“This needs to be a punky set.”
Potty Mouth vocalist and guitarist Abby Weems sits hunched over on the concrete floor of the band’s basement practice space, calling out song titles and scribbling setlist changes in a notebook. The trio is getting down to the wire, gathered at bassist Ally Einbinder’s Northampton home to run through a set for the first night of their upcoming tour, now just two days away.
It’s an unassuming practice space, lit by mismatched string lights and a couple of flickering bare bulbs. The floor is scattered with distortion pedals and carpet samples. The only hint at the tour ahead is a heap of well-traveled hardshell cases, plastered with stickers, stacked off to the side of the room. The setlist that Weems is drawing up is for a smaller venue than the rest-- a Northampton house show that they’ve been weary of giving the address out for. More importantly, it’ll be the first time they’ve ever played without the backing of an additional touring guitarist, who won’t be able to join them until the next stop. The “punky set” angle incidentally suits the show’s setting, but the real goal is to get away with a set that feels intact when stripped down to a three-piece.
At 22, Weems is the youngest in the band by 4 years, though given her tall stature and commanding presence behind the mic, she’s often mistaken for the oldest. When she speaks, it’s usually accompanied by a hair-trigger smile, but right now her eyebrows are furrowed in thought. She rattles off the setlist, pulled from 2013 album Hell Bent and last year’s Potty Mouth EP, mixed in with new cuts in the works for an upcoming record. Something about it feels off.
“It needs more stuff that people know,” says drummer Victoria Mandanas, 26, from behind her set, where she’s been watching Einbinder and Weems debate how to change the list. Her commentary tends to be sparse but significant, a current that keeps the band on course. The thought clicks. Weems makes a few more additions to the list, amps hum to life, and the trio thrums into EP single “The Bomb”. Even down a guitarist, they sound uncannily like the record. Later, they shift gears to an anonymous new track that's both slicker and heavier than their known material. It demonstrates a clear vision for their sound, and as they describe it later on, signifies their ambition to match.
After five years of increasingly buzzy house shows, bar gigs, and shoestring-budget tours, it feels like Potty Mouth is on the verge of something.
In the meantime, tonight is just another Saturday night in Northampton. Following a nearly two-hour practice, the band is ready to let loose. Over quesadillas at a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town, the conversation bounces from Tinder stories to gossip from a friend's party the previous night, landing on the group's plans for the evening to come. Einbinder, 27, is texting Speedy Ortiz frontwoman Sadie Dupuis, who also lives in Western Mass, about a party that starts in a few hours.
Though we've spent most of the afternoon together, this is the band's first nod toward any connections to other local musicians, which is surprising if only because the community-driven aspect of the Pioneer Valley's music scene has been the subject of recent media interest. Last year, Pitchfork ran a locally notorious article centered on the idea that "Western Mass is having another moment," describing Potty Mouth, Speedy Ortiz, and a hodgepodge of other area bands in a loose parallel to the mid-'80s rise of greats like Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, and Sonic Youth. Its effect was lasting, planting plenty of seeds in pieces elsewhere, though many Pioneer Valley musicians themselves (Potty Mouth included) feel that it wasn't an entirely accurate representation.
Later that night, after a string of small-town Saturday errands (a Walmart run for polka-dotted balloons, an economical boxed wine purchase) we’re all talking in Einbinder's sherbety orange bedroom when the article comes back up. Though Northampton has a reputation as a unique incubator for artistic talent, Weems explains that the area also comes with limitations. “Living here doesn’t feel like a music mecca. I can see how, if you compare it to [other small towns] it can seem like that, but I definitely think that it was romanticized”.
Einbinder agrees. “The other thing about this place is that for such a small area there are still so many divisions. I don’t think we’re in any kind of scene right now at all.”
The three feel that they’ve taken Potty Mouth to its limits within Western Mass. “I definitely think that there’s a ceiling here,” explains Einbinder. “If you want to make a career in music, the music business exists in New York and LA.”
That realization, along with a goal of becoming career musicians, is pushing the band to move to L.A. this upcoming summer. They'll have to define new goals all over again, not only to suit a new city, but also because they keep surpassing their own evolving definitions of success. It's a welcome task that's due in part to Potty Mouth's recent momentum, but it’s also a reference to the band’s own humble expectations at its outset.
Formed in 2011 by three Smith College students (Einbinder, Mandanas, and former guitarist Phoebe Harris) along with Weems, at the time still a high schooler navigating house shows, the group came together as what Weems explains was “more like a project than a band”. Creative roles were loosely defined and, out of the group, Mandanas was the only one with a formal musical background playing drums since childhood. As the months went on, jam sessions evolved into songs and the four fell into a natural rhythm.
