Patch Boy

You love a record, so you look up the band. Patch Boy reads the rest of the credits.

Type an artist and get the records they touched; type an album and get the people who made it. Every result flips the mode, so a session is a walk from artist to album to artist, and the map keeps every hop. It is the music sibling of Best Boy, which does the same for film.

A guitarist who quit Death Cab in 2014 is the only thing connecting it to Tegan and Sara

The route above was drawn before any data was checked, then run against the live MusicBrainz database on July 27, 2026. Death Cab for Cutie came back as eight members across three lineups, each with dates and instruments. Chris Walla plays electric guitar from 1997 until September 13, 2014. His own credits run to 71, and one of them is the mix on The Con, a Tegan and Sara record he is not on. Three hops, exactly as described.

Instrument

24

Producer

15

Recording

11

Mix

9

Vocal

9

Engineer

2

Art direction

1

Those are Walla's 71 release credits by role. Producer and mix are the ones that lead somewhere new: Picaresque, Plans and Transatlanticism are his own band's records, and The Con belongs to somebody else.

A band opens into its members, with the years they were there

Best Boy throws the film cast away because it is forty deep. A band is four people, and every one of them is a real link.

A band is never a destination in Patch Boy, only a door. Typing one opens it into whoever was in it, and membership carries dates so a 1974 record never credits the member who joined in 1981. Ben Gibbard leads out of Death Cab to The Postal Service, which is itself a band with Jimmy Tamborello in it, so the walk goes band to person to band. Credits for producing, engineering, mixing and playing count differently, because writing a record and mastering it are different contributions.

Jack Antonoff is the case film can't do: one person carrying four kinds of credit at once. Membership reaches fun., Steel Train and Bleachers. Credits reach Melodrama, Norman Fucking Rockwell and Midnights, which he produced.

GUTS has 0 album credits. Its single has 7.

Streaming-era records carry their credits on the songs

Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS (2023) returns no release-level credits at all. The same album's single, "vampire," returns seven at the recording level, with Daniel Nigro as producer. Records from the sleeve era list who made them per album, because that is how a sleeve worked. Records from the streaming era list them per track, because that is how labels send the metadata. Patch Boy has to read both layers and merge them, so typing Transatlanticism or GUTS gets an answer either way.