Mandy Lee is best known as the lead singer of the indie pop band Misterwives, but in late 2024, the band announced a tour that would be their last for the foreseeable future. The statement came with the reassurance “this isn’t goodbye,” but with the conclusion of the tour came an apparent hibernation. In the final days of 2025 however, there came a sudden flash of activity for Cherry Bomb, Mandy Lee’s new solo project. Emerging with a bold, yassified new aesthetic and music videos to accompany her assertive first singles “Never Be Me (M★therf★cker),”“Digital Girl,””Sorry You’re Not Sorry,” and “Myriad Reflector,” Cherry Bomb’s fully-fledged apparition is proof that Mandy Lee has been cooking. Allston Pudding sat down to talk with her two months before Cherry Bomb’s live debut at the New York edition of the All Things Go music festival.

As the lead element of Misterwives, Mandy Lee has never had the reputation for subduing herself; she has been high-kicking her way across stages in bright tartan prints and streaming ribbons for years. Even so, Cherry Bomb seeks to take what was already there and turn it up to eleven. She reflected on that decision, connecting the inspiration behind the name Cherry Bomb to her childhood self, “I always was a very fiery, fearless ball of energy and sparkles, and the older you get, the more the world tells you to be less of who you are, so this project was a love letter to getting back to who she is.” She explained without casting aspersion that although she hasn’t been timid or shy as part of Misterwives, Cherry Bomb has allowed her to take a different approach. “I think getting to do this just through the lens of what I like–and not what a band is–allowed me to dig up parts of me that maybe didn’t fit with the band.”

A solo career wasn’t exactly part of the original plan though. Lee was quick to admit “I was always from the school of ‘I will never do a solo project,’” before quipping, “classic never say never.” Elaborating on why she had forsaken the solo route for so long, she gushed, “I love being in a band! I love the familial aspect, I love the ‘doing it together,’ the community… Doing this on your own is so much more on you versus like a collective experience, and to me the joy of music is sharing with other people. While it is so cathartic in your own personal experience, the ultimate final boss of music is the [act of] sharing it with other people.” She recalled how that perspective ran counter to expectations of her as the frontwoman of a band. The questions about a solo project tended to come from a place of when, not if, and Lee’s counter to that was “if you’re gonna tell me to zig, I’m gonna zag.”

Cherry Bomb was instead a product of circumstance. “[Cherry Bomb] only came about because [Misterwives] came to a point where we’ve been doing this for over a decade and never took a break, and in a very deserving moment of ‘hey it’s okay to take a pause and take a rest, and come back to this when we feel energized and inspired.’”

Mandy Lee cites her song “Digital Girl” as the first proper song that she wrote for Cherry Bomb where she could envision the broader scope of the project. She worked on “Digital Girl” with Misterwives drummer Etienne Bowler prior to the last Misterwives tour, and the collaboration continued into the band’s hiatus after.

Bowler is one of a few close partners that Lee chose to bring into the fold for her solo project. She elaborated, “we just have such a special relationship; he’s been my main collaborator since [I was] a teenager, so it’s really just family at this point… Etienne and I–no matter what happens with the band–we will find a way to make music at some point.”

There is a reason that Mandy Lee and Etienne Bowler share such a close bond: the two were married and divorced, concluding nine years of romantic involvement, but they moved beyond heartbreak to remain strong creative partners. Cherry Bomb’s pointed lyrics could be mistaken for lingering ire aimed at Bowler, but she protested that mischaracterization with a laugh, “well it’s not to Etienne! There’s other people in my life that have made me heartbroken!” She moved to recontextualize, “the music is so much a Frankenstein of many iterations of different relationships: platonic, romantic, familial… it’s not at all like ‘[it] only responds to you [Etienne] and then you’re gonna produce this!’ Although that did happen on Superbloom, for sure.” Lee expressed thanks for their ongoing partnership, “I’m really grateful that the love is still there, the love has just changed shapes. We’re such supporters of each other and we are family for the rest of time…  there’s such a sacred bond with the two of us. We have gone through every Hell and back and have come out here where we can still create together and have an amazing time and grow, even if it’s in different directions.”

