Alien Boy

Sonia Weber played other peoples’ music in other peoples’ projects for years. So when she realized her pop-punk band Our First Brains was nearing its end, she saw an opportunity to do something for herself.

“I was always too freaked out and shy to write my own songs and play my own songs,” Weber said in a phone interview.

“But I was really desperate to have a band that I was in control of because I didn’t really want to be at the will of whatever everybody else wanted to do. I really just wanted to be in a band that took it really seriously and I realized I was going to have to be the one to make that happen.”

That was in the mid 2010s, and it just so happened to coincide with the kind of personal turbulence that often fuels great art.

“I started writing some songs and I kind of got my heart broken,” she said with a laugh. “It was perfect timing.”

Working with a couple of band mates from Our First Brains, Weber formed Alien Boy, which will play Volcanic Theatre Pub Thursday night along with indie acts Supercrush and TV Star, both of Seattle.

It didn’t take long for Weber to discover exactly how she wanted the band — which is named after a song by legendary Portland punk band the Wipers — to sound.

“I got a distortion (guitar) pedal and I got a chorus pedal because I got really into The Wipers and My Bloody Valentine and The Smiths,” Weber said. “I remember plugging in those pedals and being like, ‘Oh my god, this is what the Wipers and Nirvana sound like!’ I got really excited about that, and I was like, ‘This is my sound.’”

Since then, Alien Boy has made three full-length albums that bring together Weber’s aforementioned faves along with influences like Britpop giants Oasis, catchy emo and post-punk, jangling guitars, smeared shoegaze vibes and Portland’s vibrant DIY scene. The band’s most recent album, 2021’s “Don’t Know What I Am,” said taste-making music website Pitchfork, “wraps contemporary angst in a shimmering haze, drowning depression in lustrous dream pop.”

Indeed, one of the reliable components of Alien Boy’s music are Weber’s lyrical themes, which speak plainly about the challenges of modern life and love. She is the kind of songwriter who can wear her heart on her sleeve and sound both vulnerable and cool at the same time.

“I get bored by songs that aren’t really digging into some kind of human emotion that’s a little bit heavy in one way or another,” Weber said. “I’ve been doing this band for the last seven years and there’s periods of time where I feel much lighter and then there’s times where the darkness comes back, and I think that’s just how life goes.”

And when life ebbs and flows like that, it helps to have a band like Alien Boy to help you process the emotions, Weber said.

“This band marks me figuring out what’s most important and meaningful to me. I can’t imagine my life without it,” she said. “I was just joking with somebody the other day about how I’m really confused about a lot of things in my life. But I’m not confused about what this band is.”

What: Alien Boy, Supercrush and TV Star

When: 9 p.m. Thursday

Where: Volcanic Theatre Pub, 70 SW Century Drive, Bend

Cost: $10

Contact: volcanictheatre.com.