Interview with Up-And-Coming Riot Grrrl Sensation "Sorry Mom"
Sorry Mom (Left to Right: Grace, Juno & Taryn on the Drums) Performing at Midway Cafe in Jamaica Plain
Photos Taken by Lucy Spangler
From a back corner table in Jamaica Plain’s Midway Cafe on a perfectly rainy and miserable night, New England based femme punk band Sorry Mom sat down before their show to catch up with Five Cent Sound writer (and riotgrrrl lover) Lucy Spangler. They’ve had a hell of a ride the past few months since putting out their first EP “Juno Goes to the Big House” and launching a tour of the northeast. With no signs of slowing down they talked about plans for the future, and reflected on what brought them this far.
Lucy Spangler: First off, you guys have been touring the northeast for the last 3 months or so, how has it been?
Grace: It's been really cool! So we first recorded this album in April and we didn't necessarily think that we're gonna have people like listening to it and wanting to come to shows, but once we put it out, or recorded in February but once we put it out in April, people started listening to it and so we decided to book some shows in the area because Juno and I are both in Connecticut right now, and Taryn was in Boston. So we wanted to just book in the area while we're doing our regular jobs throughout the week. But it's been a really great experience so far.
Taryn: Yeah, I'm working, especially, like Grace said working during the week it's definitely getting a little tiring. It's really fun but at least like this week, for example, this is like our fourth show in a row, like the fourth night in a row. I woke up for work this morning and now we're here and we don't go on till 10 and we're not gonna get home till midnight. But honestly, like, as much as it's tiring I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. It's the most fun thing to do and it's like a labor of love and I fuckin love it so much
Juno: And I have class tomorrow morning. It's been hard to tour, I'm the last member of the band that is an active college student. So we're doing all this, like after the show me and Grace are driving a three hour ride back to Connecticut. So that I can go to bed in my dorm and then wake up tomorrow and go to class. So that's been tricky. But it's been fun, I just haven't been doing any homework.
LS: How do you feel that you’ve grown as a band in the last year? Any growing pains?
Taryn: I mean we've just gotten better. We've developed our own sound, a better sense of self and who we are as a band. We started off like a couple years ago just playing covers together in college. Now we have original songs, and we have a bunch more that no one's gotten to hear yet, but they're going on the next album. And I mean Junos writing has progressed so much, Grace has learned two new instruments, and I engineered and produced the album so I developed that skill as well. So if anything as a group we've just grown in a very positive direction and we've just gotten to develop like a really specific sound that feels a lot like us. When before it was really just punk covers now it's like we have our own kind of punk sound and its fucking awesome.
Grace: Yeah, I think there's definitely been some growing pains, especially with how quickly we've had to put everything together; when everything came out we were mostly in different states. Trying to put that together, and then make more music, and trying to practice, and find time to practice has been kind of tricky. Within that we have less time to practice together and so we'll have, you know, these things that really need to work through and we feel like we have to rush through them. I think that it's been, I like the challenge of it. I like how I've really had to push myself to allow myself to be uncomfortable in messing up or like asking for help from the other members. I think I've really been able to, I don't know, start to see how I like to play and be able to make that more of my own style as opposed to just copying artists that I really like.
Juno: I mean, songwriting has definitely changed for me. The songs on the first album were just a collection of everything that I've written for the band so far. And so since then writing songs that I know people will hear, is very different from just writing them for myself in my dorm room. After the album came out we were talking to somebody in the music industry and my family was actually on our way to Disney World, and he said you guys just need to send me like three demos if you can by tomorrow if you can. So I was in the closet in a hotel room at Disney World, recording demos, and we had to put them together from across three states. So we've gotten a lot better at doing things remotely.
LS: So your EP Juno goes to the Big House came out in April this year. Tell me a little bit about the creative process, what was that like and what were some of the goals and inspirations.
Grace: Yeah, like Juno had mentioned the songs that we put out were just what we had at the time. So we started playing together in 2018 2019, and we always wanted to record our stuff just to do it for ourselves and be able to, you know, show someone at one point. This is the band I was in and this is what we were doing together. But then COVID came and there was a lot of trouble with trying to record and we finally were able to get into the studio that February 2021. So we were like, let's just record everything we have and have a lot of fun with it. So I think really what is at the heart of that EP is us having fun together in the studio. Being in that space for the first time together and being able to just take two days to be super creative and bounce off each other. I think that I really enjoyed it and I really miss being able to do that together, doing it remotely, you don't have the same kind of chemistry. So I'm excited for us to be able to record in person together as opposed to sending each other clips across states.
LS: On the subject of the EP, “I fucked Yr mom” ended up gaining quite a bit of attention on TikTok a few months ago (or at least the cool side of TikTok). What was that like? How aware of it would you say you were?
Juno: That was my fault, TikTok is the reason that it happened so fast. Because the album literally came out on a Friday morning, just for a joke, me and my roommate like to sometimes smoke weed and then lie in bed together and watch TikToks. So he was like “you should make one with the song I think it would be funny,” and by Friday afternoon. It had blown up and like people were streaming the album on Spotify. Our first week on Spotify we had all these 1000s of streams. I remember sitting up in my room and every 10 minutes waking my roommate up and being like, “it went up again went up again,” it was like, “got a new comment,” “it went up again” like every five minutes.
