DOWNGIRL - Burn It Down
Sydney Femme-Punks Come Out Swinging
Written by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Tuesday 21 March 2022
Skarlett Saramore is in a damn good mood when she talks to SENSE, and she should be. Beauty Queen, the debut single of femme punk rockers DOWNGIRL, has been Track of the Day on Triple J, and the band’s social media has been awash with praise from the Australian music press. Pissed-off grunge that channels the spirit of trailblazers L7, DOWNGIRL are bringing Riot Grrrl energy screaming into 2022, and Beauty Queen is a deafening shot across the bow. Skarlett spoke to me from Sydney…
How did you meet? How did it come together?
So we used to be in a band called BOYSCLUB, and as time went by, Ava [Noir], the guitarist, first left, and we tried to rebuild the band after that, and then Sera [Doll], the singer, ended up leaving during the second lockdown, just before the second lockdown of COVID in Sydney, and we just went, “Nope.” Half the band had gone from what it was, and we always made a pact – you know, if two people leave … It’s always been a democracy … So we just went, “Alright, that’s it, rest in peace. Let’s start DOWNGIRL.” So Kristen [Adams], Lou [Harbidge] and I just started writing, and we started pumping out these demos online towards each other on GarageBand … They didn’t sound great at all, but it was just so cathartic, because we couldn’t leave the house. We couldn’t do anything for six months, so we wrote over twenty songs, all different … All of us wrote. Every single song that you’re probably going to hear was written by a separate one of us, and we all bought it online during COVID, so it kind of stemmed from BOYSCLUB. We were still looking for a singer, and then we remembered Alex [Neville], and Alex is really good friends with Kristen … We just started sending riffs over, and Alex sent the riff for Beauty Queen – the first thing she ever sent us online. I just went, “Oh fuck, that’s badass,” so I just went on GarageBand and programmed shitty drums to it, and then she sent it back with vocals, and we sent it to Lou, and Lou put bass [on it], and Lou sent it to Kristen and she did backup vocals and slayed some solos. [Laughs] And we just went, “Yeah, that’s a fucking single, hey?” That was the first song, and we’ve got, like, twenty others that we’ve written from there too.
I’m sure this is probably not going to surprise you, but when I was listening to the single, the first thing that came to mind was … have you ever seen the movie Natural Born Killers? It reminded me of the opening. Juliette Lewis is being hit on by a sleazy trucker in a bar, and Shitlist [by L7] comes on and she absolutely fucks him up. [Laughs]
[Laughs] Oh god. You know what’s funny? That was part of the end vibe of BOYSCLUB. We got our song on the new ABC show, the indigenous vampire-killing show Firebite … No joke, we had one of those scenes where they’re about to fight, and that was the end of that band. We’ve definitely carried that badass femme energy. We’ve got to maintain that energy now. It’s going to be hard! [Laughs]
Was L7 a bit of an influence for you guys back in the day?
Fuck yeah. Oh my god, they still are. Incredible, yeah.
I can’t wrap my head around what it would have been an all-female band with that kind of politics and that kind of attitude in the early 90s … and the kind of shit they would have had to put up with.
Endless shit, because if we’re still going through things in our own way through the fourth wave of feminism, I couldn’t imagine the second and third. Like, fuck me dead, they have paved the way for women like us to just straight up give the middle finger from the get-go, and probably not be assaulted as easily … We’re here to challenge, I guess, the next step … see where this world’s heading. It’s a bit weird right now, so we don’t know. Punk might come in handy soon, I think.
I think it always has, but yeah, there’s an agitation in the air that I’ve noticed since about 2015 … something really serious started brewing.
Yeah, I feel that … You know, [from] Palestine and Gaza to the rest of it that’s been brewing with the world, and climate change and the tensions, it’s a bit hard not to lose your mind from the Black Lives Matter movements and the #MeToo movement. A lot has happened, so yeah, I would agree, definitely.
I had a really interesting part of my interview with Michele [Madden – TOURETTES vocalist] where she said that she would walk out on interviews when they would ask her who her favourite female vocalists are, because, to quote her, she would say “Would you ask Chris Cornell who his favourite male vocalists are?”
