Potty Mouth

According to Ally, the band had no initial “lofty goals or expectations. Northampton was just a small punk community where people started bands all the time,” and their group was formed out of “that main ethic.”

On the other hand, she had experienced firsthand the difficulties of booking punk shows in a male-dominated scene, and had become increasingly frustrated with the way female artists were treated. Playing in punk bands such as Honeysuck and Outdated in the early 2010s had already helped her establish herself as a credible bassist, but she had yet to figure out how to navigate the patriarchal DIY scene.

Three months after Potty Mouth’s formation, the band played their first show. It was in “the basement of a punk house,” Ally remembers, and it set them on the path to establishing themselves as a unique entity amongst the masses of young, rebellious college kids trying to accomplish the same thing. What’s more, they were an all-female band, sharing the lived experience of being women musicians in punk. While there is consistently a lot of support surrounding new bands in the community where Potty Mouth rose to fame, they still faced the obstacle of being a group full of women writing and performing music in a mostly male genre.

Ally is quick to point out that, while every scene has its own dynamics, the punk scene of Western Mass is mostly encouraging. “When you start a new band, people are generally excited because it’s such a small area, so there’s not a whole lot of stuff going on. When a band starts, they instantly get booked on shows,” she continues.

Ally acknowledges another intriguing factor about their band’s formation that contributed to their rise in notoriety in their local scene: all the girls were relatively new to playing in formal bands. Abby had never played in a band before. Slightly younger than the other members, she had only recently graduated high school when she joined Potty Mouth. Victoria, similarly, had little live performance experience.

The very ethos of punk is that sort of “newness,” initially succeeding due to, and not in spite of, the unapologetically raw spirit it encouraged. Punk artists are not necessarily formally trained musicians, but, nonetheless, they have something important to say. It may be encouraging to jaded older music fans to know that the frustration of the working-class anarchists of the 1970s is still driving today’s up-andcoming bands.

Potty Mouth, having battled gender discrimination and emerging relatively unscathed, soon found themselves confronted with a new challenge. The band started receiving considerable notoriety in their local community, and, before long, they were booking enough gigs to start “taking it seriously,” Abby divulges.

“We were never trying to go from zero to one hundred,” Ally admits. They had started the band “just for fun,” mainly as a means of expressing themselves creatively. Still, they didn’t mind seeing where it would go.

To their surprise, once they took the first step, their just-for-fun side project resonated with enough people, and the rest fell into place easily enough. The realization that they could record music fairly quickly and cheaply, at least in the DIY music scene they belonged to, encouraged them to press on and reach for increasingly ambitious goals as time passed.

First came a demo tape, thrown together messily with all the crude rawness of true punk music. Next came a full-length album. Then another. And, eventually, a series of tours.

Flash forward a few years, and the band’s aspirations are significantly higher. “We’re now trying to make this our full-time job,” Abby declares. “We moved out to LA just to pursue music, so it’s pretty much the center focus of our lives,” she adds.

The decision to move to the West Coast coincided with a slight, noticeable shift in the band’s musical style. Now older, wiser, and more business-oriented, the young

women have chosen to be more intentional about their song selection whilst also taking their songwriting more seriously. The songwriting process has remained consistently collaborative, but the experience of being in a band for over half a decade has offered Abby a new outlook on many things, and the lyrics she writes are proof of her growth as a songwriter.

She penned “Long Haul” about the experience of being on tour and making friends with people in other cities, while “The Bomb” was written as a retrospective look back on the days of being stuck in a small town where few of her friends and relatives believed that “the music thing” could ever work out.

Mid-conversation, Abby and Ally pause for a moment to reminisce again over the last six years, coinciding with the six-year anniversary of that first show, which took place in May of 2011. The girls, barely out of their teens and playing in a small, grungy basement, never could have dreamed that, someday, they would open for one of the largest synth-pop groups in the world.

Soon after releasing the Potty Mouth EP, the group was invited to play several dates on CHVRCHES’ US tour. This changed the game for them in a variety of ways, most notably due to the fact that it quickly took Potty Mouth from hometown nobodies to stars on the rise.

The DIY scene is, essentially, a community of friends and of equals, resembling something more similar to an artist collective than a world divided between fans and artists. Understandably so, one of the most surreal transitions for Abby was the very idea of having fans.

Performing with CHVRCHES inevitably widened their audience, and the development of a distinct Potty Mouth fanbase seems to have left Abby mildly in disbelief. “It’s so awesome,” Abby exclaims, “but it’s hard to wrap my head around.”

The band is not signed to a label, although they have been courted by several, including Atlantic Records. While releasing music independently allows Potty Mouth to be the band they want to be, rather than the contrived, ready-made rock band that labels might wish to turn them into, that doesn’t mean that they’re willing to release anything, just for the sake of doing it. “We still hold ourselves to a high standard. We want to write good songs,” Ally points out.

As of now, they’re still waiting for the right label to come along—one that will recognize their strengths, their values, and their sound. Their refusal to conform is admirable, even though their choice to remain independent means that they have to pay out of pocket for studio time, tours, and marketing.

In the meantime, though, Potty Mouth are sticking to their guns and continuing to get their message across through music that is “catchy and feel-good,” and gaining fans worldwide along the way. Although they have yet to tour Europe, one longtime fan from Germany has become one of their close friends. With this in mind, it’s apparent that their fanbase is continuously growing no matter what they do, and, with all things considered, they seem to be doing okay.

PHOTOS + INTERVIEW LORI GUTMAN

LIVE PHOTO JORDYN BESCHEL

STORY CARLY BUSH