Nicolle Dupas said her band’s debut record is the product of actual blood, sweat and tears.
“We all got tattooed for the album artwork and stuff so we all literally bled for this album,” said Dupas, the singer, guitarist and primary songwriter for Vancouver-based all-queer, all-female garage rock band Strange Breed - Dupas, guitarist Terra Chaplin, bassist Ally Von Wallis and drummer Megan Bell.
Dupas said as a band emerging in a “pretty divided political and social climate,” it was important for Strange Breed to take a stand on issues they care out. And in eight tracks, their album, Permanence, takes a lot of stands.
“In like 27 minutes it covers gender discrimination, LGBTQ issues, sexual assault, mental illness – it covers everything,” Dupas said. “So it makes a pretty clear stand of we believe survivors and here are our stories and the reason we’re sharing them is because we want to empower women and queer individuals and whoever it resonates with, really, gender aside.”
Strange Breed is influenced by the riot grrrl feminist punk rock movement of the early ’90s, and their producer Darren Grahn even worked as an engineer on an album by Veruca Salt, one of the bands of that era.
Although the members of Strange Breed are too young to have experienced those groups in their prime, Dupas said they hope to carry that energy forward.
“When we entered the phase of discovering bands for ourselves, there just wasn’t all this female, queer energy up there. And so your own identity just isn’t reflected,” she said. “So for us a really important part of what we’re doing in making our music more accessible but also very heavily political is that we want it to reach those young people that we were.”
WHAT’S ON … Strange Breed performs at the Vault on Wednesday, Sept. 18. Doors at 8 p.m. $10 cover.
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