True … You know what? I want to push up every damn female around me, and I don’t care if I’m screaming in everyone’s face, so I’m the complete opposite. I would tell everyone. And I would call them “femme”. Femme doesn’t define you by gender, you know? I’m not here saying “female”, I’m saying “femme”. I think “femme” can be a broad spectrum of anything. It doesn’t matter what’s between your legs, or what you identify as. It doesn’t matter. I think femme is a power, like punk … If you really want to analyse it, of course, in the punk scene, I looked up to men drumming. I had Mercedes [Lander] in KITTIE … There’s a handful of female drummers that I can think of growing up in that time, but I always went back to Joey Jordison. It was always the men, so to lift women up now, I think it’s still vital. I think these women saying that, that’s their perspective, and I kind of agree in a different way? I don’t know if that makes any sense … I’m proud to lift anyone up around me, and I think that’s totally fine, yeah. [Laughs]
I noticed that Morgan [Rose] from SEVENDUST follows you on Instagram.
Oh my god, I love that guy so much. He’s amazing. [Laughs]
That band … Home and Animosity? Ooof.
You know what? When I thought I was straight, I think I was fourteen, and I had my first boyfriend and he had dreadlocks, and he invited me over to his house, and he goes, “You need to listen to this band,” and he played A PERFECT CIRCLE and SEVENDUST in a row on repeat, and I remember sitting there, and it blew my fucking mind. It absolutely blew my fucking mind.
I had a similar thing with DEFTONES around the same era. Chino’s voice just broke me.
Oh, Chino’s voice, oh my god. Yeah, DEFTONES, definitely … White Pony changed my life too. I was so young, and I don’t know, a lot of different influences at that time too, because I loved my grunge just as much too, and my metal.
The artwork for the single by Del Kathryn Barton …
Still dying over that.
What drew you to it?
So, I am obsessed with Del … Anything she’s ever done, I’ve fallen in love with. I have to thank my ex-girlfriend for that – that’s the only thing I think I can leave with, knowing that that was awesome. So yeah, she helped me discover her, and I just fell in love, and we just started following each other on Instagram one day, and then just messaging each other for some reason, and she started tagging #femmepunk in her stories and all these things, and we just connected in a way where we didn’t really speak. When this song was finished and we were thinking of covers, I just asked the girls straight away … I’m like, “I’m just going to ask her. I’m just going to totally ask her.” I know she’s worth $10,000 for something like this, and we have no money, but I’m just going to ask. [Laughs] She jumped on it straight away, and she goes, “Use anything of mine that I’ve ever done – your choice.” It took us days to go through everything, because she’s done so much.
Where do you see feminism going?
Where it needs to go is we need to empower and push up our indigenous/Torres Straight sister more than ever – more than fucking ever … There is so much work that still needs to be done, and people are saying, “feminism has had its time,” and it’s like, it’s only because you’re understanding that from a different level now. We’ve moved on, you know? There’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen with our indigenous before we can move on to any other section of anything like that. So in my opinion, we’ve got a lot of work to do. We’re getting there though. Shit is fucking changing, thank fuck.
The track Beauty Queen borrows a lot from Carrie. Be honest – if you had telekinetic powers in high school, what would you have done with them?
I would have stopped being beat up every single day. [Laughs] I was severely bullied, so my superpower would have been a force field, where I could have just turned it on, so then they would have been screaming or trying to hurt me and they couldn’t hurt me. So that would definitely have been my power in school. But I’m also grateful though, because [with] all the bullying, I never wanted to go hang with anyone, but I’d go to the music room and pick up my drumsticks, and Mrs. Ward, my teacher, would lock me in there, and I would play my little first Apple iPod, GREEN DAY on repeat, and I would just drum along to it. So, I’m actually kind of grateful for being bullied.
It sounds like you’ve got a bunch of songs in the pipeline. Do you have any plans to release any more singles? Or are you just going to see how this goes?
Oh, fuck yeah. You guys are getting so much music this year. We’re just going to smash it.
DOWNGIRL: Skarlett Saramore, Alex Neville, Kristen Adams + Lou Harbidge
Photo by: Yoga Punk Photography