Screaming Females consider what's next
"I don't feel compelled to make things. My creative instincts are born out of a necessity."
One of the most prolific punk bands of the past decade is trying to figure out how to get going again.
Screaming Females has spent most of the past 15 years on the road or recording, cranking out seven albums of heavy guitar riffs and howling songs. The New Brunswick-based trio is known for its DIY approach, building a buzz based on endless touring, regular record releases (with the occasional demonic Taylor Swift cover thrown in) and performances with groups like Dinosaur Jr. and Waxahatchee.
Songs like “I’ll Make You Sorry” from 2018’s All At Once help demonstrate the appeal, and are a reminder of why Spin named singer and guitarist Marissa Paternoster among the greatest guitar players of all time.
More than a year after their last show, though, Paternoster, drummer Jarrett Dougherty and bassist Mike Abbate are practicing once a week and sitting on a batch of songs that they haven’t had the chance to test in front of an audience.
The goal, it seems, is to just keep moving forward. The pandemic proved, once and for all, that the notion of adversity and hardship having any creative benefit is a farce.
“Anybody who’s worked in art or from a place of trauma knows that when you’re feeling bad, you don’t want to do anything,” Paternoster said during a recent conversation. “You want to lie in bed and cry or watch 50 episodes of 90 Day Fiance while you eat a pile of cheese. I don't feel compelled to make things. My creative instincts are born out of a necessity. I haven't done anything else.”
Those instincts are honed out of repetition, to hear the band describe it. The seven Screaming Females albums (or nine, if you count Live at the Hideout and 2019’s Singles Too compilation) came from the process of constant work — experimenting with different guitar riffs, watching a crowd’s reaction to a new song or gaining an insight from an accidental note.
“Even when there was a heavy feeling of ‘What’s the point of going to band practice if we can’t perform?’ we had to just keep doing it,” Dougherty says. “With our creative process, so much of it has to do with just doing.”
Band members spent much of the pandemic in various states of flux.
Dougherty, who works in food-service between Screaming Females paychecks, found that, when the group rushed home from a tour in March 2020, that his usual back-up gig wasn’t a reliable option. He learned computer programming, while bassist Mike Abbate ran a screenprinting business.
Paternoster works as a visual artist and has been illustrating a graphic novel called Merriment, which is the creation of Joe Steinhardt of Don Giovanni records “about the horrors of modern life.” The project has raised nearly $12,000 on Kickstarter by press time and “is definitely a bummer,” Paternoster added.
They’ve also been listening to new music. After years of listening almost exclusively to punk rock, Dougherty is deep into Chicago house music from the 1980s while also ordering albums from Sorry State Records, an independent music shop with its own recommendation newsletter.
Paternoster, meanwhile, has been listening to Joni Mitchell (“I finally get it”) and Linda Ronstadt (“I’ve finally turned into my father”).
For now, though, the holding pattern remains.
Thanks to the competitive touring landscape, small royalty checks from Spotify and the 18 months it takes for a record to be pressed, life as a musician already was at a “many-generation low” in terms of providing an income prior to the pandemic, Dougherty says.
“I don’t know what it means to get back from this, but I know we’re going to be active,” he adds.
Rather than booking a tour and risking financial agony in the event that audiences don’t fill up venues again, the band plans to spend the summer watching how the world reacts to in-person concerts again.
“I just finished work and there’s no Yankees game tonight so I’m just going to make a burrito and sit around,” Dougherty says when asked of his plans for the immediate future.
“Yeah, sitting around rocks,” Paternoster adds.
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one more thing
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