All photos credit: Kevin P. Neal
Somewhere between the Kuiper Belt and a Lee County zoning meeting, Oort Patrol exists. The Sanford-based punk band has been releasing music since 2014, existing in what they call a “temporally ambivalent” space. Too cosmic for local government, too bureaucratic for outer space, and too fun to take seriously in any conventional sense.
Scroll through their social posts, and you’ll notice that they read like dispatches from a parallel timeline. As if a regional planning commission also monitored deep-space anomalies. It’s absurd, and yet it all works so well.
Fronted by Gordon Anderson, a working journalist who covers local government by day and plays punk shows by night or weekend, Oort Patrol released Human Vice President in October 2024 and has since settled into what Anderson describes as their most stable and active lineup yet. With a two-song single due in June and a new record taking shape, now was a great time to talk with Gordon about the NC punk scene in your mid-40s, creating his own musical lore, and why the dumbest social media post is usually the right one.
What’s something you’ve been listening to lately?
Gordon (guitar/vocals): The big one is probably not very current, but it’s a band called The Cleaners from Venus that has dominated my playlists. It was a project from Martin Newell, a British guy who, in the 80s, just started recording songs on a four-track. Kind of a British analog to Robert Pollard from Guided by Voices. I’m sure he’s had a band because he’s played live, but back then, he was just making these records because why not. Because nobody was paying attention back then, he just released song after song after song, and I found out about it maybe ten years ago. There’s still stuff coming out, and there’s still stuff that’s 30 or 40 years old that you find, and it just blows your mind.
As for North Carolina-based music, one of the fun things about Oort Patrol is that we share members with other bands. Dan Mitre, our bass player, plays in a band called Superintendo and also sometimes in a band called Quit Everything. Our drummer, Landon, plays in Worthington’s Law and Manic Third Planet. It’s just great to share people with those bands, but also to know them and have them be your buddies. When you play together, it’s like having built-in friends. We had a great little weekend run with Small Doses recently; really awesome band and super nice folks.
And basically everything that Dan’s put together through Boared to Death Records, I can’t endorse enough. He’s done an awesome job curating a kick-ass roster of bands that are mostly North Carolina-based and do different things, but there’s a common thread.
You’ve got a long tenure in the scene and a lot of connections. How has being rooted in the local North Carolina community shaped your experience as a musician and the music you’ve put out?
Gordon: North Carolina obviously has an amazing scene. The number of incredible bands that have come from here is mind-blowing. I’ve lived in Sanford for about the last 30 years, so you’re close enough to Chapel Hill, Raleigh, or Durham that it’s not too much of a hassle to get up and catch a show, whether it’s someone coming through or a local band. But you’re also a little disconnected from it, in that I’m not just going to randomly go out and see what’s happening, especially at my age. You have to be intentional about it.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think it actually helps you develop whatever you’re into in your own way. You come to it through different paths; maybe something you know because you saw somebody wearing a shirt, or something you stumble on through liner notes or Wikipedia. That’s been fun, getting to know music from sort of outside the scene.
I did bands for a long time in my 20s, then didn’t for a long time, and Oort Patrol really kicked off the part where we were actually a band playing shows again. When that happened, I didn’t know what was going on. I knew who Superchunk was; I knew Polvo, but I didn’t know who Worthington’s Law or Narsick were. It’s been really cool to enter that scene in your mid-40s and see people — in a lot of cases, much younger than you — doing really amazing things.
How has the band evolved since 2014, and how has it continued to change?
Gordon: Back then, I hadn’t been doing music for a while. I’d sort of made a conscious decision not to put as much work into being in a band. And then over the course of about a year and a half, these songs just came pouring out of me. They were really simple. I had a very narrow idea of what I wanted to do: Ramones-style pop-punk songs with a science-fiction element blanketing everything. I wasn’t even planning to be in a band. I just had so much fun doing it that I put it up.
That eventually led to my friend Ben Brown joining. He’s been one of my best friends for 30 years, and he’s the most talented guy I know. I was like, “Come on, join up in this, write some songs.” So that happened, but we still weren’t really a band. We’d get together and jam every now and then, but there were no plans to do anything.
It wasn’t until the end of 2022 that a festival happened here in Sanford at a brewery, and the guy who owned it started leaning on me: “Don’t you want to play? Come on.” I agreed to it, and we realized, “Holy shit, we’ve got to get ready.”
So we booked a couple of shows. The first real one was at The Pinhook, where we played with wolves & wolves & wolves & wolves. Scotty Sandwich was playing with them back then; he found me afterward and said we could come record. He said, “I’m like a drug dealer — the first one’s free.” And that just led to everything. We put out an EP, then a record, then did a split. I just feel like if you’re gonna be playing in a punk rock band at 46 years old, do what you can when you can.
