would have been bad. That’s really not how I write… and there are plenty of folks who do amazing stuff with that genre. I think for me, I’ve enjoyed pairing very minimal games with my personality ([through the] art & music) and letting the music add a complexity to mechanically-simple games.

Since this is the third game Jamie has released, how has your approach to writing music for your games developed?

JAMIE: The music has been fairly easy up until Moon Pup. Moon Pup was the first game where I knew lyrics could work well… Rebel Kitsune had lyrics originally (but it would be hard to read and listen at the same time) and Bunt Girl was intentionally retro-y keyboard songs. Overall, my approach is just KNOWING what I want the product to be, but letting myself explore to get to that end point.

If you two plan to keep collaborating together, what would be the next type of game you’d want to pair your music with?

REMI: From the start, we always talked about Moon Pup 2069 as the first Patty Meltz album, so we’ve always planned for more. Jamie is the video game mastermind, so I’ll leave any future pairings to her.

JAMIE: At least speaking for myself, it’ll be nice to do an album without the confines of a video game! I have lots of small ideas for games though, so we’ll def. see! I think games that have space for indie rock and lyrics are rare-ish, so I don’t wanna over do it.

Do either of you currently have any plans underway for your music ahead?

REMI: We took a couple weeks off after releasing the album, but then immediately got back to writing songs. I couldn’t ask for a better writing partner. I’m a nerd for our collaboration, and I’m excited to see where we take it next.

JAMIE: Yeah, I am recording little covers and writing song ideas, until there’s future projects… We def. wanna do something more focused for our next album together. I’ll also [be] working on some more game music this year and Ashby and the Oceanns stuff, too! Hopefully, Patty Meltz will do some shows down the road also… *fingers crossed*.

Moon Pup 2069 — both the game and the album — are out now. Play the game at this link, and stream the album on Bandcamp below.