Within the shifting music industry that is now intertwined with the overstimulating circus of social media, the struggle to make headway as an artist requires resilience. The constant push to cater to capricious engagement-driven algorithms with a barrage of short form, easily shared, easily consumed, and easily forgotten content is incessant. Mandy Lee is under no delusion that what she wants to do with Cherry Bomb runs counter to the strategies that are rewarded with more views in an environment where being seen is winning. “I’m really trying to not let that be a measuring stick of what I’m making and how it feels to create,” she commented.  “I’m still an artist that believes in albums, and music videos, and building a world, and unfortunately those things really don’t resonate on socials. Unless you’re an already-established artist or a unicorn where you got lucky, it’s very hard to do this without using the hooky, viral formats that–to me–don’t feel authentic,” she noted before recollecting the repeated advice she was given to adjust to more attention-grabbing methods. That advice was unheeded because following it would be a departure from the fiercely self-expressive spirit of the project. “That doesn’t feel like me. So if I’m on the slower path of trying to make in the way that feels authentic, to not catering to what an algorithm wants of me, I’m okay to die on that hill,” she elucidated before bursting into laughter as she added “even if it’s keeping me in 200-view jail I can’t get out of! It’s demoralizing! To make all these beautiful music videos… making all of this art with my friends and it’s so evident how much joy, and fun, and inspiration is coming out of these things and it just doesn’t translate online. So I’m holding out for when I play shows that hopefully will help me feel human again, because I don’t love serving algorithms.”

Connecting with fans in person is always a major objective for Mandy Lee. Her first live performance at All Things Go in late September is an incredible opportunity to accomplish that. In addition to that first gig, she also has designs for an album release show in her home city of Los Angeles and a tour to accompany the album, projected for release next year.

For the time being, with the bulk of her live shows months away, Cherry Bomb can only be experienced through what has been doled out thus far. The stylized promotional art and slickly produced music videos accompanying the rollout reflect the loudest version of Mandy Lee, and very deliberately so. It’s a vibrant, frilly, sparkling visual language that is eclectic and Do-It-Yourself, but still the product of careful consideration. Most importantly, it’s still an accurate representation of Mandy herself, who took the chance to compile her Cherry Bomb look using every feather boa, sequin, and outfit she’s accumulated over the last fifteen years. Lee embraces the clashing elements because she enjoys the contrast and the imperfection. In her own words: “It’s more of a homecoming than a reinvention,” and it’s a choice to be unabashedly perceived in reply to a political climate that she identifies as seeking to shrink women.

Even the music videos are something of an act of defiance. Mandy Lee stood her ground when confronted with pragmatic advice from industry insiders to allocate her efforts elsewhere, and she has her justification. “I think it’s so vital to create in a visual language that invites people into the world, you know what I mean? The visuals work in tandem with the music,” she expounded. Even the DIY nature of the four music videos that she made for her original singles did not offset their inherently expensive production. “But to me it’s really worth it,” Lee continued, “especially for this project, because I don’t have the [live show yet]. I don’t have anything but the music and the visuals, so I think I’ve really held tightly to expressing myself as much as I possibly can within the limited resources I have.”  In the end she welcomed the challenge: “I do think having the restrictions is what makes creating so rewarding.”

Cherry Bomb is undeniably a distillation of Mandy Lee as an artist, and though it would be unfair to characterize her work with Misterwives as stifling, she has been able to fully express herself with a solo project. It is a curious aspect of Lee’s growth with Cherry Bomb that so much of it is the result of retrospection, but that’s something that she hopes listeners take to heart. “I hope Cherry is a bridge for people to get back to who they really are. That it’s a spark, permission, a reminder [that] it’s not too late to reconnect with parts of yourself you’ve lost touch with over the years, and that we can start over at any point in our life.”