Marisa And The Moths
Meet the Reading quintet mixing fiery guitars and brutally honest lyrics with classic grunge.
Every new band has their inspirations, but those who can take the familiar to a new place are usually the most interesting. Marisa And The Moths admit that their gnarly downturns are rooted in the fuzz-bathed grit of 90s grunge, but on their self-titled debut, their self-coined “filthy pretty, pretty filthy” anthemia also takes cues from Foo Fighters’ rafter-raising heroics, Halestorm’s firepower and Royal Blood’s muscular heft.
“It’s all got to go through the moth filter!” laughs drummer and producer Jason Wilson. “Grunge has been done to death. We love it, but I don’t think we ever went in trying to sound like it.”
“It was raw,” adds vocalist and guitarist Marisa Rodriguez, explaining the perennial lure of the Seattle sound. “It was back when people were making music and it was about the energy. The lyrical content was brutally honest, dark and weird. Also, production-wise we really took inspiration from that. We have a lot of the Fender Jaguar [Kurt Cobain’s guitar of choice] on the album, we kept it as a running theme because it gives it that grungy feel.”
Initially Rodriguez’s solo project, The Moths’ metamorphosis into a fully-fledged band was something of a surprise. In 2017, she headed into Jason’s Reading studio with the bare bones of eight songs and plans to record them with four session musicians; lead guitarist Sophie Lloyd, bassist Liam James Barnes and guitarist Chris Merton. But over the next two years, after hours of bonding and honing, firm friendships blossomed and a new band emerged from the chrysalis.
Since then, the band have found their tribe, a loyal community who sell out Moth shows and scream Rodriguez’s brutally honest, intelligent and opinionated lyrics from the rooftops. And it’s arguably she who has given the band their unique voice, writing songs that touch on difficult social situations, mental health issues and female empowerment. On one track, 69, she thrusts female pleasure to the forefront, crooning over powerful, Audioslave-like riffery: ‘Don’t you quit, I’m not the type to fake it. It’s no good for me when you’re just laying there.’
“I wanted to talk about it,” she says. “I hadn’t listened to any songs where women were being honest about, not just sex, but bad sex. It should be talked about more, we don’t just have to sit there and take it, pretend that we like it and fake-moan. Women like to have sex too. It’s a two-way street.”
On the flipside of Rodriguez’s lyrical coin, there’s a track like How Did You Get So Weak? where she lambasts herself for giving her heart away so easily. “I am brutally honest,” she admits of her propensity to suffer for her art. “It sometimes gets me into trouble but I can’t help it. That’s part of being a songwriter. Maybe I need to do that. Maybe I deliberately do it because I want to get hurt so I can write more songs.”
“The Seattle sound was
raw. The lyrics were honest, dark and weird.”
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