Cherry picked Feminist Punk from LA
FEMINIST PUNK FROM LA
“IT was really, really a dream. A dream come true,” Clementine Creevy says. It’s a Friday in late September, the day after Creevy’s appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden with her melodic punk band, Cherry Glazerr.
Flanked by giant inflatable red cherries and bathed in a magenta haze of stage lights, Creevy performed the band’s breakthrough single, “Daddi,” a punk feminist sneer at misogyny. (“Where should I go daddy?/What should I say?”) On this occasion, the band teamed up with the show’s house band leader, Reggie Watts, to play Watt’s club banger disco remix of the angular post-punk song.
“It’s cool to see the remix give the song another life it deserves,” she says. “I met Reggie when we played a show together at the Los Angeles Theatre with his side project Wajatta. I love his version of the song.”
At just 22, the guitarist-singer-songwriter has helmed Cherry Glazerr since she was 15, improvising and recording songs for her Soundcloud account in her family’s Los Angeles bedroom. In seven years, she’s pushed the band through several iterations of drummers and guitarists, three albums, and two EPs, as well as several tours and music festival appearances across Europe and North America. The band’s most recent album, Stuffed & Ready, released in February, has won praise in outlets ranging from Pitchfork to The New York Times.
Cherry Glazerr, who opens for Prism B*tch on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Meow Wolf, plays with the band’s current lineup of Creevy, drummer Tabor Allen, and bassist Devin O’Brien.
“I started this band when I was 15 because I thought it was fun playing guitar and writing songs,” says Creevy. “I did this for me. To continue this as a career feels like one of the greatest life hacks.”
With their feedback-drenched guitars, garage rock riffs, and a funhouse-meets-arthouse take on punk, Cherry Glazerr is a welcome throwback to the fertile energy of the 1990s DIY indie scene. A look at the festivals they have played over the past year is an intersecting Venn diagram of their fans and influences.
Last month, they played on the lineup of Riot Fest, a nostalgic, ecumenical gathering of punks in Chicago, headlined by ’80s thrash metal legends Slayer and ’90s riot grrrl icons Bikini Kill. That came a couple weeks after appearing as “the band” in a Weezer video as well as opening for Café Tacvba, the fabled Mexico City rockers, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. And just days before their Santa Fe show, Cherry Glazerr will take the stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the Tecate Coordenada music festival playing alongside Latin rock giants Juanes and American indie acts such as Yeasayer and Vampire Weekend.
“It’s crazy, it’s so cool. I feel really grateful that I do this for a living. It sounds generic, but the fact that this is my career is so stupid to me in a really hilarious way,” Creevy says.
Creevy has managed to parlay her music career into adjacent fields, where her jangly, day-glo vision of punk and feminism inspires others. She has a recurring role on the Amazon series Transparent heading Glitterish, a fictional rock band. In 2014, French designer Hedi Slimane cast Creevy as a model and commissioned Cherry Glazerr to write “Had Ten Dollaz” as part of the runway soundtrack for the fall 2014 Yves Saint Laurent fashion show.
Just seven years ago, Creevy was posting her songs online under the handle Clembutt before bringing her classmates into the project and naming the band Cherry Glazerr (after Los Angeles NPR host Cherry Glaser). Their first album, 2014’s Haxel Princess, was hazy garage rock with tart lyrics, goofy callouts, and punk melodies. Listening to an album so clearly influenced by The Runaways and Bratmobile, how could Cherry Glazerr not have included a cover of “Cherry Bomb”?
By 2017, Creevy’s writing and industry connections had improved, bringing in top producers who engineered albums for The Strokes and Ziggy Marley. The result, Apocalipstick, was released on Inauguration Day 2017, when Creevy was 19. It’s an album full of songs built around feedback-laced hooks, clever synths, and lyrics that found Creevy still writing about scattershot teenage life — in “Trash People,” she wails, “We wear our underpants three days in a row/My room smells like an ashtray” — while also growing up and realizing that her artist’s need for solitude could undercut a newfound need for political solidarity. In the album’s opening track, “Told You I’d Be With the Guys,” she laments, “I was a lone wolf/I thought I lost my pack/Where are my ladies?/Nobody has my back.” This year’s Stuffed & Ready finds the band sticking to the same formula while sharpening their guitar riffs and turning their music videos in NSFW spectacles of absurdity, juvenile delinquency, and cultural dissent. The video for “Juicy Socks” has the band intoning “I don’t want nobody hurt/But I made an exception with him” inside a glitzy party bus as agile members of the Los Angeles collective Future Ladies of Wrestling grapple on the bus floor.
That mix of the silly and the serious filters through everything Creevy makes. “Not sanitizing your art. Doing whatever the hell you want. That’s the great joy of being an artist,” Creevy says. “It’s to put your whole self out there and let them choke.”