If there’s any world I will openly admit to caring very little about, it’s the world of professional wrestling; but I do understand its appeal. Roland Barthes describes wrestling as not a sport, but a cinematic performance that “partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bull-fights: in both, a light without a shadow generates an emotion without reserve.” The over-the-top costuming, the grandiose display of shifting power dynamics, and the uninhibited performance of extreme emotions in professional wrestling all embody a ridiculousness bordering on parody. But for wrestling fans, their fervor and devotion to the sport remains entirely sincere.
If I could compare the experience of watching any live band to a professional wrestling match, I’d say the performance style of New York-based post-punk band/multi-media art collective cumgirl8 comes pretty damn close. The four-piece took the stage at Brooklyn Made last week with a riveting and unbridled fury, ripping through a setlist of tracks from their neon noise pop/disco oeuvre, including songs from their 2020 debut self-titled album and their 2023 EP phantasea pharm.
cumgirl8 describes themselves as an “alien amoeba entity” whose output has expanded beyond music and into film-making, zines, and the fashion world. What makes cumgirl8’s shows so reminiscent of professional wrestling, is the spectacle of it all. They often perform under a flashy and searing hallucination-inducing light show, decked out in eye-catching outfits featuring mesh, ripped tights, corsets, glitter, and heels. Their unabashed liberationist and sex-positive attitude has also encouraged a litany of fans to dress similarly, dance, thrash and rage as a form of catharsis, and even free the nipple at their shows.
A Grrrl’s Two Sound Cents sat down with Veronika Vilim, Lida Fox, and Chase Lombardo from cumgirl8 for a pre-show interview at their Brooklyn Made gig in collaboration with Plan C Pills, to discuss their political ethos, the fashion world, performing with Bratmobile and L7, protesting SXSW, and using their platform to advocate for a better future.
You’ve described yourselves as more of a collective than just a band. What purpose does the band serve in your overall output and why was it important to extend that output to zines, fashion lines, and film?
Veronika Vilim: cumgirl8 is a world and universe that we brought to this planet, and it serves as a multi-media art collective. We’re an alien amoeba entity that wants to spread love and art to everyone in every form of the word “art,” because that’s what we believe we were brought here to do.
What’s so awesome about fashion to me as a queer person is how it can be utilized as a signifier or a shared language to communicate with other queer people. How does presentation and fashion affect how you present on stage?
Lida Fox: I think the way we dress forms how we express who we are. It was a good learning curve to already have a background in fashion and develop our own senses in that world.
Vilim: I also feel like fashion is such a great way to express who you are. You can wake up any day and decide you want to be any type of person, and it doesn’t matter how you’re perceived, because that’s how you want to be. Fashion really encapsulates that essence of life. You should never be afraid of what you wear as long as you’re comfortable in it, and if people judge you for it, then that’s their problem.
Chase Lombardo: I also believe what you wear is your first step. It’s the appetizer, and it becomes your first impression of everyone you meet; their appearance. We don’t take what we wear very seriously, and that attracts similar types of people, which gives way to this exchange of liberation. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, as long as you feel good about what you’re wearing. And that type of freedom has attracted a lot of younger kids to our shows, and they’ve said that seeing us perform gave them an extra push to express themselves the way they want to through what they wear. And that’s rad.
I understand that the internet and sexuality both play a crucial role in your output as well. Growing up in the early-2000s, what makes that time period so important in the cumgirl8 universe?
Vilim: I feel like with fashion and with music – and there’s [actual studies about this], so I’m not just making this up – every trend seems to repeat itself every 20 years. And now the early 2000s just happens to be the hot thing at the moment, but we were already doing that five years ago because it’s the era we grew up in and it felt natural to us. We’re all millennials here, so the early internet with AOL chat rooms and Instant Messenger was a huge part of our upbringing, and a lot of us are feeling nostalgic for that.
Lombardo: I mean, the band actually started because we met in an online chat room. The early 2000s also coincided with when we were hitting puberty and starting to develop our own sexual identities. We basically grew up on AOL Instant Messenger. That’s where we were messaging our crushes, talking about sex candidly with strangers, and asking people to prom. So many hit songs at the time were about cybering. I remember an *NSYNC song being about cyber sex. Spending all that time on the internet is how our sexualities formed. So that’s a big part of why the internet is such a formative part of the band.
