Pre-Order East Kentucky "Contraceptive Rock" Band Slut Pill's Self-Titled Debut, Out 1/24
We are super pumped to announce our first 2020 release, East Kentucky “contraceptive rock” band Slut Pill’s self-titled debut, available digitally & on limited edition cassette 1/24, and up for pre-order now.
Mitchella Phipps (guitar/vocals), Paulina Vazquez (drums/vocals), and Carrie Carter (bass/vocals) formed their “contraceptive rock” band Slut Pill in early 2018 around the same time they founded Girls Rock Whitesburg, East Kentucky’s first Girls Rock Camp, an international arts and social justice organization for female, non-binary, and trans youth that couples musical education with workshops in healthy relationships, leadership, and sex-ed. Spiritually, Slut Pill shares the values and vibe of Girls Rock: empowering and vulnerable, playful and no-fucks-given, skillfully executed but with a DIY off-the-cuff attitude—and above all, brashly feminist. Influenced by bands like Chastity Belt, Vivian Girls, and noncompliant, Slut Pill’s sound ranges from riot grrl agro to riff-heavy rock to spirited beach punk, and is energized by their close friendship.
On Slut Pill, instrumental surf-rock bangers like “Sixteen Minutes” and “Surftastic,” which showcase Phipps’ eviscerating guitar riffs over Carter’s creative bass lines and Vazquez driving drums, are sandwiched between songs like the propulsive “Whitesburg Snob,” which Vazquez says was written about “the fragile, toxic, male ego” as it manifests in their small town. They chant in a harmonized sing-songy playground taunt, “You think you’re a king...wow.” The song “Get Fucked,” effectively reimagines 9 to 5, if Dolly, Lilly, and Jane were anarchist black jeans-wearing punks. “It’s for every boss you’ve ever hated,” they say. With its sludgy, Black Sabbath-reminiscent riffs, “Stiff Cookie” is a “cock-rock way of expressing how sick and tired we are of excuses being made for abusers and allowing them to take up TOO MUCH SPACE. We want a future where we hold each other accountable for our actions. If something’s fucked, speak up & speak out.”
Slut Pill’s songwriting process is a collective catharsis. Their anger and frustration stemming from their respective experiences as young women/queers in rural Appalachia in the late-capitalist era is tempered by a heavy dose of snark and lighthearted self-awareness. Their band name was born when the alarm for Carter’s (a married new mom, trying to avoid becoming a mother of two) birth control would ring during band practice, and Phipps would facetiously call it her “slut pill alarm,” referencing jokes her college roommates would make about the pill. Though the topics of Slut Pill’s songs are often earnest and delivered in Phipps’ caustic vocal style, they’re laughing at themselves too, and having a hell of a lot of fun in the process.