Kevin Bronson on April 9th, 2019

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It’s been a long, twisting road that has taken Darren Weiss from punk-rocker to PAPA to real-life papa, but the singer-songwriter/drummer seems at peace with where he has arrived.

On a balmy spring evening just a couple of weeks after he played the 15-year reunion show with his conflagratory punk band Wires on Fire, Weiss convenes at a Silver Lake coffeehouse to discuss his new project, Monastereo.

“A monastery is a place people go to serve a higher power,” he says. “Monastereo is where I’ve gone in service of music.”

Weiss today unveils “The Boogar Sugar Boogaloo,” the first single from an album he has made with producers Gus Seyffert and Sean Cook. It’s a funky, rollicking romp with an irresistible groove, spiked by brass and topped by Weiss’ crooning vocals, part Bowie and part Boss. It’s also the new track, he says, that’s closest in vibe to the work he did in the quartet PAPA, which released an EP and two full-lengths between 2011 and ’16.

||| Stream: “The Boogar Sugar Boogaloo”

While not a reinvention of his musical past, the song’s unfettered feel is no accident. “Subconsciously, I’m always feeling like I’m responding to what I did previously, but his feels fresh,” he says. “It feels like I’m 17 years old. I’m still excited by the same things — the same verbiage, the same instrumentation, the same variations.”

Weiss charted a new course after he and creative partner Daniel Presant amicably decided to put PAPA to rest after the 2016 album “Kick at the Dust.” “We agreed more on the things that made us angry than the things that made us happy. For both of us to be happy creatively, we had to do it apart,” Weiss says. “Originally, the plan was that I was going to continue as PAPA, but as I was recording these songs, it felt like something completely different.”

Other life changes made that even more apparent. Weiss was on tour as Albert Hammond Jr.’s drummer last spring at SXSW (sick in bed from food poisoning, as it were) when he got a phone call from his wife. The couple was expecting their first child (a son, Augie).

“I could only be one papa at a time,” Weiss jokes.

As his new songs took shape, Weiss felt purged of the bitterness at PAPA’s truncated career arc. “There was a lot of anger and frustration about how PAPA was perceived,” he explains, which filtered into the band’s music. “There was a lot of purpose behind some of it. There were songs about the radio [“Eat My Radio”] and things like that — songs that [implied] ‘Why is this considered alternative?’ We were feeling let down by the culture.

“When we were writing ‘Tender Madness,’ somebody would play us songs by Foster the People or Fun or whatever was on the radio and say, ‘Yeah, you do your thing, but keep in mind this is what is working right now.’ … It was great to get back to writing songs that don’t [have that subtext], songs that just want to convey a certain feeling. For me, it rekindles the joy in what people felt about PAPA in the first place.”

So there are no hidden messages in the Monastereo songs, but there are frank and topical ones: A song for his then-unborn son (written while Weiss was touring), a song addressing faith, a song referencing the president. The album includes contributions from guitarists Evan Weiss and Taylor Locke, Seyffert (bass, backing vocals and keys), keyboardist Taylor Cash and backing vocalist Vanessa Stutz. Daphne Chen contributes strings, Damon Zick plays sax and Bedouine plays trumpet.

Monastereo has yet to schedule live dates, but like PAPA they will find Weiss at his usual station, behind the kit. He has drummed for the likes of T Bone Burnett, Florence and The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Girls and Hammond and could hardly imagine being anywhere else.

“I thought about that a lot, and there’s no way I could go on tour and not drum,” he says. “I think I speak most clearly from behind the drum kit.”