MEET ME @THE ALTAR

FROM Florida SOUNDS LIKE Pop-punk thrills that will have you longing for the days of black eyeliner and studded belts

Since pop punk broke through in the Nineties, the genre’s most prominent faces have been largely white. Now, as the music industry begins waking up to its history of race and gender inequality, one band is ready to rewrite that unspoken rule: Meet Me @ the Altar, one of 2021’s most exciting new rock acts. Guitarist-bassist Téa Campbell, 20, and drummer Ada Juarez, 21, met online in 2015 after Campbell stumbled upon Juarez’s drum cover of a Twenty One Pilots song. The two became fast friends despite living in different states (Florida and New Jersey, respectively), and later added Edith Johnson, 20, on lead vocals after she auditioned by singing Paramore’s “All I Wanted.” Last year, the trio signed with Fueled by Ramen, the Warner Music-backed label responsible for launching some of the band members’ biggest influences, and rereleased the single “Garden” — an exhilarating blast of stickysweet vocals, fluttery electric riffs, and a dangerously catchy chorus (“Your flowers will finally grow!”). “I don’t think any of us have fully wrapped our heads around [the record deal] yet,” Campbell says. “We grew up idolizing these people our whole lives, and now we’re on the same label as them.”

Meet Me @ the Altar’s fans include All-Time Low’s Alex Gaskarth and the Wonder Years’ Dan Campbell, and the band members have benefited from Halsey’s Black Creators Fund, which offers financial support for black artists in need. But their rise hasn’t been without challenges. They recall feeling unwelcome at early gigs: “We would have to play with the local bands, but they’re all white dudes who didn’t really want us there,” Campbell says. “They were never explicit about it, but you can just tell.”

All three members of Meet Me @ the Altar now live together in Florida, where Campbell still works a day job and Johnson attends virtual college classes. And while the pandemic has slowed them down a little, these black and Latina women are eager to give their favorite genre some of the diversity it’s been missing for too long. “We knew going into this that it wasn’t going to be easy,” Campbell says. “But we accepted that we have to take the harder way so that the 12-year-old black girl looking up to us can do it the easy way.”