Catching Up with Seattle Supergroup Who Is She?
Talking with the band about their great new LP Goddess Energy
The magic of finding friends that share your pop culture inclinations and your sense of humor binds together Seattle punk supergroup Who Is She?.
New member, keyboardist and harmony vocalist Emily Nokes (Tacocat) joins the founding trio of bassist Bree McKenna (Tacocat) drummer Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt) and guitarist Robin Edwards (Lisa Prank) on Goddess Energy, the group’s second album on Father/Daughter Records. Clearly, they get each other, and they’re letting us in on enough inside jokes for it to feel like we’ve sat at their proverbial lunch table since at least sophomore year.
“We started this band writing about missed connection ads,” Edwards said. “The first record [2017’s Seattle Gossip] is a lot of missed connection ad songs. I think just hanging out, thinking about a weird idea for a song and following through on all of your little, weird ideas is kind of what the band is about.”
Some selections on Goddess Energy come from a COVID-19 lockdown exercise that resulted in a massive catalog of delightfully ridiculous demos.
“We had a text thread with a bunch of musician friends, and we would assign a prompt and all do a song for it,” McKenna explained. “That’s how some of these songs came about. It’s funny because I was thinking about [how] the missed connection ads from the first album were all from a prompt. Just like, ‘Let’s read this ad and turn it into a song.’ Some of these are from doing that during COVID.”
One prompt challenged everyone to write and record an answer song and text it to the rest of the participants. That assignment brought us Who Is She? banger “Shania”— the “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” to “That Don’t Impress Me Much’s” “The Wild Side of Life.”
Other tracks on Goddess Energy defend Anne Hathaway, long for the days of MoviePass and both cynically (“96 Ghouls”) and sweetly (“All Mixed Up”) dip back into the digital-searches-for-a-soulmate well. Dating apps and missed connections ads inspired not just multiple songs on Seattle Gossip but also “Siri, Open Tinder,” a standout by Childbirth, a prior McKenna and Shapiro collaboration (along with Pony Time’s Stacy Peck). On-the-nose songs about celebrities aren’t new, either, with Seattle Gossip bringing us “I’m Getting Courteney Cox and David Arquette Back Together If It’s The Last Thing I Do.” Despite multiple recurring themes, Who Is She? avoids being the least bit formulaic— a common pitfall for much-more-serious punk bands.
The best result so far of the group’s “anything can be a song if we put our minds to it” creed, “My My Orca Card” celebrates the mundanity of taking public transportation and the majesty of the Le Tigre song “My My Metrocard” (and Kathleen Hanna in general).
A cover which swaps Hanna’s Rudy Giuliani diss for a Jeff Bezos burn, “My My Orca Card” took shape long before Who Is She? landed dream-come-true support slots for Le Tigre’s July tour stops in Seattle and Vancouver.
“I remember being on the light rail, and you and I were texting about it, Bree,” Edwards said. “I was like, ‘I love my Orca Card,’ and then we were like, ‘We should cover that.’ We were texting back and forth, filling in lyrics.”
Overall, Goddess Energy’s a rewarding listen that’ll leave you wondering what ‘90s movie binges or missed connections discoveries will inform album number three.
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