The Baby Seals

The Baby Seals are all about making genres to call themselves; for their first and only EP to date, they call themselves “empower/pop/punk,” which sounds a lot like “Spinal Tap with tits” (a compliment in many minds, and really quite accurate).

For the next EP, which lead vocalist and guitarist Kerry Devine confirms as being “an-femme-ic” (anthemic), a name her sister and drummer Amy Devine came up with, will sound a lot more like the closer on the aforementioned first EP, the bluesy bass-driven “It’s Not About the Money Honey” about equal pay in the gender gap. Above all, however, it’s in the band’s greatest interest to go back to their roots of just “dicking around” in a pub, not giving a fuck and having a good time, as well as embracing your body as it is; “Don’t worry if you’ve got hairy nipples or lopsided labias,” Kerry explains; “It’s fine. Embrace it.” And if you don’t find yourself singing along (na-nana-nipple hair) to the related songs, you might need to extra embrace it.

“Porn has got really shit over the last ten years,” Kerry says to a tittering crowd before launching into “Yawn Porn.” “It’s really formulaic. We know how it’s going to end: he’s gonna come in her face. Let’s make it more female! Come on her elbow!” It’s like this a lot of their songs are introduced, before moving into a grinning crowd singing along to lyrics celebrating

the carefree attitude in which many of their songs are written on observations made as women. The band were searching for songs that were “joke-y, not man hate-y songs,” as Kerry says, when they decided to come together as The Baby Seals. Now, though, they’re looking to move forward to something perhaps

not serious, but something you can more get your anger out to, as is exemplified in “It’s Not About the Money Honey.” “It has quite a heavy feel, and it allows me to kind of express myself in other ways as well onstage,” Kerry continues. “It’s evolved as still having a message, but just playing with the

sound a bit more.” Bassist Jasmine Robinson agrees: “It’s hard to get your frustration out when you’re just doing ‘la la la la,’ whereas, with the last one, you can rock the fuck out.”

On a deeper level, when writing about heavy political topics like The Baby Seals hope to do, it’s hard to be sensitive and appropriate when your sound goes along those lines. “This year, there’s been some really big political things in the news that we wanted to reflect on, and doing that in a poppy way can sometimes undermine what you’re trying to say,” Kerry explains. “We’ve written about the Harvey Weistein thing, and that’s definitely got more of a dangerous sound. Having a song about sexual harassment, you can’t be like, ‘la la la!’” Conveying humor and a fun atmosphere through their songs about below-average porn and body hair seems to be working well for them, though.

It’s refreshing for a crowd to hear songs about these observations, especially when they themselves have perceived them and felt alone in their self-judgment. After a show in Peterborough, a woman approached the band to express

her gratitude for writing a song about something she had been so ashamed of in the past. “She was nearly crying, saying she’d been worried about her body and nipple hair, and hearing us play that song made her feel better,” Kerry says, “and I said to the girl, that’s why we’re doing it. That’s it – that’s the whole thing.” It seems taboo, talking about things like body hair and the shapes of genitals in public because of how society has perceived these topics for so long, but when people do begin to talk, just as The Baby Seals have, it opens up the floodgates, encouraging conversation and acceptance. The beautiful thing about delivering such messages in a fun manner, then, is reaching an audience in an accessible manner that doesn’t come across as “teaching” them anything. “You have to remember the audience you’re delivering that message to probably already know that message,” Kerry explains. “It’s like me sending a message on Facebook saying ‘racism is bad’. Everybody who I’m friend with knows that it’s bad.” Instead, they’re reaching out to the people who are also searching for that validation, and pursuing an attempt at reevaluating their own internal misogyny.