Grace: The funny thing was that I was super aware of it. And then people kept sending me TikToks that they saw when it came on their for you page or something and they're like, “I don't know if you know” and I was like no, I know. People are just reciting what I made up in the recording studio, and that was a really weird experience. Especially because now I listen to that monologue and I'm like, “Oh, that could have been tighter,” “the way I said that could have been better.” I just didn't think that people were actually going to take it, not even take it seriously, but just listen to it and have fun with it. I'm glad that so many people just had fun with our monologues. That was like a last second decision to have two spoken monologues, but I don't know. I think it was a really fun addition to it. it makes the song a lot more, I guess interactive. I think it made it work to be more viral or allowed it to be shared easier. And then people got to see our other music too so I'm grateful for that.
Taryn: It just came so suddenly like Juno said. The album hit Spotify Friday morning and Friday afternoon we were going viral on TikTok. It was really awesome because I didn't think anyone was gonna listen to it other than like our friends and like our parents and maybe a couple kids at school. Now we have fans, honestly in countries all across the world and people are like “come to California” or “come to Chicago” or “we want to see you play.” I was wondering if we'd ever get there and we got there so quickly now we're just trying to catch up. Can we get the money and the resources to go to the other side of the country? How quickly can we fly to Europe? Like most bands, they work so hard and they spend years trying to get to the point where they have fans in other areas and we're just scrambling to go see them. They're already there, just the era of social media and tiktok and virality. It's weird but I can't complain, it's been amazing.
Juno: I didn't even think my parents were going to hear it. I had to show them when it blew up. I had to sit them down in the kitchen and say, “You're about to be very disappointed in me.” But they liked it. They like it now, they came to our show two nights ago.
Taryn: Our moms have come around.
LS: Femme punk/Riotgrrrl has really had a revival the last year and the scene is a lot more diverse now than it was in previous decades with bands of all different intersecting identities. How do you feel that you currently fit into it?
Grace: So the inspiration for the band definitely came from me getting back into listening to riotgrrrl music. I listened to it a little bit in early high school and was like, “Oh this is so fucking cool.” The kind of lyrics, like with the 90’s stuff and Bikini kill, can be super simple. And just like hey, this is my body and this is what I can do with it and that kind of energy. I think it's really cool how bands have now taken that and everything has gotten a lot more complex. And how we look at riotgrrrl or like how we can embrace that kind of mentality. I was definitely inspired by riotgrrrl. That's where a lot of our, or a lot of my performance like inspiration comes from. Like with Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill and the way that they carried themselves on stage. But yeah, I think what I think our goal is, is kind of creating this, or trying to be a part of that community and helping it grow.
Juno: For me, fitting into the genre just means not writing songs that center men. I write all our music and I intentionally don't write any songs about men. I could, but I don't want to. I haven't yet and I don't plan on it. Having music that feels centered around like queer non male relationships I just think is something very important to me at least.
Grace: I think that's a way that it kind of adds to what was started in the 90s by the riotgrrrl scene. I feel like now, in this like, I don't know, in this decade we're able to add to it and be able to talk about more things that maybe weren't as widely talked about during that scene.
LS: Your most recent release was a cover of “Hit the Back” by King Princess, are there any other projects in the works or once this whole tour wraps up are you guys gonna take a little break. Is there anything that we can look forward to?
Juno: I am in the process of writing a full length album for us. We've gotten like five or six of those songs that we started playing and we've been workshopping and started to work on. So we're hoping to tentatively have a full length album out sometime in early 2022. Winter, spring, maybe, whenever we can find the time, but we definitely don't plan on taking a break.
Grace: I was gonna say we're definitely not taking a break. I think we're just gonna keep playing through. We might even record some, we have a song that we always do live called “Molly Sells Molly by the Seashore” and we don't have a recording of it yet just because we haven't been able to be in the studio. We're hoping to maybe record that next Sunday when we don't have any shows. So it's really about finding the time but we really want to just keep recording and putting music out there.
Taryn: I think it might seem like a break to fans who are looking forward to seeing us play live. But even when we're not playing shows, we're not really taking a break. Every weekend where there's not a show we're practicing, we're writing new songs, we're booking more shows, we're in the studio recording something. So anytime that it seems like we're taking a break, we're probably just grinding extra hard so that we can get the music out there, and get back out there and play more shows. With COVID it's kind of tough getting into studios, especially when the winter comes, but hopefully we'll get in there. We'll have some phenomenal takes, we'll engineer the shit out of it, and we'll get it out as soon as possible so people can hear it. The songs that Juno has been writing, we've heard them and they're just absolutely amazing. Already, I drive around and I'm like, “Oh man, I don't want to listen to that old EP anymore I want to listen to the new shit.” We're really eager to get that out so we're going to work as quickly as possible to get it to people. But yeah once the tour is over it's just going to be hunkering down and finishing that so there's always more work to be done.
LS: Going forward as artists with all these new projects in the works. What do you hope to create? What stories do you hope to keep telling through your art?
Juno: In a few years, I want people to be like “man, back when I was like 16 and starting to get into punk music I found this band online. I went to some sick shows and they got me into the scene .“ A lot of our fans are younger and I think that's so cool so my whole goal is just keep writing music that I would have wanted to hear when I was growing up with punk music, but there was no one there that was quite like me to do it you know? That’s what I'm hoping for.
Taryn: I think if we can inspire more more queer artists to come through the scene too that would be phenomenal. At least for me, some non-male drummers would be amazing. All of my drummer idols when people ask, I feel so bad like I have to name men because I feel like there's just not as many visible female drummers like in popular music, and I would love to have a little part in changing that so we'll see how that goes.
For more information on touring schedules and show dates be sure to check out their instagram page @sorrymomtheband, and on their twitter @sorrymompunk.
Check Out Sorry Mom’s Discography Here: