Dani Miller of Surfbort has an impossible dream. It’s a fantasy to go back in time, mainly to rescue some of her musical heroes who were gone long before she was born.
A lot of them are in the notorious “27 Club,” whose membership is a rollcall of sainted rockers who perished for one reason or another at age 27. Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin. Jimi Hendrix choked on his own vomit. Jim Morrison’s heart gave out in a Paris bathtub. Brian Jones drowned.
“I’m so grateful to be past the 27 Club,” says Miller, who was born in 1993. “If I get a time machine, I’m going to go back in time and get Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I started a new club at 27—I got off drugs, instead of dying. That’s what’s really helped my mental health and yeah, it’s obnoxious and sobriety can be annoying or boring-sounding, but it saved my life. So I’m like, thank God.”
Another rocker who perished at 27 is Kurt Cobain, whose name comes up as a spectral alternative to modern male disappointments in the Surfbort song “Jessica’s Changed,” from the band’s new album Reality Star. In a song that goes from gentle to raging, she sings: “I’m falling deep in love with the ghost of Kurt Cobain / Sometimes I’m happy when I’m sad / I’m a sexy-ass bitch in a world gone mad.”
“I was dating a ton of pirates that were crazy either on drugs or just out of their minds, so to help myself cope with that, I was like, ‘I’m dating Kurt Cobain’s ghost,’” she explains. “I wanted a chorus people could scream to and be like, ‘Yo, the world’s gone completely insane.’ It’s not normal for this many people to be suffering and everyone watching it on TV. It’s just fucked up. A lot of my words are a mix between nostalgia, comedy, and real shit that we need to scream about basically—my bipolar thoughts.”
At the moment, Miller is sitting happily on the shady patio of a favorite boba shop on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. The place is called Jellyman and is owned by actor-musician Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino). They seem to know her here.
As she sips a drink loaded with tapioca pearls, Miller is in a black dress decorated with an old poster for the Plasmatics, with dark hair and deep red bangs above her signature cat-eye makeup. She seems amused by the thumping dance music playing overhead on this quiet Sunday afternoon. “It’s like 3 a.m. and we’re in the club,” she jokes. “We’re really raging right now.”
Raging in a different way is Reality Star, her third album with Surfbort. The songs are loaded with her obsessions and lyrical non sequiturs, emotional and playful, and built on one crushing guitar riff after another. The album opens with the fuzz and feedback of “Lucky,” lurching into motion as Miller rhymes against a heavy riff: “I love it when you call me on the phone / And tell me that you saw a UFO / I love it when you cry and moan / Life is beautiful if you just let go.”
“I named it Reality Star because I love the classic reality stars, like the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan,” she says of the album. “I don’t even know what the reality stars are up to, but I just thought, oh, being sober is kind of crazy because you’re like raw-dogging life. You’re stuck in reality.”
For her, the songs are fueled by the unsettled years during and after the pandemic, and her feelings “post-apocalypse, post-2020, all the vibes of going through the world that we all are going through, just bearing my soul on the album. I try to make it fun. Not too serious.”
The band’s last album was 2021’s Keep On Truckin’, which was mostly produced by Linda Perry (with a few tracks made with Dave Sitek). Reality Star is more DIY, rocking hard and fast through songs written by Miller, drummer Sean Powell and guitarist Adam Laidlaw, who also recorded the tracks in his backyard studio.
“He’s a really good engineer, so it was cool because me and Sean are both Pisces,” Miller explains with a laugh. “We’re both in the clouds, like, what’s going on? Even though we’re sober, we’re perma-fried, so we need someone to engineer it, shred on guitar, and bring it on home. So it’s been awesome.”
“Notorious Brat” has a bit of the Pixies’ spacey guitar flash, as Miller sings, “My heart is empty but I keep giving.” “Rebel” rides a Ramones-style riff, with a catchy chorus by Perry gifted to Miller via voicemail. Surfbort are as tough and crazed as any hardcore band on “Hot Chicks Cold Beer” (clocking in at a speedy 1:11 min.), as a sneering Miller vocal offers some street-level philosophy: “I like to skateboard / I like to surfboard / And when you live a little / God knocks on your door / Face all my fears / Big trucks and no tears.”
“Hot Dog” is their weird dance song, with a music video shot commando-style across L.A., filming in different locations whenever and wherever inspiration hit. The cast included a friend in a duck costume, and another shredding the bowl at a skatepark while wearing a hot dog hat. The song is the band at its most joyously ridiculous, but it began as something much heavier.
“I wrote a whole other set of lyrics and it was really serious. It was a women empowerment song, which is also really important,” she says. “Then, all of a sudden, I had this vision: The most women empowerment is just being ridiculous and having a blast. So I’m going to switch the vibe to just saying ‘eat a hot dog’ and random stuff.
“I wanted to have a party in the name of hot dogs. Who knows how this comes to me.”
Though the singer now lives east of Hollywood, the band was formed in Brooklyn in 2014. Miller’s personal homeland is Southern California, where she was born to a car salesman dad from Long Island and a mom from the San Fernando Valley. “I can make friends anywhere because I moved every year. It was crazy,” says Miller, who finished high school in San Diego, where she also fell in love with live music at the Che Cafe. “I guess I would say I am from San Diego in a weird way, but I’m really from outer space.”
The history of Surfbort has been one of endlessly rotating band members. The newest arrival is bassist Valentine, from the band Fusion Babies. Missing this time around is longtime guitarist Alex Kilgore, who won’t be on the road with them in 2026. Miller says he’s relocated with his wife and kids to an undisclosed location outside the U.S. where surf and jungle is plentiful. The band’s personnel remains fluid.
“It’s just ’cause life changes,” Miller figures. “Like, we lived in New York and we’re like, let’s move to L.A. Who wants to come? Who doesn’t? We’ll be like, oh, we gotta go play in Berlin, who wants to come?” The lineup at any given moment can shift, she adds, “simply from whoever wants to rock out with us. Otherwise I would have to quit and stop, and I just never want it to stop.”
Remaining by her side on the new album is founding drummer Sean Powell, a punk rocker from Texas, who is old enough to have experienced punk rock when it was still new. “Me and Sean are art soulmates for life,” Miller says. “I love it because he’s from the ’70s and ’80s punk scene, and he teaches me about punk music and all kinds of music.
“I started when I was 21 in the band. I didn’t know as much about music and he was like, ‘Here’s the music, say whatever crazy words and stuff you want on top of it.’ It’s been a good collab.”
On the album cover is a painting of a warrior hippie goddess with a horse, created in the ’70s by Marie Covalt, the drummer’s aunt. She also provided a vintage illustration—of similarly clad women armed with knives—for the cover of their 2018 debut album Friendship Music. On Reality Star, the warrior goddess is accompanied by a drawing of Miller’s distinctive eye makeup, with upturned eye shadow shooting past her eyebrows like bat wings.
Many fans come to Surfbort shows in the same makeup, which is similar to the epic cat eyes of Divine, the late Pink Flamingos star. Miller rarely appears in public without it, and she’s wearing a fresh coat of the makeup now, as she finishes her boba drink.
“I could do it in like five minutes, and it probably looks like that too,” Miller says with a smile of her signature look. “Yeah, I did it today really quick. You kind of have to. I’m basically like a clown in a circus, and you gotta get your clown makeup on quickly.”
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