Lee AdcockLeora Hinkle wants to go to Chico Lou’s to get her next tattoo. Neither I nor Flynne Collins have heard of this place, even though it’s right down the road from where we sip sundry beverages at a low table in Hendershot’s. There’s a woman artist there, she says, and she’s keen to support non-males in an industry dominated by white dudes. That individual isn’t in town, though, and Hinkle wants her next tattoo NOW. “We all have matching band tattoos, except for Dylan,” she tells me, and she hikes up her leg and pulls back her cuff to reveal a stark but tiny “NC” on her ankle. “North Carolina,” she jokes. Without Hinkle’s preferred artist around, she says they can poke down to Pain & Wonder (which is right next to the 40 Watt, a leisurely five-minute stroll from here) and check availability—they could be booked for spring break. Dylan Loftin doesn’t engage in these plans; he’s just stoked to talk to me about Omni.
I’ve just wrapped up my interview with three-fourths of Nihilist Cheerleader, the feisty young punk squad that’s been shaking up Athens for the past three years. (Collins jokes that Charlie Barley’s absence might be a blessing, since he’d otherwise spout on and on about the evils of capitalism.) Our conversation has played out just like their rough-and-tumble debut, Riot, Right?: as much as we swap laughs, we also chew through some serious talks about gender politics and the creative process. And while Collins declares Nihilist Cheerleader as crusaders for the lost art of dancing at gigs (“When everyone goes to a show, they should have a signature move,” she tells me), the band seem even more driven to engage their audience with dialogue. As Hinkle remarks, “It’s okay to make people uncomfortable, as long as you’re getting them to think about things more.”
Like many a proper punk outfit, Nihilist Cheerleader began as an outlet for small town ennui. Granted, while Loftin posits that mutual “teenage boredom” brought the three Athens natives together, Collins asserts that their alliance wasn’t “just proximity” (a reference to a NC song on Riot, Right? about convenient relationships). “We love punk music, we’re young, and we wanted to get wild,” she says. Still, as Hinkle points out, the imperative to entertain keeps the band in action. “We were all having fun, and then we realize that other people have fun while they listened to us play,” she says. “[So] it just seemed natural to keep doing it.”
Yet the band’s first single in 2015, the unhinged showdown of “Bleach Boy,” immediately established the group’s collective ethos. After listing several despicable white males—including, in a shocking burst of prophecy, Donald Trump–Collins taunts, “Would you ever consider what we say? / Would you ever want me? Install me today!” (An updated version of the song on the new LP adds Steve Bannon and Mike Pence to the list of deplorables.) As a professed fan of Riot Grrrl, Collins doesn’t deny her initial love for this kind of brusque, “militant” commentary on patriarchy. But with NC, she more often employs sneered sarcasm and bite-sized narratives to suggest what listeners should think about. Hinkle compares Collins’ writing to abstract art—“the meaning of the song originally is different to whoever’s listening to it”—while Collins likens her own work to David Byrnes’ Dada lyrics.
“I mean, yeah, sometimes it’s important to be really direct and straightforward,” Collins tells me. “But also, I just feel like people don’t have healthy conversations about things.” Cue, for instance, the very Pavement-esque (or Tunabunny-esque, depending on where you come from) “We Just Didn’t Know” from NC’s first EP Parkour, which cheekily explores how naïvety can excuse all kinds of unsavory behavior. Cue, too, “Walk Home Alone” from the follow-up EP Truth or Dare, which attempts to undo the conventional wisdom that a woman is never safe at night without an escort: “I just want to enjoy the company of me.” As with many similarly charged bands, NC’s wary gaze of mundane relationships grants listeners a peek into broader notions, like power dynamics, unhealthy dependencies, and socially accepted gender roles. As Hinkle says, “[Our lyrics are] a lot more palatable than reading a news article for people who can’t find themselves relating to that esoteric perspective on politics.”
The local press stood a safe distance away from Nihilist Cheerleader in their first year, but the community embraced the rowdy squad immediately. After Taylor Chicoine caught the band in action at Caledonia Lounge, he invited Collins and Hinkle to Automatic Pizza and offered a contract from his label Perfect Attendance Records. “[We were] like, oh wow, you actually like our band and want to take us seriously,” recalls Hinkle. Truth or Dare followed soon after, recorded at Jesse Mangum’s infamous the Glow Recording Studio. As Hinkle explains, “Our experience of recording has always been, ‘get in, get out, do everything as quickly as possible in a few takes,’ because we’re broke, and we wanted to get it out.”
For the first full length, however, the squad would sink a whole year into the process. Collins muses that recent recruit Barley may have brought with him a more methodical approach from his former band Richard Gumby, but Hinkle also credits Mangum’s generosity. “He [told us], ‘I want you to put as much time into this album as you want to put into it,'” she says. Of course, even after that longer gestation, Riot, Right? still unfurls swiftly, with its ten tracks barely breaking the 30-minute mark.