What does the lineup look like now compared to when you started?
Gordon: About a year and a half ago, the stable lineup came together with me and Ben, my wife Jordan on keys, Dan, and Landon. By the end of this year, we’ll have played more shows with this lineup than any other lineup combined. They’re awesome people to play with and to just hang out with, and they seem to like the music, which is the important thing.
We’ve got shows booked through September, getting out one or two times a month to try to get into places we haven’t been, while also doing as much as we can in the Triangle. It’s really just about having as much fun as possible.
You played The Fest in Gainesville, Florida. What was that experience like?
Gordon: It was unbelievable. I’d never been before. I have a couple of good friends, Mike and Zach Large, who play in Youth League — they’d been doing Fest for several years, so I’d always heard through the grapevine that it was awesome. I’d see the lineups and go, “Goddamn, I need to get down there.” There are like a million bands you know and a million bands you don’t, all under this punk rock umbrella, with so many different types of music you can catch in one weekend.
I just had an amazing time. I honestly didn’t know what to expect — like, does anybody in Florida care about this? But we played, and I thought we played well, and people enjoyed it. We sold some t-shirts. So it was worth every bit of effort, and I would do it again under any circumstances.
How do you balance the booking and PR side of the band with actually being a musician?
Gordon: With booking, we’ve been really lucky that a large percentage of our shows have come from somebody reaching out and asking us, which is great, because I feel like I’m terrible at it. I was talking to a friend about my experience with booking, and he said, “Trust me, you’re not terrible at it. Everybody hates it.”
Being a newspaper guy, a reporter, I’m usually on the receiving end of inquiries, so it feels awkward to be reaching out pitching something. But most of what we’ve done has come from somebody just asking, and it still blows my mind every time it happens, when it’s someone I don’t know. Dan also has a lot of connections from running a small label and being involved with other bands, which helps a lot.
As far as PR goes, I think a lot of the Oort Patrol Foundation stuff and the language we use on social media, comes from covering local government for so long and just wanting to be ridiculous. I realized quickly that if I just talked like a time-traveling space agency, instead of being like, “I’m Gordon and this is our band,” it builds in this lore, even if it never goes anywhere. It’s something interesting to read. Most of the time, I finish writing one of those posts, and “I’m like, this is the dumbest one yet.” But the people who get it, get it — and if you don’t get it, Oort Patrol probably wasn’t going to be your cup of tea anyway. So no hard feelings.
I’ve got a lot of freedom to just be as dumb with it as I want. I might be more successful by not doing that, but I feel like that’s half of what might even attract anybody to the band. We’re talking in this really bizarre voice that’s somehow relatable. Even if you’ve never covered local government, everybody has a local government. Everybody’s seen on Facebook when the water’s down in their neighborhood. They may not realize that’s the language we’re riffing on, but it’s going to feel familiar, and it still involves alien shit.
What’s on the radar for Oort Patrol for the rest of the year?
Gordon: We’ve got some shows on the books in the summer and early fall, and hopefully through the end of the year. We also have a two-song single that we expect to put out sometime in June.
We’re also in the process of gathering songs and going through them as a band, figuring out what the next record looks like. Whether that comes out in the fall or maybe in early 2027, I’m not sure yet. One thing I’ve learned is you don’t really try to predict these things. But the songs are there. We have more than we need, which is a very good problem to have. It’s just a matter of paring them down to a reasonable amount, making a good recording, having fun doing it, and putting it out.
Who are some of your favorite local North Carolina musicians you’d want to shout out?
Gordon: There’s a ton, and I know I’m going to leave some out. Currently, like I mentioned, Worthington’s Law, Superintendo, Manic Third Planet. I really like Narsick.
There was a band in the late 90s called Hellbender, and they reissued their final album last year. It’s been my favorite record since I was about 17. One of the guys in that band, Al Burian, went on to be in a band called Milemarker, who I think last put out music maybe ten years ago. Anything Hellbender, Milemarker — that was all connected to a label called Lovitt Records that was more Virginia-based, but North Carolina was definitely part of that world.
Polvo was a great band. Ben, the other guitar player and singer in Oort Patrol, grew up in Wilmington, and the amount of awesome bands out of Wilmington to this day just blows my mind. One of the other bands on that four-way split is called Record Highs; they’re a couple of the guys in that band are very good longtime friends of mine who have always been awesome musicians. The singer, Chuck, also sings for Thunderlip. Just tons of bands out of Wilmington.
And another one I’d like to mention is Treasure Pains out of Durham. Zach, who plays guitar, and Kellette, who plays bass, were in Oort Patrol up until the end of 2024/beginning of 2025. They’re both super longtime friends of mine, incredibly talented musicians, and their band is fantastic.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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