Fake Fruit serves up fresh post-punk tunes
Oakland band feels more confident after successful debut at South by Southwest
The members of Oakland post-punk band Fake Fruit feigned surprise that anyone waited for their performance, up last on a three-band bill, at the Ivy Room.
“You stayed,” vocalist and guitarist Hannah D’Amato told the crowd jokingly as they set up for their show.
It was deep into a chilly Saturday night in Albany when the band took the stage. The show had been going on for nearly three hours by then, with fellow Bay Area bands Blues Lawyer and Galore playing earlier and KALX DJ Poindexter spinning between sets. And even before that, the April 23 concert was postponed from its original November 2021 date.
It was Fake Fruit’s first real headlining show, so D’Amato didn’t spare another minute. Exchanging glances with her bandmates — guitarist and vocalist Alex Post, drummer Miles MacDiarmid, and bassist Dylan Allard — D’Amato eventually fell into the cyclical prose of the band’s album closer, “Milkman,” which repeats: “Hot sidewalk/ No shade/ Milk curdles/ With age.”
By song’s end, each member was in full command of their corner of the stage, immersed in the music.
For those who missed it, Fake Fruit will be on another three-band bill, this time supporting New York rockers Sunflower Bean at the Independent in San Francisco on Saturday, June 4.
Fake Fruit had several incarnations before finding itself playing the Albany venue this spring. When D’Amato was 18, she left her home in suburban Southern California. She founded the band while she hustled in New York City, playing with other outfits and working as a session musician. She eventually found her way to Vancouver, British Columbia, before finally settling into the Bay Area in 2018, bringing the band along with her. Despite this shuffle of lineups and locations, Fake Fruit’s current iteration — its third — is its most decisive and successful.
“I really love when people challenge me. Every post-punk band seems to be a bunch of white guys,” D’Amato said. “So just me ... fronting the band as a Latinx woman, I’m like, ‘Let’s go!’ ”
In March 2021, Fake Fruit released its self-titled debut album with Rocks in Your Head Records, a label founded by San Francisco musician Sonny Smith. Illustrated on the cover is the sign for Albany Bowl, a San Pablo Avenue bowling alley a few blocks from the Ivy Room that closed during the first year of the pandemic. In the process of acclimating to the Bay Area, D’Amato would host nights at the Bowl to mingle and find her crowd. It was a way to bring disparate groups together even without music in mind.
“That spot was special to me because I feel like it helped me find my way in the Bay,” she told The Chronicle just days before the Ivy Room show. “It was kind of like my North Star.”
With time, and across several parties, she found Post, MacDiarmid and Allard.
“We just had the writing chemistry there,” D’Amato recalled. “We started writing (songs) together, and I was like, ‘This is exactly the sound.’ I know we nailed it.”
Those tracks were collated as part of “Fake Fruit,” which showcases the band’s clever instrumentation and D’Amato’s razor-sharp vocal performances. Their sound is naturally tense, plucking on guitar strings like nerves, and singing about sundered lovers.
In “No Mutuals,” the album’s opening track, D’Amato sings, “I don’t wanna wait/ To be christened as/ Cool.” It was written in response to what Fake Fruit refers to as the “Cool Guy phenomenon,” or when someone condescends and makes you “feel belittled,” the band collectively explained. The song slams scene snobs who go out of their way to keep the doors closed on people who want to be a part of something, and deserve to be.
At other times, however, “Fake Fruit” is disarming. D’Amato’s commanding voice softens, expressing
something closer to grumbling dissatisfaction than white-hot anger. “You painted a picture/ Like me, but distorted/ I built you up in my mind/ From a different time,” she sings on “Swing and a Miss.” The narrator acknowledges “that’s all right,” but there’s a veil of malaise that offsets the listener from achieving any satisfaction or catharsis.
Still, Fake Fruit inspires with a desire for self-determination. Their lyricism — which might initially come off as dreary or dissonant when paired with their style of instrumentation — is impassioned and conscientious.
That’s unusual for a band within a niche genre that’s commonly known to be dry and unapproachable.
“We all like sad songs that sound happy . ... That’s in our Venn diagram,” Allard said. “There’s many different kinds of happy-sounding songs with really sad lyrics all across the spectrum of music, and I think everybody likes that.”
Onstage, the band’s character is far from any post-punk stereotype. They’re fun. They laugh when they have to rotate instruments among people — from D’Amato to Allard, and Allard to Post, then around again.
They make sarcastic banter when the prep between songs is awkward. (“I’m just talking. I hate this part of the job,” D’Amato said, smiling at the Ivy Room crowd.) And yet, it doesn’t take much for Fake Fruit to fall back into the rhythm of its set list, an ability its members have gotten the hang of after playing with festival circuit veterans such as Canadian indie pop band Alvvays, British post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning and the trendsetting British indie rock duo Wet Leg.
All their experience culminated in their trip to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, this year, when Fake Fruit’s momentum was at its greatest. The band played eight shows in five days.
Upon their arrival there in March, the group saw an unfamiliar crowd. But by the time they had to leave, folks were wearing Fake Fruit shirts and coming back to catch another set.
“We were kind of surprised by people excited to see us outside of our little bubble of the Bay,” Post said.
D’Amato left Austin with a memory of a new fan who meant to leave, but said she saw “another brown girl get onstage” and gave the band a chance. After the show, the new fan told D’Amato that she had just found her new favorite band and that she wanted to start her own band.
“I feel like I had defeated impostor syndrome at South by Southwest, for real,” D’Amato said. “I finally was like, ‘I’m good at this. And I’m supposed to be doing this.’ ”
“We melted some faces at that festival,” MacDiarmid added.
Fake Fruit has played to bigger crowds than the 200-capacity Ivy Room, but the gig was special to the band. In an intimate venue lit up by rows of fairy lights, standing on a stage that was less than 4 feet high, the band ripped their guitars to celebrate headlining a show.
The crowd cheered as if it understood it was witnessing something rare. But it took just a few seconds of the opening riff to “No Mutuas” (the album opener translated into Spanish) to snap them out of it and get them jumping.