According to Weems, none of the band’s early turning points were especially thought out; instead, they came as the products of a commitment to the group that soon outweighed other priorities. “There were always obstacles along the way,” she says. “We thought ‘Oh, this will be the end of the band because Victoria is graduating and she moves away,’ or ‘Abby has to go to college’ or whatever, but we just kept deciding to do things in favor of the band.” Harris left the group to pursue an illustrating career in 2014, but the rest were determined to make it work, filling the role with rotating touring guitarists.
Along the way, they grew into their sound: blunt lyrics, coolly delivered against melodic, garage-y instrumentation. Weems' double-edged voice is capable of both silky harmonies and snarling, often vacillating between the two within a single song. Depending on who you ask, the overall effect might be described as a polished reinterpretation of punk influences or a toughened-up spin on pop. “We say punk-influenced pop,” explains Weems, careful to sidestep pop-punk baggage. “It is just pop music, but we’re a rock band.”
“Genre seems so dated in a way,” she elaborates later. “It’s a weird thing for us because we do want to be a successful band, so there’s a weird line that we have to walk. We don’t want to be pop stars. We want to be the best possible version of Potty Mouth, and the most accessible version of Potty Mouth. We still don’t really know what that is, but I don’t see it as a bad thing. We just want to be successful, and we want people to hear our music, so we’re not going to keep it in the basement just because we want to stay ‘punks’ or just want to appeal to punks.”
“Punk ethos in practice is intensely hypocritical,” says Einbinder. “I don’t see the binary of pop and rock to be a useful one. I think it’s really limiting to think of music that way… I think that to position pop as secondary, lesser than rock music, is in a lot of ways reproducing the same meanings of the gender binary hierarchy. Rock has more associations with masculinity and all the values therein, whereas pop tends to be more associated with femininity.”
Those perceptions present an illusory choice for many bands, but Einbinder challenges the value of broad genre categorization, which she views as minimizing all the common ground between the two. “As for genre categories describing sound, [pop and rock are] two of the broadest categories that you could possibly come up with. It’s so watered down in that sense. A lot of rock music is pop music, and a lot of pop music is rock music. I still think that being anti-pop is stupid, because even the people who think they’re the most politically radical punks don’t live outside the dominant culture. They exist within it.”
Potty Mouth has plenty of experience with the ups and downs of the DIY-or-bust mentality that Einbinder references. Though that kind of scrappiness helped contribute to the band’s development in earlier years, she's now disillusioned with the expectations that she sees the movement placing on the very bands that it creates and supports.
“It carries with it this assumption that if you’re not a punk band in the punk subculture, that you can’t have the same ideas and ethics and values that that subculture purports to have," she says. "Punk subculture purports to be anti-racist, anti-sexist… I hate the idea of selling out, because what does that even mean? You can still be a band that has [those] values and ethics and puts those values and ideas and ethics into practice to achieve career success.”
Highlighting the distinctions between Potty Mouth’s internal philosophy and the meaning of its music has been an unexpected source of frustration in the past. Though the band's sound has a clear punk inflection, Weems’ lyrics mainly deal with relationships and identity, and were never intended as commentary on a larger scale. Even at the band’s heaviest moments, there’s always something lighthearted about it. Weems makes faces behind the mic, Einbinder bounces around the room while firing off bass riffs, and the trio replaces the chorus of “Cherry Picking” by chanting “I want my white wine!” If Potty Mouth is representative of any statement, it's the idea that a band can engage deeply with a personal philosophy while making music that isn't a constant declaration of its values.
Embracing both aspects equally has helped guide the group's development, especially when evaluating career-altering business and creative decisions. Recently, while shooting a music video in L.A., the band reworked part of the artistic concept on the spot upon discovering that a videographer planned to incorporate a compilation of explosions and dropping bombs.
“We saw it and were like ‘Okay, some of this is cool, and some of this is war-reminiscent and very violent’,” says Einbinder. “It was hard to talk about it because there were a lot of people in the room, but we stepped out into the hallway and talked about it and were like ‘Yeah, we can’t use this footage because it’s just really violent, and it’s a privilege to look at this imagery and use it as art and not take it seriously... I think for us, as a group and as individuals, we’re always talking about our values and practices and consciousness and communication. This kind of work is happening all the time on a microscopic, day-to-day level."
“Everyone’s contributing to society’s bullshit in some way,” says Weems. “It’s better to think about how you can change it instead of taking each other out for it.”
Catch Potty Mouth tomorrow night (3/5) at ONCE Somerville, along with Charming Disaster and Puppy Problems. Tickets are still available.