Vilim: Yeah, and now the internet is even more significant because of AI. The internet has now become a second brain to everyone, and to think that there was a world without it at some point, is an unfathomable thought.
Veronika and Lida, I understand that you both have backgrounds in fashion and the biggest commonality between fashion and music is that they’re both performance mediums. What do you find are the biggest similarities and differences between the two worlds?
Fox: They’re very different. In music what you’re being asked to do is express and project an extension of yourself. You get a lot more control in the process of how things are done. In fashion, you’re often asked to portray someone else’s idea. But they’re also very similar, because in both worlds you have to know your boundaries, there are many obstacles, and interesting people you have to navigate. But at the end of the day, they’re both businesses that you have to figure out where you fit in them.
Vilim: In fashion, everything is very fast because there’s a lot of money going around, whereas in music, things are very slow, because the money isn’t going around fast enough. With fashion, it’s not about being patient. It’s about killing the planet faster. With music, it’s about saving the planet.
You’re notoriously outspoken about oppression, sex positivity, and the politics of liberation. How does the speed of the internet influence that approach?
Lombardo: Oppression is a subject we can’t ignore because as women, we can’t get away from it. Especially because we’re women who look a certain way, we’re expected to act a certain way. So we have a really fucking good time making a mockery out of that and satirizing what it means to be a “hot bitch.” It’s been really fucking fun, because sometimes celebrating unabashed joy is the most effective weapon against oppression, at least on a personal level. I can’t speak to how effective it is politically, otherwise I’ll sound like a fucking hippie.
With regards to the speed of the internet, it’s really difficult to keep up sometimes. We recently went to SXSW, and we saw our name right underneath the US Army, the super-sponsor of the festival. We had like 10 hours to decide what we ultimately wanted to do as a response, because the genocide that’s happening in Gaza is fucking disgusting. So we pulled out of all our official showcases to draw attention to that. And with the internet, you’ve always got to come up with the perfect way to articulate yourself without alienating the people who are on your side, because with SXSW, we knew there were also bands who couldn’t just pull out of official showcases because their visas were predicated on performing. So the speed of the internet is very inhuman, and I guess that’s why we lean into the fact that we are post-human right now, especially as we get closer to being ruled by artificial intelligence. We’re nearing into post-reality right now, and we should probably just slow down.
I see that you also have a new album in the works. What can you tell me about the project (who worked with you on it, recording highlights, etc.)?
Fox: We wrote it ourselves and we collaborated with our friend Paul who recorded and engineered it. Without giving away too much, I’d say we’re pouring a lot of emotions into it and exploring new arenas of joy.
Lombardo: Also we wrote it really quickly, so it was a big challenge because we were on a time crunch, but then we just started daring each other to push the boundaries further and test just how far we could push them. And now we have an absolute masterpiece, it’s so sincere and so fucking weird.
Vilim: We also built a really fun story around it, being as real as we possibly could, and also making fun of ourselves as much as we possibly could, while also being vulnerable. In retrospect, it was really fun to be daring in the recording process, because we were just testing a new recipe and it worked out surprisingly well.
Lombardo: Exactly. We took all the ingredients and let the soup tell us how to make it.
Tell me about playing a show with Bratmobile.
Fox: They’re one of my most favorite bands ever, so that night was everything I could have hoped for and more.
Vilim: It’s hilarious too, cause for the longest time I thought that “Gimme Brains” was about oral sex, but before they played it, Allison was talking about how the song was about guys always telling her what to do. And I turned to Chase and I was like, “Lol, I thought this song was about getting head.” They’re one of the coolest bands in the universe, so it was such a privilege to share the stage with them. Their cover of “Cherry Bomb” is maybe even better than the original.
What does the rest of the year have in store for cumgirl8?
Vilim: The record’s coming out, we’re playing with L7 in Atlanta this month, we’re playing in Denmark, and we have a new song coming out on May 14th.
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