DOWNGIRL: The Sky’s the Limit (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

THE first time I met Downgirl drummer Skarlett Saramore, she was working the merch stand after her band had played a blinder of a set with Fangz at Katoomba’s stately Baroque Room in early 2022. She was wearing an iNsuRge t-shirt, which I had to ask about as she was too young to have ever seen them, and she said it was her dad’s.

“Just as well I wasn’t wearing my Kelly Clarkson shirt,” she says now over the phone, on the day Downgirl’s EP is released, “or you would have never talked about Downgirl ever again!”

That’s unlikely, because even if I thought Kelly Clarkson sucked – which I don’t – Downgirl has become a powerhouse impossible to ignore. Since that time the band has exploded across playlists nationwide and they’ve stepped on stage alongside acts like Magic Dirt, the Hard-Ons, Glitoris and others. This week, they open proceedings on the Sydney leg of Off the Rails with Amyl and the Sniffers, and the weekend before last they were at the Hunter Valley’s Thrashville festival along with COG, Mammal and more.

“I’m still recovering from that to be honest,” Skar says. “That was really gnarly. I would be at that festival every year. It was one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to in my life. You know all those bush doofs that EDM and house people go to? This is the version for people like us! It was so bloody good!”

Last Friday was release day for the band’s debut EP Manic and the reaction has already blown them away. The drummer admits to feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all.

“My bipolar is even freaking out and going, ‘This is too good! You can’t be this happy!’”

It’s a far cry from where she was during the pandemic when the singer of her previous band Boysclub – which also included current bandmates guitarist Kristen Adams and bassist Lou Harbidge – walked out. It was a devastating blow for Saramore, but her friends helped her through it.

“When the singer of Boysclub left, I couldn’t cope,” she confesses. “I didn’t want to live, I didn’t want to do music anymore … I went through such a heavy time. Boysclub kept me going through lockdown and we were doing so well … I’ll never ever forget Kristen and Lou – Alex wasn’t in the band yet – and I looked at them both and said, ‘What do we fucking do? I give up’. They both looked at me and said, ‘We change our name and we keep going. What the fuck are you on about, dude?’ It wasn’t even a problem to those two. They both got me out of that headspace and then we just went straight into Downgirl.”

Taking their name from Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, they found their singer in the shape of Alex Neville, a wild extrovert and natural performer who had never been in a professional band before. She fit right in.

“Finding someone similar to our lives, on the same energy but also someone who’s only jammed with a family band [was amazing],” Saramore says. “Alex has done so many things. She was one of the best burlesque dancers in Sydney back in the day. Alex is such a hard worker and always has been. I remember her 15 years ago in the Sydney scene doing that stuff.”

Just as soon as they could, Downgirl recorded their first track with Neville, “Beauty Queen” and played their first show together in Newcastle. They’ve been working like a well-oiled machine ever since.

“I’ve never been in a band where everyone has their own little thing. We do what we do and it’s the first democracy in a musical project I’ve ever been in. And it’s bloody working. Don’t get me wrong, we can all piss each other off pretty damn good but in a way that’s super sisterly, and I’ve never had that before.”

Manic provides eight tracks of pure punk rock aggression, but it also offers more than that. Every single physical copy of the EP is completely unique, thanks to Saramore’s desire for the pressing to be as eco-friendly as possible. Looking into the process, she discovered that cutting vinyl accumulates a huge amount of waste, so she came up with an idea to cut back on some of it.

“I said we wanted recycled vinyl,” she says. “From whatever falls on the floor, make it into Downgirl vinyl. I think a lot of bands should jump on it. Not only is it cheaper and the quality is the same, you’re also saving all this wasteful product that’s going to be on Earth for at least the next 500 years. We could have offcuts from some of our favourite bands, as part of ours!”

The idiosyncratically detailed cover art was the painstaking creation of Harbidge, who pieced it together from hundreds of individual images that she cut and pasted the old fashioned way. By hand.

“So she has to go and find photos by hand, print them out, paste them on… she did such a good job. We were all blown away by Lou. She has a hidden depth. She just showed it to us, she didn’t tell us. That’s the amount of trust we have in each other.”

That trust is taking them on to bigger and bigger things. The EP has been out less than a week, and they’ve already started thinking about a full length album. For Skarlett Saramore and Downgirl, right now the sky is the limit.

“I think anything’s up for grabs. We’ve just gotta keep working.”