Reptile Tile’s “Shopping Around”: A Fever-Dream Single That Levels Up Indie Weirdness

There is a certain charm in the off-kilter concoction that is Reptile Tile; the Virginia Beach collective often even feels more like a fever dream in motion than a traditional band. Their new single “Shopping Around,” released on October 17, 2025, walks a similar tightrope of wild abandon: a swirling mix of static, beer foam, humor, and brilliance.

At the starting line, a collaborative experiment sparked the music. Terry Cloth (aka Roderick Edens) and Period Bomb’s Camila Alvarez, both of whom are used to working collaboratively in theater, managed to write it together without supervision. Lyrically, it tumbles out half in jest, half in desperation, until it is simply written. On the demo for “Shopping Around,” where it all started, the drums are the first heartbeat. On the full version, it is the relationship between Terry with sharp edges and Camila with surreal sweetness that truly begs you home.

At that point, we had a song and the sonic palette is pure Reptile Tile: kazoos melted through a synth, saxophone riffs burst like neon static, guitars clang against the concrete of the mix. There is ash, there is shimmering, there is the reckless joy of creating something that does not quite fit somewhere else. It is fun, for sure, but also the quiet art of subversion playing in the absurd to poke in any way possible at uniformity.

The album, recorded at three locations, the RTT Lab in Virginia Beach, Cami's apartment in LA, and the Dragonship Studio in Smithfield, follows the band's ethos: a little sloppy, breathing, gloriously human. These musicians have built a world with Terry, along with Ken Shiro, Max Methane, and Gerry Gemstone, where experimentation doesn't just coexist with the song—it IS the song.

"Shopping Around" doesn't subvert. It laughs, it rocks, and it thinks. This is what it sounds like when a group of musicians embraces collaborative practice and pushes pop to be weird again. As Terry states, "Every release is a level up." In the case of "Shopping Around", that's a level of evolving process—some kind of reptilian wink at indie rebellion repeating for the future.