"BECAUSE GIRLS ARE BETTER AT EVERYTHING, EVEN BEING MEAN!"
I’ll be honest and upfront with you right from the very beginning: this is the best song that Subpar Snatch have released to date!
Juicy Booty is, unapologetically, an old-school, old-feel punk track with a precisely structured new-age assertiveness; raw and aggressive, and yet melodic and meaningful, perilously so you sometimes fear. The band’s new single is swaddled within CeeCee’s drums, pounded onwards and onwards in their usual and merciless rhythm, reminiscent of an oft broken heart that stubbornly refuses to stop pumping. Verse and chorus, full of names slung away contemptuously in sharp despised snaps of derision, are crafted deliberately and cuttingly to the faithful accompaniment of the taught worn strings of a once soothed guitar that adds authority to the track’s bittersweet meaning, no longer content to bide its time before shrilling out in perfectly delivered condemnation: you can feel the hurt when you read between every line.
And then, bursting through, bold and clear, is that voice of vengeance growling its warning of retribution with a Devil-may-care resoluteness and an in-your-face defiance, Subpar Snatch’s sometimes brash but always deliberate and forever intelligent response to all the heartache they have faced before… And yet it is still thoughtful, sometimes even whimsical you’re deluded into feeling? A song full of calculated revenge served lukewarm due to impatience and whilst still fresh in mind. Most definitely whilst the target’s heart is still very much beating. You never want to fall foul or get on the wrong side of these guys!
“To be frank,” CeeCee Email tells me, “we each have our own traumas or concerns, that have caused us each to be very in the moment and fast when making decisions.”
“When you’ve lost people in the worst kinds of ways, it tends to make you pull the creative trigger quicker,” according to lead singer Jess Scott. “No time to waste, no money to make and no one to impress, except each other. Trusting our gut is easy cos we’re at peace with having nothing to lose.”
And, as for those named?
As CeeCee explains: “Jess worked in a highly male-focused corporate office and these lyrics represent relationships with a few of the women there. Some started as friends, while others initiated a bit more roughly, feeling more as enemies and then inevitably growing closer due to operating in a staunch patriarchy.
“In the 2nd verse, notable celebrities/characters that represent similar dealings with this same notion of friend/enemy. Clara – the Silence of the Lambs character who faced the extreme polar point of enjoying women: Buffalo Bill wanting to wear their skin in order to be them. Nancy Kerrigan – the Olympic great who was betrayed/sabotaged by her fellow team USA skater Tonya Harding. Wanda – the Marvel character who emerged as the strongest Avenger due to her reality-manipulating abilities but started out by accidentally burning down a village.”
And the track’s bridge, and the perhaps the song’s most powerful line?
“Jess was chatting with a college mentor years back,” CeeCee elaborates, “and was asked for her opinion while raising children, ‘Who is more mean, girls or boys?’ The mentor’s answer, ‘Girls are way more mean.’ Jess’ realisation: ‘Of course girls are more mean, we’re best at everything!’ The hope for this song’s message is to witness the flexibility and power of women’s relationships,” CeeCee adds quickly, determinedly. “It attempts to address the many sides of a woman’s experience in order to be a call to action to female-identifying listeners: remain kind and self-aware as the future of all good things depends on it.
“Juicy Booty was built in similar fashion to our other songs,” with Jess on vocals, Nate Ribner on bass guitar and CeeCee relentlessly pounding those drums, initiating the grooves and progressions. The song was, according to the band, “composed in a haunted rehearsal space (that used to be a nursing home room…with no windows) and was super fluid to build; the bones and muscles of it all came easy. The lyrics, aka the organs, poured out quickly as well. All Subpar Snatch lyrics and melodies are written in the room during composition,” the guys revealing their process.
“Recording with David McDonald is when Juicy Booty really got its flesh. Our sound engineer has one of the most incredible ears for bass and his experience with building his own pedals has given songs like this one a true vibe. We’ve watched people listen to the song and when they hear something David laid in their eyes light up. Shit, our eyes light up when we listen to his magic and we’ve listened to this song like 800 times.”
Juicy Booty was released on the 21st June
This Subpar Snatch article was published first on For The Love Of Bands.