But individual songs do tear away from the band’s usual “get in, get out” approach. “Shark Fin Soup,” which Hinkle describes as Barley’s “welcoming” into the NC family, breaks down into a foaming frenzy, while “Miss You Forever” jumps between a sentimental ballad and a punky skip in ¾ time. Once again, Barley may have steered the band to these uncharted waters. “A lot of it’s inspired by him coming in and being like, ‘I have all of these ideas!,’ [which] we had never explored before,” Hinkle says. But the undeniable climax of Riot, Right?, the monolithic lead single “& She Takes It,” was born almost entirely in the studio, after an intense group jam sprung from one bass riff that Hinkle brought in from practice. “We weren’t planning on putting it on the album at all,” she says. “We were just messing around.”
On Collins’ part, the songs also venture into more daring topics, too; even Hinkle and Loftin were surprised when we talked about the background behind songs like “Shark Fin Soup.” While, on the most literal level, the band do pay homage to actual sharks (which Collins regards, with hand to heart, as her “spirit animal”), Collins also wanted to poke at how certain xenophobic individuals render minorities as monsters in order to justify their exclusion. “People are people, and sharks are sharks,” she says. Meanwhile, “Who’s Gonna Hear You” casts a weary eye on their hermetic hometown, with sly references that only local scenesters would chuckle at: “Is this a town or is it a city? / Is this a party, or is it a pity?” (A common nickname for Athens is the “Classic City,” while the Pity Party is Chicoine’s house venue.) And “You’re Ur Uniform” boils down local scene culture to what Collins and Hinkle call the “authentic” Loftin quote: “It’s not about who wears the coolest t-shirt, OK?”
While the band expect some healthy dialogue to stem from Riot, Right?, they didn’t expect to stake a position on the album’s cover art. Aspiring tattoo artist Hinkle draws all of NC’s covers, monochrome and life-like portraits that evoke the bleak illustrations of old punk zines and underground comics. This one, however—the image of a woman nonchalantly crushing a hot dog—was meant as a tribute to a dearly missed friend, who had traveled to Greece to do some modeling work. “She’s a model, but she can still do whatever the fuck she wants,” Hinkle effuses. “She’s not just a pretty girl. She can [also] ravenously eat a hot dog.”
Before we dive into this subject, Hinkle, who always fixes her gaze right at me when she talks, asks me what I think the cover represents. My answer seems so simple, that I take a moment to form the right words. “It just looks like a very raw picture of a girl chomping down on a substantive piece of food,” I finally reply. “Exactly!” affirms Hinkle, but, apparently, some dude looked at their friend’s portrait and thought her indulgence symbolized a blowjob. “[His comment] turned the album cover into a statement against that,” she says. “A girl should be able to eat a hot dog, or eat food, and not be sexualized for performing necessary life functions. If you’re a man, and you immediately see this image sexually, I hope that it makes you think about: ‘why am I looking at a girl eating food—not sexually, just devouring food—and see that in a way that objectifies her?’ He should face that internalized bias. I will force people to face it.”
This isn’t the first time that Collins and Hinkle have forced an audience to face their subconscious objectifying. At one memorable house show, Collins took off her shirt and revealed her bare chest, with only tape covering the nipples. “I saw it as a statement,” says Hinkle. “Does this make you uncomfortable? Because my autonomy is just that, and it’s not sexualized. I’m screaming at you, but I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want with my body.” Front women baring their breasts definitely isn’t a novel maneuver—both Kathleen Hannah of Bikini Kill and Teri Gender Bender of Le Butcherettes have pulled similar stunts, to name but two examples—but the Athens crowd rarely confronts such outspoken stances on stage. Hinkle swears that someone was there to film the act, but I couldn’t find any footage from Collins’ topless performance on YouTube, even though plenty of other cool NC shows made the cut. “Probably because it’s too controversial,” says Hinkle, which, indeed, proves their point.
By the time we’ve wrapped our interview, Collins and Hinkle have nearly convinced me that I should join them on their excursion to the tattoo parlor. I politely decline, but that’s OK. After everything we’ve discussed about gender politics, the local scene, and band t-shirts (Is black overrated? Dunno, but theirs come in brown and lavender), I’ve no doubt that I’ll jive with them again soon.
Riot, Right? is out Mar. 30 on Perfect Attendance Records. Pre-orders are available here.
Nihilist Cheerleader will celebrate the release of Riot, Right? on Sat., Mar. 31 on the Rooftop at the Georgia Theatre. Doors open at 11 p.m. Admission is FREE. 18+ to enter.
More Info
Web: nihilistcheerleader.com
Bandcamp: nihilistcheerleader.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @NihilistCheerleader
Instagram: @nihilistcheerleader