We’ve spent years now tracking the rise and fall of The Pizza Underground, a joke that was dumb and silly to begin with, and which has now achieved a sort of transcendent strangeness with age. Created by Macaulay Culkin, the band is exactly what it sounds like: pizza-themed parodies of Velvet Underground songs, performed with acoustic guitar and pizza boxes for percussion. (Also, the music is awful.)
We thought we’d seen the end of TPU after they were booed off a stage in 2014, canceling several dates and declaring themselves to be in a state of “cheesemergency.” But just like The Velvet Underground itself, the za-themed rockers have apparently found themselves in the mood to reunite. That’s per a recent interview Culkin gave to The Guardian, where he laid out the band’s plans for an album that‘ll serve as the grand finale in the long-running exercise in self-amusement. “It’s one of those good ideas you have when you’re drunk, and you wake up and forget about it,“ Culkin said. “But we’re taking it to the end of the joke. We have an album coming out, a vinyl pressing with a children’s choir, a symphony orchestra. We’re giving it away, our gift to the world.”
When asked whether he still finds this whole thing funny, Culkin—who comes off relatively well in the interview, as a man with functionally unlimited resources and no goal in life but to harmlessly amuse himself with pepperoni puns—cited The Rake Effect. “Of course I find it funny! We rhyme mushrooms with mushrooms, come on. It’s the same joke, relentlessly. Like, they’re really doing this?”
Apparently, they really are.